Three ways to better work days

The upcoming Elevating Cougs conference features two tracks, Developing as a Cougar and Leading as a Cougar. The Leading track shares strategies for increasing your leadership skills, while the Developing track focuses on growing your soft skills: the abilities and behaviors that help you more effectively relate to and collaborate with others at work.

Advancing your soft skills is a great way to help your experiences at WSU stay positive and productive as we work with colleagues who may be in a different location to us – the office, remote, or different time zones – and as we use technology at an increasing rate to perform our job duties and communicate with each other.

Despite our rapidly evolving work environment, it can take time for our ways of working to catch up. WSU isn’t alone: Microsoft found we spend the equivalent of nearly two days a week in meetings and answering emails. In a 2022 Harris Poll survey of more than 1,200 workers and executives, leaders estimated that their teams lost an average 7.47 hours a week—nearly an entire day—to poor communications.

Developing our soft skills with these issues in mind can help us adapt to, and even take advantage of, our new ways of working at WSU. Each session in the Developing as a Cougar and Leading as a Cougar tracks will dive deeper into the soft skill areas below, offering tactics and tips that employees can begin practicing right away. Subject matter experts from central HRS and across the university will focus on practical ways employees and leaders can improve their workdays, including the three ways below:

  • Managing workloads
    • Tactics for planning, organizing, and prioritizing work at all levels, from critically important tasks, to responding to emails.
    • Communicating with your leaders and team to establish priorities, expectations, and to request assistance.
  • Developing positive work relationships
    • Encouraging employees, their supervisors, and their coworkers to learn about each other’s preferred ways of working and communications styles.
    • Using task-management tools and methods to plan and track work, requests, and due dates.
  • Conducting meaningful meetings
    • Creating efficient agendas and preparing for meetings.
    • Developing clear action items and meeting take-aways.
    • Establishing meeting guidelines and time management practices to make the most of your team’s time in meetings.

Employees interested in learning more about conference sessions and speakers can get started now by exploring the Elevating Cougs webpage and signing up for conference updates. They can also explore on-demand offerings in Percipio, including Skill Benchmarks, which can help identify areas of interest and potential development for a variety of soft skills.

Elevating Cougs is brought to all WSU employees free-of-cost by Modernization and HRS’ Learning & Organizational Development. The conference will be held virtually on October 19 & 20, 2023. Questions? Reach out at the Workday Service Desk, or email HRS Learning & Organizational Development.