Greetings all and welcome to the Conversations: Enhancing 2-Way Communications blog! The idea for this blog came from work of the Central District Program Leadership Team. In identifying program training needs in their district, they discovered some issues that, well, didn’t really relate directly to subject matter programming but nonetheless are important and need to be addressed (for example, work/life balance and office/field time balance.). So we (State Staff) developed this blog to promote two-way communications to talk about these issues.
We will be posting periodically and encourage you to comment (just click on Leave a reply) at the bottom of the post. You may comment anonymously, but we would encourage you to tell us who you are. You can also suggest additional topics either in comments or by emailing Mike Lambur (lamburmt@vt.edu).
For more information on the blog, see About.
The Human Development Program Team has been hearing the same things. This program team wants to assess exactly what topics may be helpful internally to Extension before we develop materials for our (external) educational programs. We want to have the healthiest Extension workforce so Extension in turn can reach out and help others. If we are stressed and need to understand the “Science” of stress or we are having difficulty understanding work-life issues then how can we advise others we work with? These are “human” issues and ones we can know about to grow personally and professionally.
We are working on some things now but please brainstorm about what you are hearing among your colleagues as far as what we can do now.