INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION FORCULTURAL PROPERTY PROTECTION
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Reposted from AAM
Less than three weeks after COVID forced museums around the globe to close their doors last year, an article by Arundhati Roy in The Financial Times titled “The Pandemic is a Portal” stopped me in my tracks. In the midst of an exponentially mounting crisis, Roy courageously sounded the call to resist the urge to seek a return to normality. She offered up an alternative, and posed a challenge to us all:
“[The pandemic] is a portal,” she wrote, “a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, . . . and dead ideas. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
At the 106-year-old Museum of Us (formerly the San Diego Museum of Man), which sits on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Kumeyaay Nation, we took Roy’s challenge to heart. Over the past sixteen months, our driving question has been: How can we emerge from the pandemic’s portal to become a better version of ourselves? And while our answer has taken a wide variety of forms (including a long-overdue name change), key shifts in our human resources policies and practices are making the biggest impact of all.
You see, faced with so many unknowns at the onset of COVID, we made the heartbreaking decision to terminate forty-three employees in June 2020. As difficult as it was for us, the pain was far worse, of course, for our colleagues who lost their livelihoods. Although we took many different steps to support our furloughed, and ultimately terminated, team members, it simply wasn’t enough. So, we set out to ensure that something good came out of the harm we caused by laying them off from their employment. Specifically, we committed to rebuild our team (and, in turn, our organization) in more equitable and decolonial ways.
Here are some steps we have taken so far.
As we prepared to reopen our museum consistent with public health guidelines, instead of returning to our old staffing model, we decided to reimagine our forward-facing roles altogether. Specifically, we changed our Visitor Experience Associate position from part-time to full-time, so that every team member would receive our generous benefits package, including a new retirement match of up to 6 percent. We also raised the position’s wage from $13.75 an hour to $20 an hour, committing to annual cost-of-living increases (at a minimum). That way, we will continue to stay ahead of pay equity, rather than losing ground every year. We also redesigned the role so that it is a long-term career position, with an increased focus on opportunities for professional development and growth within our organization. Finally, we are in the process of adopting a reasonable cap (likely in the range of 6:1) on what the highest-paid employee (currently, me) makes relative to what the lowest-paid employee (our forward-facing staff) makes. This will help make our entire compensation structure more equitable going forward.
The Museum of Us offers team members thirteen paid holidays every calendar year. Historically, these have been set holidays designated by the museum as mandated days off. But thanks to input from our BIPOC staff, we’ve come to understand how many of those holidays are deeply rooted in a colonial paradigm: New Year’s Day, Presidents’ Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc. In response, we decided to revise our holiday policy, effective January 1, 2022, to allow team members to substitute (and even group together) holidays that are meaningful to them. Employees still may choose to take any or all museum-designated holidays, if they wish, but the power to decide will become theirs. We are excited about changing this seemingly innocuous practice so that it better supports all of our team members in a decolonized way.
Like most employers, the Museum of Us offers various types of paid leave, including vacation and sick time. But when our Indigenous team members shared that they needed time off to participate in multi-day ceremonies in their home communities, they pointed out the obvious: Their absence from the office was neither “vacation” nor “sick” time. To the contrary, it was hard work, centered around cultivating community well-being. It was for the good of many, and for future generations, not for their personal enjoyment or convalescence. We soon realized the ripple effect of good that could come from enabling all of our employees to take paid time off to do the same.
We considered classifying such leave as “professional development,” but quickly saw the ways this would run afoul of applicable employment laws. So, we settled on a new paid leave category altogether. We call it “Community-Centered Leave,” and it is specifically designed to encourage employees to support their communities in ways that are meaningful to them. Effective January 1, 2022, every team member at the Museum of Us may take up to three days of paid Community-Centered Leave per year.
The result of these changes? Well, it’s still early, but we’ve discovered that employee satisfaction and engagement rates have gone up significantly. And, just as happy nurses make for happy patients, happy forward-facing staff make for happy visitors. Employee retention rates have gone up as well, leading to a plethora of intangible (but also invaluable) benefits. We now have a more stable institutional culture with stronger, more capable teams. Projects have fewer stops and starts. We expend less bandwidth recruiting, orienting, and training new employees. And the list goes on.
Although the benefits of human-centered HR practices are undeniable, they can be hard to see from a short-term perspective. When we play the long-game, however, they become crystal clear. I find three concerns commonly emerge in response to these kinds of shifts:
For sure, these changes have a tangible impact on the bottom line. I would suggest, however, that while maintaining the status quo may save a few bucks on the profit and loss statement, most of our organizations are dying a slow death by a thousand cuts, without us even realizing it. This prevents them from ever truly soaring in a healthy way. The benefits of taking a human-centered approach (starting with the very people upon whom the visitor experience depends!) will far outweigh the associated costs in the long run, particularly when implemented in an intentional way. The key is to move from a mindset of scarcity to one of abundance. Viewed through this lens, the script flips and it becomes clear: “We just can’t afford not to put our people first.”
Yes, they will, but only when they aren’t fairly compensated and/or respected for their labors. This is a cultural problem, not a justification for maintaining the status quo. When an employer and an employee have entered into a fair exchange and have mutual respect for one another, they honor each other, too. It may take time to build up trust and goodwill, but the kinds of practices described above will do just that. When leaders consistently show up as listeners and learners, and then do better as they know better, the path to right relationship begins to unfold.
Yes, it can. But liability is not a weakness in and of itself. When managed creatively and in human-centered ways, it can even be converted into a strength. Our Community-Centered Leave is a great example. While an employee could argue that this leave should be subject to the same rules as vacation (including pay-out upon separation), our policy clearly distinguishes between the purpose of the leave (serving one’s community) and that of vacation (personal enjoyment). Moreover, from an employee perspective, we are providing three additional paid days off per year in a values-consistent way. As a key component of our employee recruitment, retention, engagement, and satisfaction strategies (particularly relative to our BIPOC team members), this new policy will undoubtedly pay significant dividends for years to come. I’ll take that benefit-to-risk ratio any day.
I’ll close this post by sharing that, for the Museum of Us, all this is just the tip of the iceberg. The more we learn about how our policies and practices undermine the values we espouse, the more we realize how much more we have to learn. Like so many of our organizations, the Museum of Us continues to be full of hypocritical disconnects between who we strive to be and who we actually are. I believe that, as leaders, we must relentlessly work to identify and bridge those gaps, one by one, in the name of equity and inclusion. And what better place to start than from the inside out?
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Reposted from Fast Company
After a year of social distancing, mask-wearing, and–for millions–working from home, many employers are eager to bring their staff back to the office. But for many, the prospect of readjusting to in-person work is a daunting one.
A recent survey found that out of 4,553 office workers in five different countries, every single person reported feeling anxious about the idea of returning to in-person work.
Employers face a conflict of interest. On the one hand, they want to look after their employees’ health and reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission. While on the other, they’re motivated by financial incentives to justify expensive office rents and have their employees physically on hand for meetings and discussions or to simply monitor their working time.
But putting pressure on employees to return to the office might be creating more anxiety. For those surveyed, the top causes of return-to-work stress included being exposed to COVID-19, the loss of work flexibility, the added commute, having to wear a mask while in the office, and a need for childcare.
Some managers recognize working from home doesn’t necessarily mean reduced productivity, and a “work-from-anywhere” approach could drive greater equality, unlock new growth opportunities, and lead to greater ethical behavior. When people aren’t wasting hours in traffic, the free time unlocked from commutes can lead to more rested, happier, healthier, and productive employees.
What’s worrying, though, is that 56% of respondents in the recent study reported that their organization hadn’t asked for their opinions about return-to-work policies and procedures. Such a breakdown in communication between employees and employers could create anxiety for those employees who don’t want, or are not yet ready, to return to their physical workplaces. They may worry that voicing their concerns to return to work will signal distrust in their managers’ decision to reopen for in-person work.
I’ve studied advice-giving and advice-taking for over a decade and found that people getting advice often struggle to signal distrust to their advisor. People often feel anxiety to express disagreement with or defy an advisor, a boss, manager, leader, or authority figure. Rejecting advice makes employees anxious because it can insinuate that they think the other person is incompetent, biased, or even corrupt.
I call this distinct type of anxiety insinuation anxiety. It arises when people worry that not complying with another person’s wishes may be interpreted as a signal of distrust.
Across a series of studies investigating this type of anxiety, my collaborators and I found that patients frequently follow medical advice, even if they believe their doctor to have a conflict of interest.
Imagine someone’s trying to sell you some advice, an opinion, or a product, and the seller says: “I have a conflict of interest. I recommend you follow my advice, but I should let you know that I get paid more if you follow my advice.” You might think such disclosure would decrease trust and compliance with such advice–after all, there’s now some uncertainty as to the quality of that advice.
However, I found that although conflict of interest disclosures do indeed decrease trust in advice–arguably the “correct” response to such disclosures–they can also counterintuitively increase compliance with that distrusted advice.
Why? Because the other person now feels greater pressure to comply with advice they do not trust, as rejecting it insinuates that the other person has been corrupted by the conflict of interest and is untrustworthy. People are reluctant to signal distrust in another person. Insinuation anxiety persists regardless of the size of the conflict of interest, but it can be reduced if people can make their decisions in private, away from the pressure of their advisor or employer.
As employees navigate the shift back to in-person work, employers should consider the role of insinuation anxiety increasing pressure on their workers to reluctantly comply with new in-person work policies. If employees feel unable to express their discomfort or choose more flexible working options, organizations may end up losing their best talent to workplaces with more open communication and flexibility.
Reposted from Museums Association
Museums appear to have made little change to their Covid safety measures despite the easing of legal restrictions in England this week.
Many venues, including the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum in London, are still operating at reduced capacity and asking visitors to book tickets in advance to limit numbers, although they do accept walk-ups if space allows.
Some museums, including smaller institutions such as the Museum of Freemasonry in London, have dropped their requirement for timed entry tickets.
Most have changed the terminology they use in relation to mask wearing, but are continuing to recommend or encourage that visitors wear masks in enclosed spaces.
One museum director told Museums Journal that the dropping of restrictions has led to concern among staff, particularly younger front-of-house workers who are not yet fully vaccinated, about their own safety, as well as the difficulty of confronting visitors who refuse to adhere to restrictions. She said her museum had reassured staff that there would be no change to its existing safety measures or messaging as a result.
Sector organisations have urged museums and galleries to prioritise public safety under the new rules.
Museums Association director Sharon Heal said: “As restrictions are lifted in England museums might want to retain some measures voluntarily such as mask wearing, extra hygiene procedures and social distancing, depending on their local context. In all cases museums should put the interests of staff, volunteers and visitors first and make sure that all appropriate measures are taken to ensure everyone’s safety on site.”
The National Museum Directors’ Council has updated its reopening guidance to state that, while face coverings are no longer required by law, “the government expects and recommends that people should continue to wear them in crowded and enclosed settings, to protect themselves and others”.
The guidance also advises museums to continue to collect visitor contact details for NHS Test and Trace, although this is no longer a legal requirement.
Arts Council England (ACE) has called on cultural venues to ensure an inclusive reopening that gives “disabled and clinically extremely vulnerable (CEV) colleagues, performers and visitors the support and flexibility they need to take advantage of reopening like everyone else”.
The arts council says that now that more discretion is allowed, it is expecting organisations “to take steps to ensure this is the case”.
In guidance published last week, it stated: “In considering which measures to maintain, organisations should consider the specific needs of disabled and CEV people. We strongly recommend talking with disabled and CEV employees, creative practitioners and audiences if you are not clear about their needs in relation to your organisation at this time.”
The arts council says it will provide further guidance and spotlight good practice in the coming weeks.
ACE chair Nicholas Serota said: “As the lights are switched back on in venues, the principle of inclusivity must be applied in organisations. Our ambition is that the sector that emerges from the pandemic is one that offers talent from all quarters the chance to succeed, one that embraces audiences from all backgrounds, and one that endeavours for its performance and exhibition spaces to be accessible to all.”
Reposted from the Sacramento Bee
The Sacramento History Museum was closed Saturday morning after a person broke into the museum and stole gold artifacts.
At 5:15 a.m., video showed, someone broke into the main entrance of the museum in Old Town Sacramento. They went directly to an upstairs gallery and stole gold artifacts out of a display case, exiting the museum three minutes after entering.
Delta Pick Mello, the executive director of the museum, told The Bee that all alarm systems worked properly but the person was gone by the time police arrived. She added that the thief attempted to break into three display cases but was only able to open one, indicating that some security measures worked.
“The museum has been here for 36 years and this is the first time this has happened,” Pick Mello said. “So we feel our security measures are there; this just is something that took place within three minutes.”
Museum officials do not yet have an estimate for the value of the stolen items, but did note that they were fully made of gold.
Pick Mello said that the surveillance cameras did not give a clear view of the suspect’s face. The Sacramento Police Department is investigating, using the video, fingerprints and other evidence.
The museum was closed as officials cleaned up damage at the front entrance and continued to survey the crime scene. Pick Mello expects the museum to re-open in the afternoon, though museum employees will close off the portion of the upstairs gallery that the break-in targeted.
Hours have not changed for the Old Town Sacramento underground tours operating out of the museum.
Reposted from CNN
A wall of ice collapsed Monday at the Titanic Museum Attraction, injuring three visitors to the popular tourist spot in Tennessee's Smoky Mountains.
The Pigeon Forge Fire Department arrived at the museum at 8:11 p.m. after getting a 911 call reporting a traumatic incident, Chief Tony L. Watson told CNN.
Firefighters helped first responders triage the victims and prepare them for transport.
One patient was airlifted to the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville about 30 miles away, Watson said. The other two were taken by ambulance to LeConte Medical Center in Sevierville. Their conditions have not been released.
"Needless to say, we never would have expected an incident like this to occur as the safety of our guests and crew members are always top of mind. We take pride in the quality of our maintenance and have measures in place to ensure that appropriate safety guidelines are upheld," owners Mary Kellogg Joslyn and John Joslyn said in a statement posted on the museum's Facebook page.
"Something caused that ice to fall off of that wall," Watson said.
Staff had closed the museum and were clearing the area by the time firefighters arrived. "The Titanic staff did an excellent job of getting people away from the area and downstairs then evacuating them out of the building," Watson said.
The museum reopened on Tuesday, according to a post on its Facebook page.
Reposted from The Art Newspaper
Museum security officers, the people who probably spend the most time looking at art, will soon be organising an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) as guest curators. The show Guarding the Art, due to open in March 2022, will bring together a selection of works that resonate with each of the 17 participating officers, and offer “different perspectives from within the museum hierarchy”, says the curator and art historian Lowery Stokes Sims, who helped develop the project.
“The security officers are guarding the art, interacting with the public and seeing reactions from visitors that most museum staff don’t have access to from our offices,” Stokes Sims says. “I was struck and moved by the extraordinarily personal, cogent arguments that each officer made for their selection, which was so different from the intellectual and filtered approach that a trained curator would take.”
For example, officer Ricardo Castro chose a series of Pre-Columbian sculptures “as a means to inject some of my Puerto Rican-America culture in the exhibition”, while Dereck Mangus selected a painting by a local self-taught painter called Thomas Ruckle titled House of Frederick Crey (1830-35) that partly depicts the Washington Monument in Mount Vernon. “The painting was hung salon-style in the American Wing and stuck out among all these other disparate images,” Mangus says. “It’s a glimpse into an old Baltimore by a Baltimore-centric artist that most people have never heard about before, and it shows the neighbourhood I live in.”
Kellen Johnson, who has a background in classical singing and performance, chose Max Beckmann’s Still Life with Large Shell (1939). “It’s a portrait of his second wife, Matilda, who was a violinist and gave up her career to support Beckmann and his painting aspirations,” Johnson says. “His first wife was also an opera singer, and I felt that this painting reflected my own trajectory as an operatic singer.”
The other officers taking part in the exhibition are Traci Archable-Frederick, Jess Bither, Ben Bjork, Melissa Clasing, Bret Click, Alex Dicken, Michael Jones, Rob Kempton, Chris Koo, Alex Lei, Dominic Mallari, Sara Ruark, Joan Smith and Elise Tensley. They are now working with museum staff to determine the installation design and to generate a catalogue and develop public programmes around the exhibition.
Reposted from Security Management Magazine
The contemporary organization strives for inclusion and diversity—not simply in terms of demographics, but in attitudes, opinions, and ways of thinking. Diverse ideas can fuel innovation and create radical change, leading to new levels of success. While diversity can strengthen an organization, strong or extreme beliefs in the workplace can be a two-edged sword. An employee’s passion for a belief or cause might manifest itself as a real commitment to their employer or a project, but it can also create friction, erode workforce cohesion, and consume valuable resources when dealing with conflict.
Finding the right balance between welcoming diverse views and minimizing tension between those who hold those views and others can be tricky, but it is necessary. Left unchecked, extreme beliefs can not only threaten cohesion and productivity, they can compromise safety and raise the risk of disruptive behaviors, even violence.
A challenge for those tasked with workplace safety and security is recognizing when beliefs and behaviors begin to approach a red line—when they are not simply strong feelings, but potential pre-incident indicators of risk or possible signs or symptoms of mental illness. Strong beliefs, extreme beliefs, and conspiracy theories are often tinged with a sense of grievance—the thought that something is wrong and there is someone to blame. In the threat assessment field, grievance is recognized as an entry point to the pathway to violence.
Extreme thoughts can become extreme actions.
Extreme beliefs and conspiracy theories often develop around the idea that a person, group of people, or way of life is under threat by dark forces within an organization, community, or culture. Paranoia about the perceived threat leads to defensiveness and an us-versus-them mentality. It can create the sense that a person or group is at war with others around them who do not subscribe to the same ideas—the nonbelievers.
Paranoia is an established risk indicator for workplace violence; that is not news. Employees who are convinced that their coworkers, supervisors, or organization present an imminent risk may act preemptively to protect themselves or others they believe are in danger. Many instances of workplace violence have been inspired by paranoia. Someone who is paranoid harbors excessive distrusts without justification and may believe that sinister plots are swirling around them. Sometimes paranoid people feel compelled to use violence to stop a real or perceived threat. Extreme thoughts can become extreme actions.
In a workplace culture that promotes inclusion and diversity—not just who people are, but how they think—how does the organization recognize and tolerate deeply held, sometimes extreme beliefs? What are the thresholds for speech and conduct in the workplace, and how should the organization respond when someone approaches or crosses the line between extreme ideas and extreme behaviors? These are important questions for leaders at all levels in an organization, but especially pressing for security, legal, and HR professionals.
When speech and conduct are perceived as disruptive or potentially dangerous, it is important that they be viewed as potential risk indicators and never simply brushed aside. While it is important to create a workplace culture that tolerates diverse, powerful, and sometimes unpopular attitudes or beliefs, it is never acceptable to say, “Oh, that’s just that employee being themselves—it’s just who they are or how they are.” The failure to recognize and respond to hostile communications and behavior leaves open the possibility of escalation.
An employee who subscribes to the QAnon ideology, for example, might deeply believe that liberal elites and other actors in an imagined “deep state” are working to cover up child sex trafficking operations by forcing the pubic onto the 5G cellular network where they can manipulate communications about their nefarious activity that might expose them. That may seem like a pretty far-fetched belief, and it certainly may raise some eyebrows around the water cooler, but if that same employee now is refusing to communicate with coworkers who have 5G phones, there may be a direct and immediate impact on productivity and team cohesion in the workplace. This sort of disruptive behavior crosses the line between free speech into behavior with real world consequences.
U.S. Department of Justice and FBI research suggests that individuals who commit mass violence in a workplace, school, or community typically exhibit four to five observable indicators in the lead up to their attacks. Violent action is often proceeded by hostile rhetoric. Ideas that are associated with an extremist movement and represented by hateful language, images, or actions cannot be left unchecked. In most instances an organization’s code of conduct for employees will address hateful speech or actions, and it will clearly communicate the potential consequences for such behavior. But organizations cannot regulate what people think or believe.
In approaching an individual who holds extreme attitudes or opinions that have become disruptive or concerning, it is important to focus on the behavior, not the belief. Trying to convince someone that their worldview is incorrect or delusional is a fool’s errand. Such individuals often push back citing their rights to free speech or other legal rights. Attempts to intervene, de-escalate conflicts that may arise from extreme beliefs, or to conduct thorough risk of violence assessments must be focused on the facts—specifically the communication or behavior of concern.
Depending on the nature and seriousness of the employee’s belief, it might be advisable to meet with the individual to further assess the quality and strength of their beliefs and to review how discussion of the extreme ideas in the workplace affects other employees or the work environment. The National Standard on Workplace Violence Prevention and Intervention suggests the use of outside consultants in complicated cases where specialized knowledge or skills are required to determine the level of concern.
Research in this area makes it clear that even highly qualified and credentialed forensic psychiatrists and psychologists may have difficulty distinguishing between extreme belief and delusions. At present, there are no clear best practices in managing extreme beliefs in the workplace, and each situation will likely need to be addressed on a case-by-case basis working within the existing frameworks of security, human resources, legal, and threat assessment policies and procedures.
An employer’s duty of care must be balanced between an individual’s rights and the safety and security of the workplace. Finding that balance in an environment with strong polarized attitudes and opinions is a challenge made more complicated by evolving political and media landscapes. Security professionals must be able to see through the smoke of extreme ideas to determine if the fire of extreme action is being ignited within their workplace.
There has never been a more important time to be mindful of the mental health of employees than now. After what organizations have endured during the past 18 months, it’s remarkable that so many organizations can point to quick adaptation and resiliency on the part of their employees as amazing successes.
However, we may be seeing the costs that come with that success. Last summer, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 40 percent of people said they were struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues. The National Safety Council (NSC) reported that 9 in 10 employees said their workplaces caused them stress and 83 percent said they experienced “emotional exhaustion.”
The Mental Health Index is a study led by management consulting firm Total Brain, along with partners that include the American Health Policy Institute and the HR Policy Association. The December 2020 Mental Health Index cited that the risk of general anxiety disorder had increased 80 percent. The index went further and conducted simple tests to see how these stressors affect people’s cognitive ability at different points in time. From prepandemic 2020 until December 2020, the study showed a 9 percent decline in memory recall capacity and a 62 percent decrease in focus and sustained attention capacity.
“Our work and our workplaces impact our mental health and wellbeing,” the NSC said. “This has never been more evident than with the changes in working conditions this past year—with some working from home indefinitely, some in extraordinarily high-stress and high-risk frontline jobs, often for longer hours, and others experiencing layoffs and job insecurities. …Mental distress includes periods of intense nervousness, hopelessness, restlessness, depression, feeling like things require great effort, or feeling worthless or down on oneself. This distress is painful and costly for both employers and employees.”
Even prior to the turmoil caused by the pandemic and civil unrest, a study from the United Kingdom’s Institute of Occupational Safety and Health estimated that mental health issues cost UK businesses £42 billion ($58 billion) in lost productivity. Despite the costs, the same report found that 57 percent of people responding to the survey said their businesses offered no mental health or wellbeing training or support for managerial staff. Of the 43 percent that have some training, almost 80 percent reported that the training was not mandatory.
Just to pile on a little more, 80 percent of those surveyed said they would be reluctant to discuss their mental health with their manager. In an ASIS webinar in May, “Managing Better Conversations for Wellbeing,” Heather Beach, founder and director of the Healthy Work Company, said employers have a duty to their employees to do better.
“Quite often managers are promoted because they’re very good technically at the job,” Beach said. “They’re not necessarily the best, empathetic people managers.”
Beach said the context of this work duty does not just include severe mental health diseases, such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or post traumatic stress disorder. It includes mental health issues that all of us experience. No human is immune to anxiety, stress, depression, or a host of other issues that can affect how people function, both professionally and personally. As the statistics above indicate, this is an especially acute time, one where managers—even ones with weak empathic ability—need to be sharp to ensure their teams are functioning well.
The good news is, as a manager you are not expected to be a caregiver.
“All you’re expected to do is to notice that someone is struggling and have that conversation with them,” Beach said, “to support them, to empathize, and to normalize, and to signpost them to get further support.”
The NSC gives four recommendations for addressing employee mental health and distress:
“While understanding the impact of worker wellbeing on the bottom line is a critical motivator for organizations, we must be careful to not lose sight of the humanity of this issue," the NSC report said. "At the end of the day, we are all employees. We have all experienced unprecedented stress and distress over the past year.”
Going from the organizational level to the individual level, in the ASIS webinar, Beach gives guidance for managers. She calls it the A-B-C-D approach. Here’s a quick look at each component.
Managers who want to be in tune with the mental health of their staffs—all managers should aspire to this if they want to foster a high-performing team—need to be constantly aware. Managers need to be able to recognize behavioral changes. Did an employee who left at 5:00 p.m. on the dot every day suddenly begin staying later? Did someone who generally has an impeccable appearance show up to work a couple of times with a disheveled uniform? Has a generally passive employee become more assertive?
And when you notice something, ask about it. “Don’t wait for the perfect moment,” she said. “Especially now. There is no perfect moment is there? You might want to react quickly.”
And, importantly, ask twice. Often the reflexive answer is that everything is fine, but if you ask twice, you are giving them permission to go beyond the expected answer.
If the ask leads to a conversation, it’s time for managers to turn on the active listening skills. Humans are horrible listeners. In general, we hear a few thoughts and our minds begin racing, filling in all the spaces between the words the other person is saying with our own thoughts, suggestions, judgments, and—the worst—anything that we think makes us look smart or powerful. And then we can’t wait to share these insights and we have quickly turned from trying to understand the person to whom we’re supposed to be listening to thinking about how best to say back what we want to say.
Beach proposed that doubling down on active listening approaches is imperative in such situations. After all, as a manager you’ve done the hard work of initiating a conversation. It would be shame to wreck it.
Instead, summarize what they are saying using their words. Ask clarifying, open-ended questions to continue the dialog and improve your own understanding. Use and respect silence to encourage additional sharing.
The most important part of creating a plan in this context is that managers create a plan with the employee, not for the employee. In fact, the more the employee develops his or her own plan, the better. Remember the earlier statement from Beach: Managers are not expected to be psychologists, therapists, or parents. A manager’s job is to support, to empathize, to normalize, and to help find or suggest additional support.
Organizations have a duty to their employees. When managers engage employees in conversations about their wellbeing, Beach reminded that managers must remember their role in this. They are agents of the organization. That does not mean that managers do not also share the best interests of the employee. Quite the opposite, in fact, employees are also part of the organization. However, this dual role needs to be a factor in their conversations. Managers should not be promising confidentiality, for example. And managers should also document these conversations, even if it is in the form of contemporaneous notes that are not shared with anyone else.
The goal is for managers to spot any issues quickly. It’s true in so many situations: an early intervention can keep a minor issue from becoming a major obstacle. And that’s often true with the mental wellbeing of employees.
Reposted from Security Magazine
While technology advances have significantly improved the communication and collaboration aspects of work in all industries, there are also multiple ways in which tech can be used to boost safety and productivity for workers.
Especially for employers with an isolated workforce or with lone workers that can come across third party risks or hazards completely outside of an employer’s control, tech solutions can make a great difference.
What are the ways in which technological solutions improve workplace safety and boost worker productivity? From wearable safety devices, incident reporting software and alarm monitoring systems, to incidents and task management software, employers have access to a whole host of solutions to try and implement.
In this article, you’ll learn about how to leverage tech in the health and safety industry, from the importance of doing this to some practical solutions that you can embrace easily.
When technology is discussed in a workplace context, it is normally associated with productivity, especially from a process improvement perspective. This can range from office organization tools to sharing information, calendars, and resources.
Especially recently during the health crisis, technology has also been heavily linked to communication in the office as well as in more operational contexts. Delivering meetings via online platforms, being able to share screens and documents, and enabling colleagues to contact each other virtually 24/7 through a host of apps has become the norm in the modern workplace.
However, the health and safety industry has yet to fully tap into the potential of tech solutions. Currently, technology can be used to prevent injuries and even fatalities thanks to the use of devices like a man down alarm.
Some organizations might make use of trackers and incident reporting software. But many of the tools used to keep people safe and manage their daily workload are becoming outdated, complex, slow, or lead to even more problems for managers.
This is why embracing new, simple and well-performing tech solutions can make a huge difference to how your teams work every day. With intuitive, reliable and integrated tools, workflow management and ensuring safety and security move into the modern era.
Using the full array of tech solutions available for workplace safety and productivity can yield multiple benefits:
So, what are the best ways to include technology for your workforce to support their health and safety, while also boosting productivity? Below is a non-exhaustive list of solutions you can proactively implement with your teams quickly and easily.
Safety devices and lone worker apps
The first step towards ensuring worker safety in any environment is conducting a thorough risk assessment. This should be based on interviews with staff, a process overview and any lessons learnt from previous incidents.
After your risk assessment, you will most likely find that the minimum requirement for worker safety is that your teams are equipped with safety devices. These include lone worker safety devices and apps, which allow them to contact a central in-house or external monitoring team.
These solutions ensure real-time communication and alert raising during emergencies. They also offer a seamless user experience, especially when using apps that support two-way voice calls, a one-touch discreet alarm activation, and the familiarity of a mobile phone we all use every day.
Finally, they are a great source of peace of mind for workers, allowing them to be productive without worrying about being stranded in case something goes wrong.
Alarm monitoring systems
Having safety devices and apps is a great first step towards ensuring employees’ safety. However, a key element of keeping your teams safe is the ability to always respond when an alarm is triggered.
This is where alarm monitoring systems come in. The latest, most competitive ones offer custom-fit solutions that match your organization’s requirements. Look for one which integrates perfectly with your workers’ devices and is supported by a cloud-based platform for perfect interoperability and access from wherever your monitoring team is situated.
Incident reporting software
Preventing hazards from developing into safety incidents is facilitated by the use of safety devices, alarm monitoring systems, and overall improved communication and monitoring of workers. However, things can always go wrong and it’s important to be able to accurately and easily report incidents.
New tech solutions enable workers to streamline and speed up their reporting, capturing the information quickly and accurately.
This has two benefits: firstly, it makes reporting easier and more attractive, as it is less awkward than filling in long paper forms or outdated systems. Secondly, modern incident reporting software boosts productivity, too. As less time is spent logging, more time can be spent on moving ahead with important work.
Finally, consider using incident reporting software that allows the users to log hazards and near misses. This can significantly improve overall safety by reducing the likelihood of incidents occurring. It also boosts productivity as it reduces the hours possibly missed as a result of an incident.
Mass notification software
Depending on your industry, mass notifications can become very important for alerting entire regions or wider populations that could be impacted by an incident or hazard. Keeping people informed before, during, and after critical events can make the difference between a hazard and a massive accident.
For mass notifications, there are also significant productivity benefits to be gained from efficient communication and alerts. Rerouting workers, organizing plan B activities or putting in place continuity plans can also be made easier by using mass notification software that alerts everyone concerned quickly and efficiently.
Inspections and task management software
Finally, when it comes to managing workloads and tasks, coordinating groups and logging and ticking off actions, the latest task management software can make a huge difference for saving time and ensuring productivity levels are at their best.
From a health and safety perspective, software supporting inspection forms that can be created in easy-to-use templates will help save time and make it easier for your inspectors to complete their work. Organizing corrective action plans can all be done quicker and in a more interconnected fashion if you’re using an all-in-one app, too.
Task management software that allows management to see where the workforce is deployed at all times also enhances security and productivity.
An overview of teams’ locations ensures that they can be contacted for pre-emptive hazard reporting, located easily in the case of an incident, and deployed effectively when synergies are noticed in activity on the ground.
For example, noticing that one team member is not far from a site where others need help, contacting and deploying them at that location, saves everyone significant time and travel.
Eliminating pen-and-paper reporting makes all the information easier to share, come back to in the future, and use in training. It’s also a more sustainable, enduring way to log all the data for the long term.
Embracing tech solutions in your business will enable your teams to work safer and quicker, creating a positive and interconnected workplace.
Reposted from The Atlantic
An archivist sneezes on a priceless document. Then what?
What, exactly, does history lose when an archive-worthy text is destroyed?
A year and a half ago, I found myself in an archive room at the London School of Economics, staring at 150-year-old documents complete with swirly handwriting and a red-wax seal. My mind flicked back to a few weeks earlier, when I’d gotten one of my occasional nosebleeds, and I had a random yet horrifying thought: What if my nose starts bleeding on one of these irreplaceable pages? What would happen if I ruined them? I was doing research for a book I was writing about the first women physicians. Examining personal letters and other original records—holding speeches, notes, and letters handwritten by the women I was writing about—helped answer many of the questions I had but also sparked a new one: What, exactly, does history lose when an archive-worthy text is destroyed?
I had the chance to discuss my fears at my next research stop, the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh’s main library. When a smoke alarm interrupted my silent, solitary scholarship, another researcher invited me to her office for a cup of tea. The alarm got us talking about archival damage, and when I shared my nosebleed anxieties, she told me that a friend of hers had once sneezed on an illuminated manuscript. As the friend instinctively began wiping, the ink smudged. The more they wiped, the worse it got; the scene was practically the same nightmare that had been depicted on the old British TV show Mr. Bean.
All public archives, like the ones I visited in late 2019, before the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, must balance the responsibility of making collections accessible while also protecting them. “There are documents that become almost sacred,” Elizabeth Yale, an author and a history lecturer at the University of Iowa, told me. “If you think about the copy of the Declaration of Independence on display at the National Archives, the physical document itself carries so much weight and meaning that it has to be treated differently.”
When I asked an online group of archivists for horror stories, members told tales of researchers attempting to slide 18th-century parchment through the document feeder of a photocopier; of museum artifacts getting damaged by the blood of a doe that crashed through the window; of a scrapbook leaking glitter on important texts. One writer said that in college she watched her professor accidentally rip a medieval palimpsest. Some archivists cited the damage done to centuries-old documents by outdated cataloging or preservation methods: lamination, tape, ink stamps, ballpoint-pen markings to denote library ownership. “When I was processing the Susan Wright papers on the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom for the Leather Archives in Chicago, I gave myself a bad paper cut and bled on one of the pages,” the writer Jessica DiMaio said. “I was just an intern, and it was an ‘Oh shit!’ moment.”
Of course, many important texts have seen worse: fires, floods, thefts, volcanic ash. Yale explained how politically inconvenient papers purged from libraries and Catholic monasteries in the 16th and 17th centuries got reused as beer-keg or musket stoppers, pie-pan liners, and parcel wrapping. Having lost so much knowledge to authoritarian acts of destruction makes preserving what has been collected all the more crucial. “All of the labor and all of the care that goes into maintaining collections, keeping them in order, making sure the materials are findable, creating plans for emergencies ... This is work that has to be sustained over generations of archivists and librarians,” Yale told me.
In other words: “Documents don’t just conserve themselves.”
Curious to learn more about what happens to damaged archival materials, I arranged a tour of the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts back home in Philadelphia, in February 2020. I didn’t know at the time that it would be my last in-person reporting trip before much of the U.S. shut down. Dyani Feige, the director of preservation services at CCAHA, said of the center’s work: “Preservation is really the underpinning of collections. We would not have collections without preservation.”
The tour greatly eased my fears about inflicting accidental damage when handling primary documents. In a space that’s part artist’s workshop, part science lab, conservators work magic, performing feats of restoration I never imagined possible. I watched as a paper conservator submerged an Auguste Rodin watercolor in a bath of deionized water to undo the darkening the paper had experienced from light exposure. At another table, several 1920s panoramic photos of rodeo performers sat waiting to have enormous longwise tears painstakingly repaired. Coiled for storage, the photos had grown brittle and tore when unrolled. In front of another conservator was a large abstract painting, thick and impossibly black with a heart of blue. On its way to America from a London gallery, its frame failed. Once the conservator had cleared the shattered glass embedded in the art, he hunched over a magnifying glass, holding up tiny flecks of the paper’s edges that had ripped off to find where they belonged.
I also learned that some of the worst enemies of precious artifacts aren’t humans but mice, insects, and moisture. A copy of the Nuremberg Chroniclehad come in to have sections of its cover mended. Made of rag paper in the late 1400s, the book blossomed with vibrantly colored woodcut illustrations. Metals in the paints were slowly breaking down the paper. A conservator invited me to smell the text to see if I could detect the rat-urine aroma he’d noted. To me, it just smelled musty. The bottom corners of the pages had been darkened by centuries of oily fingers flipping pages. The conservator imagined people sitting down to lunch while thumbing through it.
The pandemic complicated archival restoration efforts—you can’t exactly mend the Nuremberg Chronicle remotely. Most labs, archives, libraries, and museums closed, at least temporarily. The National Center for Preservation Technology and Training was quick to offer advice on personal protection equipment, disinfecting artifacts, and safe reopening. The American Institute for Conservation collected a trove of resources relating to caring for collections and the people who interact with them during the pandemic.
CCAHA’s lab closed for only a few months last spring; by June 2020, it was back up and running, with an abbreviated, staggered work schedule. By then, research had shown the coronavirus was undetectable on library materials after three days, so the people whose job it was to handle such materials could feel more at ease. Unfortunately, some germ-mitigation efforts actually pose a threat to artifacts: Library of Congress research showed that alcohol-based hand sanitizers can cause some types of paper to yellow. The pandemic also forced CCAHA to get creative about its other work; the center now holds combination online/hands-on preservation training classes and performs virtual assessments of archival collections. The lessons learned in dealing with this pandemic can be carried into future emergencies and disruptions of normal life.
For many artifacts, their importance is born of the damage they’ve amassed. The inky paw prints left on a 15th-century manuscript give it character, and tell a story of their own. The same goes for the dozens of doodles Charles Darwin’s children left on his draft of On the Origin of Species. But these defacements occurred around the time of the artifacts’ creation, not at the hands of researchers far in the future.
“Touch and handling and use add to the meaning of documents,” Elizabeth Yale said. “As you see people writing on them, shedding a hair on them, maybe even dropping candle wax on them—the fact that these have been used in some way, and you can see those traces in the documents, can [make] them even more meaningful for the historians. Even something that destroyed the documents can make it more interesting and more valuable.”
One of the most miraculous restoration techniques I learned about involved new technologies being used to render legible texts once thought damaged beyond recognition. A digital-imaging specialist at CCAHA showed me how the center restored completely faded handwriting using UV photography. “We’re always discovering new ways to analyze the text that we have … Material analysis, chemical analysis, studying the metal in the pigments, studying the DNA in the parchment … A hundred years ago, nobody would have thought of that,” Yale said. Ash-encased Herculaneum library texts? Readable. The Dead Sea Scrolls? Readable. Their survival shows the importance of preserving even those documents that appear to be a total loss.
But the technology of digitization can be a double-edged sword. The researcher who told me about her sneezing friend reasoned that the damage would be okay, because there was most likely a record of what was held in the text: Someone, somewhere would have taken a photo of it, would have copied down its contents. But is it enough to have digital records remembering things for us? Digitization is certainly a great way to preserve knowledge and make it more widely available, but the connection humans feel to physical objects themselves can never be replaced. I was surprised by how emotional I felt holding letters written by women I’d spent months researching. When an archive-worthy document is destroyed beyond restoration, we lose the stories that the artifact itself tells, stories that digitization can’t capture.
“We are the stewards of what everyone who comes after us will be able to learn from,” CCAHA’s Feige mused. “In deciding to preserve, we're being responsible stewards of life. That sounds so big when I say it like that … but I think it really is that big.”
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