Don’t accept the default: How to make work work for you

Have you ever been in a situation at work where the default way of doing things just isn’t working for you?

Us humans love to belong. We live to conform to those around us, so taking the first step to change the default isn’t easy - it requires effort up front.

By using your mindset, environment, and behaviours to your advantage, you’ll begin to notice how making better decisions becomes effortless, and fast-tracks you towards feeling the impact of those decisions…. Which in turn, reinforces the positive cycle.

Over the course of three blog posts, I’ll share three ways in which I’ve challenged the default to make work, work for me.

Example 1: The Walk and Talk

During COVID-19, I was managing a project with a global insurer that required us to spend most of our time in large, virtual meeting rooms with our cameras on. As a result, the default for pretty much all interactions with my immediate team, and my client team was also video. 

I’m sure you can imagine how being on screen from 7:30am to 6:30pm did not bring out the best in anyone. One day I became so frustrated with the baseline assumption to show my face that I started joining morning check-ins from my exercise bike, which also wasn’t the best plan for professionalism. 

Thanks to brilliant working relationships with my client and my team, I started asking if we could take our quick 1:1s on a walk and talk, as I needed a break from my screen. Fast-forward to a few months later, where not only were most of the programme taking walk and talks, it almost became the ‘cool’ thing to do within the team culture, with people across the programme using the language to connect in a new way.

It’s tiny changes in our behaviour like this, that can start the domino effect of change and help us find a way to work that works for each and every one of us.