Empowering Employees to Optimize their Workday

How often have you heard someone say, “I’m so busy”? Would you agree that sometimes it seems that the word busy can be used as a success badge? For people who are too busy to see anyone, this busyness could not only be burying themselves but their real values.

It’s important to consider that, rather than using the term busy, we talk about how effective we are and whether we are working smarter. Using busyness as a label creates a perception of doing the right thing in other people’s eyes, whereas effectiveness creates real outcomes essential for personal and business success.

How would you like to be more effective with the work you do? I’m sure you’ve decided on some key goals and aspirations for your future. What if you could achieve these by optimizing your workday: adopting tools that help you become more effective, helping you break free from being too busy?

At work, it’s important to create space in the busyness and decide how you can work smarter. When you find ways to do this, you create time for effective leadership, you support your team and demonstrate that you value the people who are helping you build a successful business. You would then feel that the business cares about you and your well-being.

14-Channel wireless EEG headset

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32-Channel Saline Wireless EEG head cap system

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32-Channel Gel Wireless EEG head cap system

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5-Channel Wireless EEG Head Cap System

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2-Channel Wireless EEG earbuds

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16-Channel adhesive EEG monitoring

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And remember, as a manager, success is about keeping your team with you on your journey by being supportive: being there with everyone at the start, middle and end, not just letting employees go when they are stressed! Having everyone with you on YOUR bus at the end of the journey is true success: not just being too busy to notice who is around you and who got off at the last bus stop!

“May I never get too busy in my own affairs that I fail to respond to the needs of others with kindness and compassion” – Thomas Jefferson

The way to optimization

Life is a journey, and it’s important to be aware of what you are doing on this journey and how it impacts your well-being. The pace of life can make this difficult. However, there are messages on the way, if we take time to notice! This is especially true regarding mental well-being, where we should aim to work effectively and avoid burnout.

Your life messages offer insights into what might be holding you back, providing opportunities to change your behaviour. To start the process of increasing effectiveness and working smarter, let’s check what’s happening for you at the moment:

• It seems there is never enough time in the day.

• You feel like you’re on an endless treadmill going nowhere.

• You often feel you don’t have any time for yourself.

• You feel unprepared and pressured by too many priorities.

• You are tired of working hard and still don’t create enough income.

• You have trouble staying focused and motivated.

• You have missed many important family events because of work-related time pressures and responsibilities.

• It sometimes feels like you never even have a chance to catch your breath.

• You wonder why others achieve so much more with little effort while you work so hard.

• You can’t remember the last time you read and finished a book.

If anyone, or a number of these, ring true to you, I think you would agree you have good reasons to start making some changes.

Knowledge is Power

Knowing where you are at in broad terms is a great start, but let’s go a step further:

• Examine past trends. How focused were you? What worked for you, and what didn’t work for you?

• How effective are you now? Try rating your effectiveness out of 10, with 1 being not very effective and 10 working very effectively. How does this compare to your past performance? Can you see opportunities for change?

• Are you constantly in ‘urgent mode’, always busy or feeling that you are fire-fighting everything? What are the outcomes? How is it affecting your mental well-being?

What if you could add in an additional layer of understanding by knowing your cognitive stress and attention levels throughout your workday. This would put you in a powerful position for success. You could identify when you’re unfocused, in the zone, or burning out, before you’ve even recognized it yourself. These insights can lead to behavioural changes and smarter outcomes that help you optimize your day.

EMOTIV provides technology that enables personalized insights into stress and attention levels helping you optimize your day, just like being in the driver’s seat of a high-performance car.

EMOTIV and SAP Collaboration

In 2018, EMOTIV and SAP collaborated to develop a focused user experience to improve workplace productivity and well-being. With EMOTIV’s Electroencephalograph (EEG) technology, the companies created a system that leveraged real-time brain activity data and provided personalized feedback on users’ cognitive performance at work (including cognitive load, stress, and attention levels).

In 2019, the companies collaborated again to personalize workplace learning and development and created a seamlessly integrated work environment for employees.

To develop this initiative further, EMOTIV developed MN8—a 2-channel EEG earbud system that allows you to listen to the audio while collecting brain ac