Workshops
The WorkLife Office supports all MSU faculty and staff by connecting individuals with resources and assistance to help navigate the workplace, career, and life transitions. We provide presentations and workshops to colleges, departments, and units at MSU.
We would love to facilitate a session with your team! Please select “Request a Presentation or Workshop” below to submit your request or send an email to worklife@msu.edu. Thank you!
Managing Stress at Work
There are ebbs and flows to the intensity of our work and stressors in our personal lives. Learn tools and strategies for identifying stressors, prioritizing responsibilities, and managing stress throughout your career. Participants will leave with strategies in mind of how to best manage their stressors in life and in their career.
Click here for a recording of the session with captions (requires MSU NetID)
Well-being at Work
Explore the questions that have surfaced the ranks of faculty and staff, supervisors and leaders, focusing on how to create and maintain healthier, more productive workplaces and teams. Well-being at work is important. It honors each employee as a complete person both inside and outside of work. It provides shared knowledge about workplace culture and practices that attract people to work at MSU and keep them here. During this presentation you will learn evidence based practices that increase well-being at work and lead to more productive and well workplaces.
Busting the Myth of Work-Life Balance
In our fast-paced world, what is the secret to balancing all of our responsibilities? Well, there is no secret or fix-all answer, but there are strategies and tactics for helping to manage it all. In this interactive session, learn tips for striking a “balance” that works for you and your unique blend of responsibilities. This session will also provide tools for reducing work-life stress, understanding your own and your colleagues’ work styles, and creating an environment that works for your whole work team.
Building Your Best Colleague
During busy or challenging times at work, people may say, “Just let me know if you need anything.” Sometimes it feels like an empty offer for help. Other times it can be hard to figure out exactly what we need. Join us for an interactive presentation about building a strong community of colleagues. Find out how you can be a good colleague and how you can build a strong network of colleagues around you. That way, you’ll know how to identify what you need and who can help you accomplish that goal.
Creating Flexible Work Arrangements as a Team
Flexible work arrangements can be a win-win for departments and employees. They can be a useful method to maintain unit service while supporting the personal needs of individuals on the team. This workshop can be adapted to small groups interested in learning about flex work, all the way to addressing the entire unit to help formulate a comprehensive arrangement for the whole team.
Grounding Strategies: Tools for Coping with Stress
Grounding strategies help you cope with stressful situations and help you strengthen your resilience. The strategies that will be covered in this session include: Gratitude, progressive muscle relaxation, optimism, visualization, guided imagery, mindfulness, focused breathing, meditation, and affirmations, mantras, and mottos. Grounding strategies are things you can do to bring yourself into contact with the present moment. They can be quick strategies or longer more formal exercises. Different strategies work for different people. By learning about them, you can find one that works for you!
Psychological Safety and Transparent Communication at Work: Strengthening Collaboration and Innovation
Employees need to feel psychologically secure and safe in their workplace to do their best work. This type of workplace culture is increasingly important to encourage. Creating psychological safety in the workplace allows teams to create a trusting workplace and increase productivity. Transparent communication is a critical tool toward building trust and creating a workplace culture that has the foundation to allow psychological safety to flourish. Learn more about transparent communication and psychological safety which builds a climate that increases collaboration, innovation, and a positive work environment.
Boundaries and Self-Care
The boundaries and self-care presentation is an empowering and informative session designed to help individuals establish and maintain healthy personal and professional boundaries while prioritizing their well-being. Through practical examples, interactive exercises, and insightful discussions, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the importance of setting boundaries in various aspects of their lives, including relationships, work, and personal time. This presentation aims to inspire individuals to embrace boundaries and self-care as vital components of a balanced and fulfilling life.
Diffusing Difficult Situations
De-escalation is aimed at calmly comm aims to calmly communicate with an agitated person to communicate with an agitated person to understand, manage and resolve their concerns. Learn de-escalation techniques to take to help reduce the person’s agitation and potential for future aggression or violence.
Building a Strong Community of Social Supports
Building communities is important. It is one of the building blocks that make up a successful society (Frami 2020). Join this session to Identify ways to contribute to a positive social support system through building community. Recognize the types of support that you have in your life and that you could benefit by having. Set a personal goal you want to achieve regarding this presentation’s content.
How to Recognize the Signs of Burnout in Uncertain Times
Burnout is the loss of meaning in one’s work, coupled with mental, emotional, or physical exhaustion as the result of long-term, unresolved stress. Burnout impacts our mental and physical health, which directly affects both our work and personal lives. In this webinar, we will define burnout, explore the stages of burnout, and explore steps to minimize burnout to help us healthfully navigate stressful and uncertain times. Learning the signs and how to work toward health is a positive way to promote workplace wellbeing.
Taking Care of Ourselves during Times of Uncertainty
We can be creatures of habit. Things that are expected and planned allow us to feel more in control of our lives and our time. But with all of the uncertainties that we face in our personal and professional lives, we can begin to feel overwhelmed, which can impact our mental and physical health. During this presentation, we will discuss the importance of self-care, compassion for others, creating routines, and practice a visualization technique to help reduce our stress, regain our focus, and become more effective in our work and lives.
Caregiving
Are you among the 44 million? The Family Caregiving Alliance describes caregiving as any partner, friend, or neighbor who has a significant personal relationship with and provides a broad range of assistance for an older person or an adult with a chronic or disabling condition. This workshop discusses the ever-changing needs of caregiving. It offers tips and techniques to help caregivers on this journey.
The Power of Affirmation: An Antidote to Imposter Syndrome & Burnout
This workshop explores the power of affirmations and addresses how they are important as an antidote to imposter syndrome, self-doubt, and burnout. During the workshop, we will learn how our thoughts and the things we say to ourselves affect our feelings and actions. Learn what affirmations are and how to get the most out of them to combat anxiety, imposter syndrome, and more.
Managing Holiday Stress
What are the top holiday stressors? The holidays are a busy time for people in the United States. From everyday stressors such as working long hours to fighting traffic, caring for aging parents, and paying the bills, just when you think your life is stressful enough, the holidays arrive, adding an additional layer of stress to our already busy lives. Depending on how well you manage stress, added responsibilities can have a long-lasting impact on your body and your mind.
Childcare Resources
Navigating the world of childcare can be difficult. Facing a national shortage in childcare providers and increased prices, finding the best location for your family’s needs, and locating resources/assistance for this process is a challenging process. The WorkLife Office and the Student Parent Resource Center have joined forces to provide you guidance in this journey, including insights into potential childcare providers in the area, your back up dependent options as an MSU employee, access to Care.com/MSU, local community resources, special needs care and applying for assistance. Whether you are expecting, have a toddler or a child of any age that you care for, this presentation will help provide you guidance in navigating the childcare process.
Recognizing Signs of Stress and Distress in Others
As a supervisor, it is important for you to be able to recognize signs of stress and distress in your employees. Noticing those signals can allow you to respond quickly and effectively with resources and guidance for your employees in need. In this third session of the 4-Part Supervisor Training Series, you will learn how to recognize the different signs of stress and distress, how to respond with empathy and care, as well as what resources are available to your employees on and off campus.
Supporting Each Other through the Next Normal
How can we support each other and our community as we navigate continued change? This presentation focuses on empathy, empathetic leadership, signs of burnout, resources, and the importance of self-care.
Understanding Trauma: The Months After
In response to the tragic events that occurred at MSU, the WorkLife Office has prepared a training geared towards all MSU Faculty and Staff to assist with your own personal response as well as how to apply this information to assist in your colleagues’ response to the trauma we have faced. In this presentation, we will discuss the diverse ways in which we respond to trauma, what the natural recovery process looks like, as well as resources available to all of our MSU community.
Tracking your Professional Success
There is a huge difference between accomplishment and success. Many people are accomplished. They earn competitive credentials, secure high-profile jobs, build sought-after careers, and earn top-tier salaries and incomes. These are several examples of the standards by which many in society define career success. But these items—degrees, job titles, desirable careers, and great pay—represent accomplishments. And the problem here is that accomplishments alone don’t necessarily equate to career success. This workshop discusses ways to develop and track your professional success.
Creating a Healthier Life: A Step by Step Guide to Wellness
Every aspect of wellness can affect a person’s life. Working toward all of them in one way or another is a great goal because wellness relates directly to the quality of a person’s life. This workshop offers a broad approach for things we can do—at our own pace, in our own time, and within our own abilities—that can help us feel better and live longer.
US Surgeon General Framework for a Well Workplace
Seeing that we spend around half of our waking life at work, our workplace plays a significant role in shaping our mental health and overall wellbeing. Employers have a unique opportunity to not only invest in the mental health and wellbeing of their workforce but also to strengthen their organizations’ success by doing so. This session will explore the framework released by Dr. Vivek Murthy, U.S. Surgeon General, for guiding workplaces in promoting the health and wellbeing of our workers and communities.
Women in the Workplace
We are at a point of “Great Breakup”, where women demand more from work and are switching jobs at the highest rates ever observed. The Women in the Workplace 2022 article by McKinsey & Company, in partnership with LeanIn.org, highlights reasons why women leaders are leaving their organizations. This session will detail the findings from the Women in the Workplace Report as well as what organizations need to do to retain current and recruit future generation of women leaders.
Customized Workshop
The WorkLife Office can design training programs to address the needs of your unit/group of any size. Workshops/presentations can range across a span of work-life topics. We will work directly with you to develop the session that is perfect for you and your team.
