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Mental Health, What Can You Do As Managers?

Yesterday, I had a chance to talk with my member and as expected, he is struggling to cope with the pace of the project. The fast pace of this project and number of issues we are dealing everyday has caused him to question his own capability. I used to think like that before and of course I could relate to that. Luckily he reached out to me and I've advised him to proceed with his plan ie. to meet up with my GM and share his struggles. Honestly, I'm not sure how I could help him as I know the challenges awaits them whenever they decided to join this team. But as superior, what can you do to ease the process? Learn about mental illness - minimal thing you can do is to know how to spot early warning signs and manage stress. This at least will help you be more empathy and build the trust. Workplace stress is not a myth - Majority of cases I'm hearing recently, caused by work-related stress. Even today during our monthly safety talk, people posted about how their workload cau...
Recent posts

Yearly Appraisal Blues

How will you rate yourself? After a year, most of the employees will need to go through an appraisal activities to measure their performance for that year. Some will struggle and some will consider this as part of their job requirements. Being one of the appraiser is not an easy task. You are evaluating others and as someone who has a very high expectation towards others, your staffs may not be the best among others. After years of experience, I need to calibrate on how I viewing others - keep telling myself that everyone is doing their best at their own capabilities. Only then I'll not feeling frustrated with them and not blaming myself for not trained them better. Well, self blame is the easiest route to depression. So, what are I'm looking for when assessing my team's performance? As a team, I believe everyone has done their job but now need to assess them individually. So, my comments to them when we having one-to-one sessions earlier were, what is the outcomes of your ...

Ultrawide, 4K & Black Friday...

Post 11.11 mega sale, I've been thinking about buying an external laptop for my home office. The problem is I do have a 24 inch monitor but been trying to find a justification why I need to buy a new monitor. First, I think an external monitor with USB type C connector will be a great addition to my gadgets. I can easily connect & power up my HP laptop & Macbook without need to worry about cable management. But do I really need a new monitor at the first place? Whenever I found myself in an excessive behaviours of spending money, this is like an alarm that I need to really think before make any new purchases. It takes me a while to notice this but whenever I'm in the great stress, online shopping is like a distraction to my work problems. I bought a lot of unnecessary things and after 1-2 weeks, I'll be giving those items to others. People are happy with this because they going to get free stuffs but but end of the month, all my salary will be used just to pay my cr...

That Winter, We Parted

Watched a great movie just now. It's about the story of a man who avenged the death of his girlfriend by taking everything by his own hand. His girlfriend was burned into death by the psychopath who thought by doing that was helping his brother to take the most beautiful pictures in the world but having that's not the case. Therefore, this guy started to plot the journey to punish those people by staging the second crime. I think that was the best plot twist I ever watched so far. The murderer burned into death exactly like the victim and her brother took the pictures of her while her soulmate witnessed the second act. Well, those people deserve to be punished.  One thing I learnt about this movie is sometimes you have to take things into your hand and get it done as pace might be slow if you are waiting for others. 

Start-Up

Perhaps, the most hype korean drama right now is the Start-Up which majority of people has been inflicted with second hero syndrome. However, that's not why I'm jotting down my thoughts today. Watching this drama somehow bring back my earliest memories when my company started the digital journey. Hackathon, agile methodology, challenging the norms, digital savvy, prototyping to get highest ROI and many more. But because of this opportunity as well, I've learnt a lot of life lesson. Same goes for this drama. I could relate so much with the storyline and characters which includes: Digitalization aspiration - it is not just about pursuing your dream. First, you need to know what is the business case you're trying to resolve. Doing digital is not about converting your manual works into automation of processes but it's also about transforming your organization. Plus, you need to balance the pace of you to scale up your digital products and closing the adoption gaps. Thi...

Enjoy Your Life, Broaden Your World...

Don't judge others by your own standards. ... perhaps the type who does better when praised.  What good is anything if you're dead?  If someone dies, there's another to replace him.  The basics of work is put yourself in others' shoes.  If you're reprimanded every time you do something, you'd feel like quiting.  We live in an era where we ought to respect everyone's different working style.  Moreover, it doesn't mean that people who don't take days off would definitely produce results.  When we were in school, we usually hang out with people with the same values, right? That's a good thing, but for work we have to cooperate with people who have totally different way of thinking, just to accomplish one thing. That's why it's interesting.  Don't be a person who exists only for the company. Enjoy life. Meet all kind of people. Broaden your world. The accumulation of such experiences will lead to good results at work. 

The Life of Gang-Tae

I've been following Korean series in Netflix called It's Okay to Not Be Okay . The pace might too slow for certain people but I can relate to the storyline. It's sucks to always be the perfect gentleman and suppressed all the emotions you have inside. That's the price you have to pay when people set a high expectation on you. I used to be like that and keep reminding myself to balance it out. I need to love myself before I could help others. Gang-Tae experience the same things like me I guess. Always felt unwanted and unloved. His existence merely just to take care of others. Therefore, he stopped to has expectation on others.  Last two years, when I was battling with depression, I used think there is no point for me to live anymore. If people just expected me to take care of them but let me take all the blames, then why should I be there for them. There is no more purpose for me to be around. I did stop having expectation on others but later, slowly I'm realise, th...