Some organizations are going through another round of layoffs. People are on edge. No one feels like their best self right now. As a leader, how do you keep your team going? How do you buoy their spirits? How do you continue to navigate these rocky waters—remotely? Here are some ideas.

One way to mitigate the negative effects of too much screen time is to make sure our video meetings are both productive and efficient, allowing us to cut down on those long hours of screen time while still accomplishing the important work.

Life has changed so drastically for all of us in the past several months and has forced us to “set up shop” in our homes overnight!  Going virtual is the new order of the day and has challenged us to find resourceful ways to make the best of our circumstances. DWL team member Belinda Passafaro gives tips to maintain professionalism while working remotely.

Because our world, our selves and our work are intertwined, today’s post offers reflection on what anti-racism means to us as humans and how you can embed anti-racism into your work through your organization’s professional development strategy.

Think about when you wanted to learn how to dice a fresh mango, how to launch your e-marketing campaign or how to facilitate a Zoom meeting for the first time. All of these things were “nice to know”s until they became “must know”s. And THAT is when you sought to learn them. That’s what adult learners do—we learn things we need to know, when we need to. Help your learners get the knowledge they need by starting your own online university.

It used to be that we could keep work at work and then come home to rest, relax and rejuvenate. Work life and home life could be—at least—physically separated. Over the past couple months, we’ve all been figuring out how to mix the two, some days more successfully than others. And that home-work paradox highlighted several other tensions we’ve been existing within. How do we do it?

Need help figuring out how to create an online professional development experience for your staff or network? We can help—starting with establishing your case for investing in online professional development now. If you need to communicate with your board, funders or partners that now is the time to invest in online professional development or that the funds currently tagged for programming (that isn’t occurring) should be reallocated to online PD, copy and paste today’s post into your own document to get started.

If you host a virtual happy hour and nobody comes, is it still worth doing? Do you find yourself wondering: What’s wrong? Why am I here in this virtual room, virtually alone (except for my kids playing and dog barking in the other room)? Read on to find out what to do if this happens to you.

You’ve been burning on both ends and if you don’t give yourself a minute to pause, you’ll burn out. Even outside the COVID-19 crisis, youth-serving leaders and staff suffer from burn out. Now, we’re five or six weeks into this isolated life with no clear end in sight and it’s time to take a break.

You can’t just take the in-person agenda and materials, pop them into a virtual space and then expect it to be just as amazing as it was in-person. But, you also do not have to scrap the full agenda and start over. Follow these simple steps to adapt an existing workshop agenda to the online environment.

Youth-serving organizations have been forced to close their doors, suspend or digitally transform their services in a swift turn. More staff are experiencing furloughs and lay offs as organizational revenues drop. In this incredibly challenging time of stress and uncertainty, how do you support your team?

You’ve been managing a team, but have always been able to see them in person. People have always been able to pop into your office when they need a quick response. You all have chatted in the hallway or at the coffee maker. And now you don’t. If you’re scrambling to effectively manage your team when everyone is working from home, here are five strategies to help you now.