Most years offer a personal lesson or two - last year laid them on thick and fast. We were keen, even anxious to know what might happen next. The pandemic also messed with the ways in which we got to mix with our families, work colleagues and communities. One positive spinoff for me came from tuning in to strangers; some of these people I now call friends. I’m learning to love the opportunity to reinvent who my tribe is, the people I want to connect with to make progress change the wicked problems that COVID is creating, problems that stretch our capacity to keep on bouncing back.

Full marks to the WHS lead who spoke about the elephant in the room at the autism@work summit in Melbourne back in July. To be truthful, the issue raised was not about ASD, though this turns up in design for neurodiversity. My heckler was vexed about design for the physical environment and the seeming impossibility of guaranteeing everyone’s safety when tactile indicators for the sight impaired create a trip hazard for the less nimble ageing worker. We could look at this from the viewpoint of one population versus another or one design feature over another.  I’d like to jump into the deep end

There’s no shortage of experts saying we work best when we’re motivated and that means doing something we feel is worthwhile. ‘Worthwhile’ or not is owned by future you, but today it’s your choice that counts. If you are harbouring a secret start-up project then now is the time to get it off the ground. But how? Having a destination gives you a reference point. When you have a reference point, that means you have a choice to make, namely, how to get started.

Shifting habits is hard. Doing different takes energy, especially if you are the boss making it happen. As a leader, you have to do what it takes to lower the resistance, leverage the effort and lift the rewards.  The boon? Your job gets easier over time, not harder. Innovation becomes easier when the barriers are down.

We all have habits. Something we don’t think about them—we just ‘do’. Sometimes our habits are good and sometimes they’re bad. As a manager, you need to sort through your own habits, and your team’s, to create a winning workplace.

Think about the Australian Open (whether you’re glued to the television watching or not). Good habits can catapult your team to efficiency and effectiveness just like the impressive habits drilled into the likes of Leighton Hewitt and Serena Williams take them to the top and keep them there win after win after win.

You’ve taken a step to stand in the workplace, realising that making the office more active is a positive, productive position.

Working with procurement you’ve paid for the purchase and installation of sit-stand desks and chairs for your team. Now it’s time to report against this expense by measuring progress.

But what does progress genuinely look like? And what’s the best way to measure it?

You might have made your first few steps back into and around the workplace for this year. Hopefully you are refreshed and have a little more spring in each step - spring which might have been missing at the end of last year.

How we turn up each day has to affect the quality of our work.

It’s not just all in the mind though; even the most intellectual jobs have a physicality about them that you can shape for better results. With a little thought you can put some grace and spice into the place you land in each day by owning both how you own and interact with the space and its contents and by noticing the results returned.

If you were one of the exhausted many working ‘wounded’ at the end of 2015, what’s that telling you about what is working and what is not?

Towards the end of the year there is a collective sigh of relief which goes through the business world as we give ourselves and if you are a boss, our employees permission to refresh ourselves en masse. In droves, we reconnect with family, friends and fun. Unspoken in all of this is how we start up with more grace next year, what we leave out and what we add to make a cleaner go of it.  Just omitting 2015’s failures might not bring you the best result. You did those things for a reason.

Phrases such as ‘thinking on your feet’ slip into everyday use easily; neuroscientists and their colleagues from related fields like to put these claims to the test.  It’s not as simple as taking one idea - say that more blood flowing to the brain gets more oxygen up there and improves brain performance. That would be true but it’s never going to be the whole truth. Multi-factor problems are always intriguing.

Have you noticed how big headphones of all types are a constant in the office? With compressed workplaces and trends towards apartment living, noise is a constant companion but not always a friendly one. Friend or foe, noise has an impact that affects the business bottom line, health and relationships. Figuring out the direction and extent of that impact for any single person or team is a technical job many designers and businesses find difficult to tackle.

Searching for ways to get an edge on productivity always turns up some surprising facts. Remember Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad Poor Dad? It turns out that extremes in your company’s resource environment (abundance or scarcity) when an employee starts work have long term consequences for problem solving, work with clients and successful job performance. Yet more proof that a performance edge can only come from looking at the wider context of work and not just the building.    

Few of us reflect on the place we work in much depth; seems we have a fascination for people who do just that as long as they do something fascinating. Chris Hadfield, Canadian astronaut is on tour and sharing his experience as a spaceman working on the International Space Station and in Australia, he’s drawing huge crowds.  In space, the phrase ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ is the second to second reality of the spaceman.

Every year in May Cebit (an annual technology expo in Sydney) shakes up my ideas about how work, or in this case, where work is done. Somewhere between the 3D printers and pens and the cloud services, the tablets, servers and virtual reality, my confidence in a stable place and process for work in any business is shaken.

Have you've ever watched a corporate drama unfold in the office? I can hear David Attenborough's melodic tones in my head as he tells us about the mating ritual of the (insert name of exotic species). Think about this famous naturalist watching on as a senior executive fights back when told he won't have an office in the next refurbishment. The naturalist is examining plants and animals - in our losing-the-office-scenario, we are interested in the behaviour of people in the office environment.

The hours, weeks and months of a year have patterns which we can learn to expect but possibly don't currently respect enough. There are patterns which, if not picked up in time, often get us into trouble. Were you one of those knowledge workers with a busy close to 2014 - a typical end of year mental exhaustion pattern? Were you one of those knowledge workers with a busy close to 2014 - a typical end of year mental exhaustion pattern?  If you rely on the quality of your thinking as a tool for productivity, then taking a new toolkit into the New Year  makes a lot of sense. 

Big, live data is starting to drive our businesses day-to-day and that information is fast turning into a real time measure of the health and activity at  of workers at work. Imagine that overworked senior executives have their stress hormones   monitored 24/7. Armbands with sensors can pick up your movement over the day as you walk around your new activity base work place.