 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine, we do record the show as we are doing today, and so you can watch it later at your convenience, and I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our show recordings. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have in Encompass Live. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries, so we would be similar to your state library, so we provide services and resources to all types of libraries in the state, so you will find shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, really anything and everything. Our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries. We do book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes come on the show and do presentations about things we, services and resources and things we're offering here through the Library Commission, but we also bring on guest speakers sometime, as that is what we have today. We have with us Lacey Rogers, who is from our University of Nebraska Omaha campus. Hello. Good morning. Good morning, Lacey. How are you doing? Good. Thank you. And she's been talking to us about deploying soft skills in the library setting. And this is a session that she did in May, back in May. Yes. One of our regional library systems, Southeast Library System, there's an annual training extravaganza, is what they call it. And this was at that event, but that was an in-person session. So I invited her to come on here in a couple of slides. We could have a nice recorded one and have it available even more. People who weren't able to attend just our one little show here, one little event here in Nebraska. So I'll hand it over to you, Lacey, to go ahead and tell us all about how to do this. All right. We'll go ahead and get started. As Krista said, this is going to be about deploying soft skills in the library setting. I'll introduce myself just a little bit. My name is Lacey Rogers. I am the Access Services Librarian at the University of Nebraska Omaha. I've been in Access Services and Libraries for about 15 or so years, and I've worked in customer service in some shape or form since I was like 13 and started working at a dairy queen in my hometown. So I know a little bit about customer service. Definitely. All right. So what are soft skills? I have seven key skills listed on this side of my presentation here. Communication, customer service, teamwork, problem solving, self-motivation, flexibility, and time management. My presentation is going to focus on the top three with communication, customer service, and teamwork. But I'll go through each one a little bit before we move too far forward. On the other side of the presentation, I have some job postings that I found just randomly on Indeed for local library positions. And you can see and hear some of the things that they have listed. All three of them have some sort of customer service, excellent customer service skills, strong customer service skills, high excellent communication skills, important on all of those playing as part of a team, teamwork, time management is necessary, the ability to build a rapport with students is necessary. There's a lot of different ways to list a lot of these things in job ads. Communications, my very favorite one when I was looking these out back in May, there was an ad for a dental assistant. And it listed that you needed to have enthusiastic communication skills. And I'm thinking how does that work in a dental office to be enthusiastic? Well, I'm so glad you're here today and we have some wonderful news for you. You have to have a crown and it's going to cost you $1,500. I'm enthusiastically telling you that. That seems like a very difficult thing to do, but that's okay. Customer service is going to be in almost every single ad because there are so, so many ads for service related jobs. And I think sometimes it's forgotten that libraries are service related. Probably not among librarians and library assistants, but I think a lot of folks out there still think of libraries as shh, and that's not at all what we are really anymore. I'm pretty sure I get shushed more than anybody else in my library, but that's another step. Same thing with teamwork. There's a ton of ways to list this one on the bottom says, you know, an ability to build a rapport with students. I've seen, you know, the ability to work in a collaborative way, collegiality, ability to maintain relationships. That's a big one in sales, but it's important in academia too, because you're building relationships with students, facilitating connections, so on and so forth. There's going to be a lot of fancy ways to say you need to have good service skills. Problem solving. That's not going to be one I talk about a lot today, but it is an important one because that can be anything from unjamming the printers, which I am the queen of doing this, all the way up to being able to diffuse a tense situation, which is a little bit different in libraries. Hopefully, nobody has had anything so tense that it borders into like emergency management services, but it could be, you know, somebody is very, very upset and yelling at you and you're in a library. Even if you're not in a library, you still need to make sure people aren't screaming at you. Innovation, creativity, dedication, all of these things are going to fall under self-motivation. One thing that I think is important to look for or make sure that you're not asking somebody to over-dedicate because that can lead to burnout. Burnout is a very hot topic and we can probably do an entire presentation on that, but that's not what we're here for today. Flexibility. This is one thing that I'm really good at. I fortunately don't have a lot of outside commitments, so if somebody needs me to come in on a weekend, yeah, cool. Awesome. That's not for everybody. You know, folks have families. They can't be flexible with their kids' school. They can't be flexible because they're caring for a parent or a sibling. They have doctor's appointments they need to go to. Some folks just flat out don't want to be flexible. It is what it is. And some folks feel like they're entitled to others being flexible because of some of their outside obligations. Something that communication skills will come in handy with. Personally, I'm a fan of rewarding flexibility. Hey, you came in for me this morning at 7am. Let's figure out a way to make sure you can come in later in the week. Time management. I'm going to skip this one because I have to be honest. Time management is not a thing that I've ever been good at. Time is not a skill that I can grasp, unfortunately. So, communication. This is a big one and this is one that I feel like I can talk about. What is the best way to communicate? I found that the best way to communicate with folks is to ask how they feel is the best way for them to communicate. If, you know, something basic like, hey, what's the best way to contact you in case of a snow day and the building is closed? Some folks are going to say, hey, text me. Some folks are going to say, wow, I really appreciate a phone call. You're going to have other people while I'm on email most of the time. I haven't personally come across it, but I know that some younger folks, hey, can you message me on social media? That's maybe not my favorite way to do things because I'm not on a lot of social media, but if that's the way that works out best, okay, well, these are the social media that I'm on. Are you on either of these? Can I message you on Instagram and say, hey, we're closed? So, being upfront with people, hey, what's the easiest way for you to communicate? There definitely has to be some give and take in there because of like social media being kind of a blurry one. But I mean, that's the best thing to do with communication is to ask. And that's like, you know, starting with the basics. Like I said, going all the way up to how do you best respond to constructive criticism? What should I be expecting with this? I personally am usually fairly responsive to constructive criticism, but I also need to let it sit in a little bit. So I would want to answer this question with, you can tell me the constructive criticism, please don't expect me to respond right away because I want some time to think about it. So I don't say the wrong thing. And that way I also have a plan to figure out when I communicate back to you, I have a plan on how we're going to go forward with the constructive criticism. I can say these are the things I've thought about. These are the ways that I want to try and fix this. Yeah, and it's hard sometimes to when and some some people have communication difficulties, getting blindsided by something that you didn't know was a problem. Yes, you can't really be expected to respond immediately when you had never heard that anything was happening. Yes. Okay, thank you for that. Let's go through it and think about it and we'll get back to you. I can tell you what I think right now, but let's not finish this conversation right now because you've had time to think about this a lot, obviously, because you just have brought it to me, but I didn't know anything possibly. Possibly didn't know it was happening. Yes. And I mean, on either side of that, I don't want to have somebody explode. And what do you mean I'm not doing this correctly? If somebody knows that's how they respond, we definitely want to say I need to be given constructive criticism away from any kind of front desk situation. Yes. Definitely needs to be in an office or perhaps a classroom if that's something that's available. Just so people aren't concerned about, wait, why is this employee screaming at the employer vice versa? Keep it private. Keep it private. Yes, that's always even if it's somebody that accepts constructive criticism, well it's best to be in a private situation just in case you have somebody that overhears something and then there's the gossip mill that starts. We don't want that. So what's the difference between a formal and informal communication? Social media. We'll go back to that. That's a great example. When you're posting on Facebook, are you posting as a library associate or are you posting as yourself? I always take into consideration when I post something on Facebook, I'm always kind of representing my employer. I don't have anything listed about where I work on my social media, but I'm also pretty easy to find. If you wanted to Google Lacey Rogers, Omaha, Nebraska, my profile at UNO is going to pop up and there it is. Somebody could easily contact my employer and say, hey, did you know that your employee is posting weird things about her dog on social media? That's usually the only thing I do post on social media. So if somebody is offended by something I posted about my dogs, they can go ahead and contact my employer. That's fine. That would be a great conversation. It would probably be a long conversation because my employer or my current supervisor also has dogs and they would just be like, so what's going on with your dog? Anyways, I digress. Social media generally is generally an informal way to communicate. So if you do have somebody, that's how they prefer to be told that the building is closed. It still needs to be a little bit professional. By employee X, just to let you know there's a snow day you don't have to come to work today, thanks. But informal can get too informal. When you send an email to a supervisor, you don't want to be like, hey bro, what's up? I'm not going to be in tomorrow. Is that cool? You still need to have the level of professional in there even if you do consider yourself to have a pretty friendly relationship with your coworkers or supervisors. Hi, Supervisor A. I need to let you know that I have a really terrible headache and I'm going to the doctor tomorrow, so I don't think I'm going to make it in. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you, Employee X. There's just that level of you're at a job and you need to make sure that you can, regardless of whether it's a text message and email, it still needs to have that level of professionality to it so that they know that this is a work thing and not, hey, can you, well, hey, can you wash my dogs for me? That's what I'm saying. It's going to come back to that all the time. Sorry. And it's really important to think about what your conversations are at work that aren't necessarily work related. Yes, you can already tell. I talk about my dogs all the time. I love them. They're adorable. I show pictures and so on and so forth. But I've also been in situations where I've been really comfortable with my coworkers and all of a sudden we're talking about like body hair and we're comfortable talking to each other about this but we don't necessarily know that the people coming to the desk are comfortable with this or that any other employee that can be listening outside of this small group is comfortable with it. So you need to be careful with that which is a good lead into being able to respect reasonable boundaries and setting reasonable boundaries. If somebody needs to bow out of a conversation, it might be worth your time to check back and say, hey, was this just a timing thing and you needed to leave or were we being offensive? That's fine. Can you tell employees, you know, my building is open from 7am until midnight. I generally set my quiet hours on my phone from midnight to 7am so you can't text me. I'm not going to see that you emailed me. Maybe that needs to be different for other folks. If your building is open from 9 to 9 and you have people coming in at 8, don't email me after 9.30. I'm not going to be paying attention to it because it's outside of my working hours. If it's an emergency, that's a little bit different. For me, I found that the best practice with communication is the more you communicate about how you communicate, the better your communication is going to be. If you're open about communication, if you're willing to take the feedback, constructive criticism, even if it's something simple like, hey, I feel like you talk too much. That's true. I'll work on it. Thank you. Yeah, just making sure, being open, being honest, being able to ask questions and find an appropriate way to answer those questions are all important parts of communication. Customer service. Like I said, I've been doing this since I was like 13. I'm 38, so I think that's 25. We'll not talk about that. That's fine. Some of the things that customer service, I know that nobody likes to hear it, policies, policies. We write policies for a reason even if it's something very, very small. We are not able to print more than two pages or a page in having issues. As interesting as it would be, there is no way to train for every single customer service transaction. If you were to write a policy for every single thing that could happen in a library, you would never be done training and the person would never be at the desk because they would just be reading and reading and reading. Sometimes things just have to happen as they are, but that's why we have policies. If they're clear, if they're simple, we can refer patrons to those policies. Yes, I understand that you're having some technical difficulties getting your 50 page brochure printed off. Unfortunately, it's our policy that we can only make two copies for folks free of charge. If you'd like, I can do those two copies and you can come back later to see if we have time to help you with the technical issues. I understand that you have a classroom of students, but unfortunately it's our policy that one person can only check out 25 items at a time. You have 50, we really can't break that policy. I'm so sorry. Our policy is the building closes at 9. It's now 9.02. You need to leave. If you're not willing to leave, I will have to call the appropriate authorities. For me, that's campus security. I worked in public libraries. At that point it was actual city police. If you're fighting in my building, we have a policy against that. No violence. Call the police. If I had to call the police in campus security more than I would like, but that's what the policies are there for. Some things are a little bit out of our hands as librarians. I personally don't want to jump in and break up a fist fight. I have a current staff member that would be happy to do that, but that's not me and it really shouldn't be that staff member either. They should probably not be volunteering to break up fist fights, but yes, you have to have those policies in place and you need to make sure that you can follow them. Wait a minute, you told them what? Wait, you told them what? I get this a lot. We're a very open place. We try to really help our patrons out, but sometimes the answers aren't always super clear. So I have a little story here that I want to share with this. This is back in my public library days. We had a patron call in. I was in the back of another associate who had answered the phone. Patron called in and I can only hear the one side of the conversation, but I hear the associate answer the phone. Patron says something and the associate says, no, we don't have baskets to check out. We don't do that kind of stuff. Do you need a place? If you need baskets, you can go to the dollar tree or to Walmart and Patron says something else and I hear the associate say, no, we don't check out baskets. I don't know what you're talking about and that's kind of the end of it and they hang up and they kind of roll their eyes and they say why would anybody want to check out a basket and it hits me? Did they say they wanted to check out a basket or did they say they wanted to check out baskets? That's a TV show. It had Zach Gallifanakis in it. It was actually really funny. We could have ordered that TV series in for them easily. It would have taken us three minutes to get this situated and maybe two weeks to get it from Amazon in, but the associate didn't understand and wasn't really willing to understand. So what do you mean you told them we can't check out baskets? No, we don't have that DVD series here, but we can get it and as far as baskets for their home, I think they know. They can't go to the library to check out baskets. When you get a question like that, it obviously seems really weird. That's where your reference interview skills would come into play. Let me figure out what you're really trying to ask us for. Yes, I will never forget that phone call because I always think if I would have answered that, first things first, if I would have answered that, it probably would have been a 20 minute phone call because I'd love that show. It would have talked about scenes from the show, but at that point, if I would have answered it, we also would have gotten the patron what they needed. Everything would have worked out. Hopefully that person I don't work at that library anymore, but hopefully that person was able to get a hold of something so they could watch what they needed. Picking your battles, knowing when to end the fight, that's also a big part of customer service. It doesn't always seem like it, but it is. It goes back to those policies and it goes back to keywords. Is the patron making a threat and how do you know when it needs to be taken seriously? If a patron is grumpy about a fine and they say they're going to take it to the next level, the library director, maybe even beyond that, they're going to take it to the city manager if it's a public library. They're going to take it to, I had somebody threaten to take something to the Board of Regents one time as an academic librarian. How serious is that? Is that an automatic pass to say, okay, we'll take care of the fines? Well, that's going to go back to your policies. Do you have a policy saying first time you lose an item, we will waive it anything after that you have to pay for it? I'm very sorry, but this is our policy. Not even the city manager or the mayor or the governor can change this. So sorry. What's the cost to replace or repair the item? Is it something that you can eat? If somebody comes in, they're constantly losing $5 paperbacks. It adds up, but maybe it's okay to break that policy and say, okay, I know you've already lost six of these, but you've paid for five of them. We're going ahead and waive the seventh, buy five, get the sixth free. That kind of a thing. We check out some higher level technology at the library I'm currently at. So we can't really afford to let a pass go when somebody brings in a Canon T7 DSLR camera and says, hey, I didn't mean to, but this got tossed out the back seat window of my car and it's shattered. Sorry. Yeah, I'm really sorry too because now you owe me $500 and you can take that to whatever you want, but you destroyed it. You signed paperwork saying that you would take care of it and I can't let that slide. I've had some folks make valid arguments about what has happened to the technology. Yeah, I'm really sorry you're in that situation. Unfortunately it's a high dollar item and you signed the paperwork. You have to pay that $500. Exactly. That's why we have that paperwork. You know, if somebody loses a lens cover for a camera, okay, that's a little bit different. We can order those in bulk on Amazon for like $4 a piece. This is the first time you've ever had an issue when you check these cameras out weekly. We're going to let those, that lens cap pass. However, if it's somebody that loses a piece of the camera every time they check it out, I'm so sorry, but this is a habitual thing. Our policy states that you need to replace it. You did sign the paperwork. It's $4. You can pay it next time you come in. This last part about maybe there is someone for everyone. I've had some interesting relationships with patrons. I think everybody can say that. I had a difficult patron at a former job. They were well known for having meltdowns when folks didn't understand them. There were a lot of ways that you could misunderstand this person. They didn't always have the correct words for what they wanted. They didn't always have a constant stream of thoughts to communicate out what they wanted. They lost their words a lot. They mumbled a lot. They were sometimes hard to understand. It was easy for them to get lost in it and get frustrated and have a meltdown. This patron started asking for a specific associate. I was like, okay, we'll see how this works. I started taking them back to this specific associate. I later asked this person, are you okay with this person always asking for you? Did you tell them to do this? They said, yeah, it's fine. I think I just get them. That's amazing. I'm very glad you're here because I don't get this patron and I have a hard time and I'm so glad that there's somebody that can. I think it's interesting how that works. There have been times where I have been in a position, somebody has been awkward for lack of a better word. They can be a little bit difficult to understand. For some reason, I just click with them and I can help them. It can be, that can happen for anybody. I haven't knocked on fake wood. I haven't run into a patron that is absolutely unhelpable. Usually there's somebody somewhere that we can get help with. Occasionally that does mean the person that helps them is campus security or a police officer. I did have one situation where a patron came in. They were trying to sign up for a credit card and they needed to use our phone to do so. It was very awkward. Yes, the person that ended up helping them was a police officer but I didn't find that out until later when I saw a police officer escorting them out of a local grocery store. That was an interesting one. But they got the help that they needed. Just not for me. Teamwork makes the dream work. That's a motto that I tell everybody to the point where it gets annoying. If you're not actively part of the team nobody will want to be on your team so it's best to lead by example. For me in a supervisor position nobody wants to, if nobody wants to be at the desk and I'm out there they're going to say, see that and say okay, if my supervisor is doing this stuff that I don't really like maybe I can do that too. So if you're leading by example you're going to show that teamwork is important and hopefully have a more cohesive team. Playing to everyone's strengths is something that has always worked well for me. If somebody actively dislikes an area maybe don't schedule them there. I know that that can be a difficult thing to grasp sometimes. I know every job that I've had someone really, really dislikes working in youth services, story time type areas. If we're really short staffed and they have to be back there sorry you have to be back there but in general if you really don't want to be in youth services I'm not going to schedule you there because they don't like it the kids back there aren't going to like that you don't like it. It's not going to work for anybody. So maybe this person that doesn't like youth services is a really, really great at building displays. Cool let's work on that. Hey we need a display for Band Books Month. What can you come up with? If you can work on this and do four really amazing displays for the building you know you can work on that while you're back in kids if you have to be there you can work on that instead of being in kids maybe there needs to be a discussion about some job expectations. Hey you were hired for this. You do need to work in this area sometimes if it absolutely can't work for you we need to talk about flexibility if you have to schedule people in a computer lab but you have somebody that's not very technologically savvy maybe figure out okay it's not super busy when we first open from 9 to 11 this person can work in the computer lab from 9 to 11 and we'll figure out another place you know somebody that's really great with computers can work between 12 and 2 when we're busy when people are on their lunch breaks and need to come in and have things done quickly another thing with playing to everyone's strengths is watching for the overachievers I personally love an overachiever because it makes my job a lot easier because they really want to get things done they really want to be active they really want to help they're not helpful overachievers who offer help to others with their project pieces can be godsends but people who take over a project really are not overachievers can get comfortable in their roles they can assume that they have knowledge and that knowledge may or may not be correct and that makes them less likely to ask questions and in the library business asking questions is our business whether it's somebody coming up to ask us a question about research or even where the restroom is it's really easy for someone to get really comfortable well I'm doing a really good job so I'm just going to keep doing a really good job and I don't need to learn this extra thing because I already know it even though that extra thing is changed and they need to change with it I love it when people help I love it when people offer to help others with their teamwork I love it when people say hey I see you have this part project can I take part three for you to make it easy yes please thank you that's awesome and when that person does part three and then leaves it and then maybe that person come back and says hey I need help with part seven okay I'm willing to help but the overachiever that comes in and says I'll help you with part three and then just does parts three through ten that's a little too much they might get burned out we talked about that a little bit earlier but they might they might also just make things really tough so it's something to watch out for and it's part of you know these are all interconnected if somebody really needs to stay busy that's a strength and you can figure that out by giving them extra projects but make sure that they're not taking over something that somebody else might be better at and my surprise fourth skill this is not one that was listed on my first slide but empathy this has been a big keyword in my research as of late and I did think it was interesting when I was looking through some of the job ads I found that yes empathy is something that they were looking for in one this is a really specific library position it was someone they were wanting someone to come into the library and help with ESL isn't quite right but a little bit of ESL they were looking for someone to help adult learners do back to school earning their GED learning some job skills that kind of stuff so they wanted somebody that was empathetic along with the excellent customer service and communication skills and this is kind of a difficult one because this is where part of my research comes in is empathy a teachable skill yes but also no part of my research I read a really great book by a clinical psychologist Martha Stout and in this book the sociopath next door it states that up to 4% of the population is a sociopath so no you cannot teach those people empathy generally not the kind of person drawn towards library work they tend to move more towards like higher level business corporate things where they can flex power but you might hit somebody that maybe they're not a full on sociopath but maybe they have some tendencies and for those folks know it's not teachable otherwise maybe and something that's important for me as a supervisor is it something that I can teach is it something that you can teach as a supervisor yeah maybe but that's that's really up for you to figure out I know that that is something in my particular setting where that's a feedback question that we get on reviews you know is does this person show empathy do you feel like this is a person you can talk to when you need time off for personal things is this someone you know would your fellow coworkers employees say that you are cold hearted when they say that you're a pushover those kinds of things and for me it's it's kind of a golden rule thing I want to be treated with empathy so I'm going to treat others with empathy it's there's some give and take with it because yes sometimes people will take advantage of you but I also feel like those folks that maybe aren't so forthcoming with their personal issues if they see you as somebody that will have some empathy they might be more likely to talk to you and say hey this is why I'm not doing my best at my job right now I don't want to divulge too many too many details but I'm having some family things going on I feel like you might understand is it okay if I start coming in late for a little while yeah I think you know otherwise you've been really helpful on the team I think that folks will understand you don't have to say anything I'll just let people know that you're not going to be in until 10 instead of 8 we'll work it out can it be detrimental can it affect other skills yeah big time somebody that's empathetic in my experience has is better at tuning into communication styles and they're more likely to be a good team player because they're listening to what their teammates are saying that's kind of going back to some of the parts with the teamwork if somebody is really not enjoying this part find somebody that can if somebody has that empathetic value they're going to notice that their teammate is not really grasping how to build this particular display and they're going to come in and help they might not take it over from them but they're going to say hey I have a little bit of expertise here can I help I see that you're struggling with this thing that you're usually really good at can I help does this need to be spread out across the team and something that can be detrimental being that push over yeah overly empathetic folks often can be seen as somebody that can be walked on while being non empathetic folks are the ones that seem unapproachable so there's used to be that happy medium of am I somebody that people can talk to am I somebody that people want to talk to and am I somebody that is saying yes not only can you talk to me and ask questions but I want to do the same with you and kind of going back to the communication how do you want to be communicated with how much empathy do I need to use with this particular employee they personally are very hard and don't want to talk about it personal things I'm not going to go ask them hey how's your family life going but if I have somebody that's kind of in that happy medium and they seem to be struggling I can reach out privately and say hey you seem to be struggling is there anything I can do to help even if that's all I ask and they say no okay they know that I'm willing to help but that might be the one thing I want to say yes the thing that I need help with is I have my mom moving in with me she's not super well we're really having to do some remodeling on our house and it's been very stressful okay would it be helpful for you you know this position you can work from home some would it be helpful for you to take a week to work from home so that you can keep an eye on things at your house oh my gosh yes that would be amazing they come back after that week feeling a little bit better about their personal life so they can focus a little bit more on their work it's a hard thing it's a hard thing to teach it's a hard thing to learn but I think it's out there and I think that I really think that empathy is probably number one for soft skills just because if you can learn it if you can teach it if you can practice it your team in general is going to be a happier healthier team and they're going to be more willing to talk to you they're going to be more willing to do the work in general it's just going to be a better situation that is the conclusion of my slides if there happens to be any questions or if any other things come up I have I think about 15 ish minutes before we're done and I'm happy to answer questions absolutely yeah yeah go ahead and just leave your slides up there just in case we need to pop back to anything yeah if anybody has any questions go ahead and type into the questions section of your go-to-webinar interface we can ask any questions you have I'll also mention while we're looking at the slides the slides will also be available afterwards along with the recording we always post those up as well so you will be able to refer back to everything that Lacey had put into the slides as well today so yeah get your questions in we have plenty of time for that actually it's a perfect timing yeah about 15 minutes left so this is great yes Lacey a lot of soft skills you're talking about soft skills in the library setting and I think a lot of people assuming we're talking about with our patrons with the people coming to the library our students or people in the public library but it's not just that it's also staff and I think that's something that people don't realize that it's the same the same kind of customer service skills that you use to your the people that are coming in to use your library can and should be used for your colleagues whether it's you or you as a supervisor or just people at the same level as you and I mean that even goes I am a supervisor of supervisors but I also have supervisors so I mean some of those go the same way I need to be able to communicate with my supervisors the best way to communicate with me and that's just going to make everybody's job a little bit easier you know if it's easier to come by my office and say hey do you have them in it usually I'm going to say yes unless I'm doing something like this or my door is closed and it says I'm presenting of course um and I will I will that empathy part I think yeah does cross over into all of these other soft skills it's kind of interesting that you know when you said you did this research these are the seven things that everyone says is soft skills but I mean that kind of is a part of all of these things how you communicate how you solve problems which will be working with other people on a team being flexible like when your examples of understanding someone's having a bad time at home and they need some flexibility in their in their work so I think that they need to do research on this um I know I've worked with um in various other places where people didn't have that and it was it was difficult um supervisors that are just cut and dry these are the rules I don't care that whatever happened to you you should have contacted me about this and then reported it this way and you didn't so I don't care that this horrible thing happened in your life uh you you told me about it wrong you didn't you know get in touch with me well you talk about what's the best way to communicate with you when I have something happen you know I was ill and I couldn't so I had my husband call instead and he just called who he knew and told them hey this is the what's happening she'll be in later we'll figure it out and instead the supervisor like well that's who you should have told it's okay you got the you got the word right you know exactly I mean it's living in Nebraska there's always that little chance especially in Omaha there's always that chance that you're going to get somebody calling saying I was in a car accident it's icy out I was in a car accident because it's on people drive crazy but um yeah you never know and that's if that's me that's not my first place that I'm thinking of is to call my supervisor I'm I'm thinking about do I need to call my I should probably call my spouse because they're going to be the person that's the most connected being that they also have ownership in this vehicle but yeah I'm going to want to call them I have I have students you know we have student workers they probably want to call their parents first you know they might be on their parents insurance sorry your insurance is going to go up the insurance is my first call yeah I mean that's going to be in there too there's a lot of others isn't bad enough that you're needing to call 911 that's definitely going to be your first call and then eventually I'm supposed to be at work okay hang on it's like 4th or 5th down the line um someone does have questions um yeah get your questions typed in if you want to um do you have any like you said you did a lot of research on this do you have any like resources for learning some of these like readings whatnot you know is there any places that you would recommend where people can find out more about how to do these things grab this book actually um the one that I referenced um Martha Stout the sociopath next door it was written in 2005 so at this point it is a little bit dated I don't know if there's been any updating to it but I think that's a good starting place if you're interested in learning about what that is as far as what sociopath involves um one thing that I have used as a resource if you're if you look at mental health websites um in particular if there's something that you feel a little bit more connected to like you know maybe you maybe you yourself or a family member has generalized anxiety disorder or they have like bipolar personality disorder if there's something in there that you have a little bit of a connection with I would start with that find a website um that looks like it's run by therapists counselors mental health practitioners in general and look to see what their tips are for handling situations with this particular type of disorder because generally they have empathy built into them because you need it that's where you're really going to look to see it this is this is how I have to handle this situation and it's been helpful on a college campus we have a lot of kids right now that have a lot of social anxiety the kids that are coming to campus right now they were in high school during COVID era they did their freshman and sophomore possibly their junior year online they have no idea how to sit in a classroom at this point because it's been forgotten because they haven't been in a classroom for three years um I think a good example with that for me personally my niece um she just graduated she's going to college in a week I think she's moving in on Saturday but um she did her entire sophomore year online and it actually worked out really well for her um she's really self-motivated she tends to do better in a in an independent setting and her grades were already good but they got a lot better what she was able to work for it on her own so knowing that this person works better this way she was actually able fortunately to go to her counselor her academic counselor at the school and say look at how much better this is working for me by the way because I can get my work done at my own pace I've been able to work more and I have a bunch of money saved up to go to college can I keep doing this and they said yes so it worked out you know knowing what works for people is always the best policy so yeah um we're learning that yeah and learning styles that's a whole different presentation too yes different learning styles and and teaching styles are yeah everyone's going to react to them differently and some some to students do um move into college and do very well and some don't and it does not work for them but there's so many other options now that's that's great yeah uh so this is thank you so much for mentioning how important empathy can be in all relationships yes these are definitely some of the skill you should could and should carry over into just any part of your life yes um yeah we're of course because we're here librarians talking about this right now is what we're focusing on but um yeah use this everywhere and I think yeah if you um practice it all the time not just like constantly think okay I'm at work so I've got to have communication I've got to be in a team and I gotta be like no just do it all the time and it just become um now habits of work but just like it's natural yeah it'll start to be more natural and with empathy I think if if you can find one thing that really helps you feel like you're being more empathetic whether it's you know I feel like I can listen to folks more and that would make me see more empathetic practice that um you don't have to worry about anything else pick that one thing I'm gonna listen to people more I'm going to be more about what people are saying we're going to process this in a more complete way I'm gonna be a better listener start with that then you can bridge out from there um if you want and you know if you want to be a better storyteller if you want to if you do want to if you're somebody that's comfortable sharing more personal experiences I tend to be very personal personal experience oriented I'm very much a storyteller um practice telling stories I'm not a good storyteller necessarily but I enjoy it relevant to the situation it's okay absolutely um one thing about um the empathy and the very last slide where you had something about um building a rapport with the students yes that I think is important too is just you know I mean they typically they are younger than those of us who are working in the university library or you know when you've got your teens or whatever coming into the public library and it can seem um possibly to them to be little intimidating I'm gonna go to this adult and ask these things and are they not welcoming um I worked in a university library before I was here um back in New York and when I started there there was a previous reference librarian and it's just his style he wore a three-piece suit to work every day and he was at the main reference desk and then he had to go to the side desk and the students would avoid him and come over to the side desk where I was they thought he was just too and he was a good he did his job well but oh this must be the big guy I can't ask this person in this three-piece suit my silly college question and come over to anyone else who's working at the desk and I was like dude you gotta loosen up they just don't want to talk to you and that's not good um so you know that's that building report you've gotta you know know who you are you know don't walk around in like jeans and a ripped t-shirt but you know find that happy medium of no I'm not the like president of the college but I am the the guy you can ask your question though yeah and that's and there's those like those like um subconscious or you know yeah the vibes you put out that you don't realize sometimes but that's part of the reason I mean we love to have work-study students because somebody else pays him to work here but that's part of the reason that we like having the student workers is you know if you are somebody that does have that social anxiety coming up to the desk even though I'm not a three-piece suit kind of person I am older you can tell that I am the professional at the desk well I don't know maybe she's going to be mean I don't know what I want to talk about but then I have a student there that's looks like they're you know kind of doing their homework well maybe their homework's like my homework and I'll ask this question and they can go from there so there's a nice icebreaker to have yeah and we got some comments here saying yes people don't slow down enough to listen definitely there's a lot of talking over which I hate you know wait just listen let them say their thing there's other comments saying thank you very much great great webinar you're welcome hopefully it was useful yeah got a lot to learn yes I do research on it I still have a lot to learn I'll just get you started on it yeah alright so we got some more questions coming in here realizing that people come to our profession with different levels of soft skills can you work recommend ways to train staff I think the biggest training tip that I have is that going back to ask about ask how they prefer to be communicated with ask what their preferences are when you're in training and they're doing readings or they're watching videos or they're shadowing somebody if you notice that they look really bored when they're shadowing okay this is something that is not working for them the best way for them yeah ask them hey I see that you look a little you know a little bit bored out at the front desk with the shadowing do you feel like you're ready to jump in and have somebody shadow you so that you know if you have questions they're there if they seem nervous when they're shadowing hey do you need some more time with the shadowing do you want to reread any parts of the manual do you do you want to buddy for the first couple of shifts or maybe the first two weeks of working here is there somebody that you feel comfortable with I think the best way to train that is to train yourself to recognize people's communication skills which is kind of an awkward way to put that but if you're seeing something in somebody that might be working for them but not for somebody else I think that's where the training needs to come from okay this person really really took to the videos are there videos that we can have them watch are there videos on youtube about doing a reference interview that they can watch and then practice and a lot of I think is you learn by experience as a supervisor and watching all your different staff and seeing how they are doing sometimes like you said ask them what they prefer they might not know I don't know what my learning style is what does it even mean okay let's just try some things out or be a little more casual about it or you like watching videos and you catch that rather than reading a book reading manual that's what we need yeah yeah um what would you recommend what would you recommend for a person who is flexible without appearing to be a pushover I think that goes back to the setting the boundaries I you know like I when I was introducing things I tend to be very flexible I don't have tons and tons of outside obligations besides my dog so if you are willing to be flexible but you don't want to be the only person that gets asked for flexibility I think it's you know don't automatically say yes okay a great example I have a Saturday person when that Saturday person needs time off I am generally the first person they ask just because I'm the main supervisor let me think about it I need to check my schedule okay maybe I don't have anything going on that Saturday but maybe I want to leave it open I'm really sorry but this isn't something that's going to work for me you'll need to check with some other supervisors I think being flexible and being able to say yes but also letting people know that your life is not your job and that you do have outside things is appropriate yeah yeah and that's something you have to practice I think too it can be hard something you're always saying oh yes yes yes of course I'll do that for you or and with your users too your patrons your students can't give them you know oh sure we'll wave everything we'll let you get away with everything no there's got to be some little yes but no I think you mentioned about being in something I think a lot of people especially now on this stage of being connected all the time supposedly there is a point where your work day is over and that's okay no one should come back at you and say you know I needed something at nine o'clock last night and you didn't answer you know it's not a clock last night at night and I'm not on I'm not working then yes and yeah and that's perfectly okay and I'm from both sides that you need that kind of acceptance on both sides that that's at this point really work into flexibility as well if you're somebody that that can say yes and you like to say yes it's also okay for you to say here's the deal I'm a night owl if you want me to cover your shift from you know six to ten ask me first because I'm probably going to say yes but I'm just not a morning person if you need somebody to cover an eight to noon I'm not the best choice flexible this way but not so much this way and when you have a lot enough staff to go around you can adjust those people appropriately and say okay who's who likes to be up in the morning who doesn't I was that person at the University we had evening reference staff would come in at like six o'clock at six to whatever and I was the person who just bumped a couple hours so I would work like ten to six so that there would be a librarian on duty until the evening people came in and that was the same thing I didn't know anything else going on there was nobody at home waiting for me at that point except for my cats so all good I could I was and I was happy to do that everyone else like great I don't want to have to stay here and not to get my dinner yet or it's like sorry I do I'm fine yeah all right it's just hit eleven o'clock central time by my clock here so that's perfect timing here does anybody have any last-minute desperate questions they want to ask of the question we'll get them answered you will have the slides available as you said her contact info University of Nebraska at Omaha you can find it from there I'm going to pull presenter control back to my screen while we're waiting to see if anyone else has any questions I'll show you here I didn't look up that book that you mentioned the sociopath next door Martha Stout and she did actually do a couple of other ones that I found I just I looked in WorldCat and the first one that came up was this one outsmarting the sociopath next door in 2020 that's yeah a lot more then there was also one in 20 2016 disarming the sociopath next door so she did do some expanding on her original book so probably any one of these would be good to look into yes the disarming is the disarming might actually be a better choice because I think that can be a little bit more difficult than the outsmarting I do she talks about it in the first book I do think it's definitely possible to outsmart a sociopath they really hate it when you do so that's some motivation uh huh yeah I don't know which libraries have it but I just you know all of these are somewhere in WorldCat go ahead and look for them there alright let's go over here oh and someone is also suggesting another book surrounded by sociopaths ooh okay bye and they can't remember the author right now um let's see if I can find it in here not finding anything ah Thomas Erickson cool alright surrounded by idiots is that what we're looking for oh surrounded by psychopaths oh that ooh okay surrounded by bad bosses there's a whole bunch of things okay uh oh sorry you're typing something else here too okay oh so my psychopaths how to stop being exploited by others there you go I found it a really great blog as well author is Haba Yousef it's called I Hate It Here which is a fabulous title and that's originally what caught my attention but she's an HR CEO I can't remember what company but yeah I hate it here H-E-B-B-A Haba Yousef yep yep some really really great things come up in there it is really HR focused it's not necessarily a library blog but there's been some things that I've picked up especially concerning like how to combat burnout which is something that everybody can find helpful and I think that combating burnout is definitely part of empathy in knowing like you said at the beginning customer service is it's something that lots of professions have to have customer service skills soft skills and libraries being one of them definitely so yeah that's a fun one all right I'll have to follow that yeah all right so doesn't look like there's any other desperate questions right now that's fine you can as I said of course reach out to um Lacey at UNO whenever you want to ask or just chat with her about any of this um so thank you so much Lacey this was really great I'm sure we've all been stressed over our life you know practice these things a little more and get better at them practice will make it easier and less less stressful for everyone on both sides I think yes absolutely all right so thank you everyone thank you Lacey um yeah this is great having you here today as I said the show is recorded being recorded and it goes to our archives um if you use your search engine of choice you whatever you do and you type in encompass live the name of your show you'll find our main page or our recording page I'm just going to click over to the recording page here today's show will be posted here at the top of the list should be here by the end of the day tomorrow I'm at the latest as long as go to webinar and YouTube cooperate with me everyone who attended today's show and register for today's show will get an email from me letting you know it's available I know not everybody who registers is able to come on the day of I know that everybody who registered was here today um but I'll let y'all know and there will be a link um let's see the one from last week yeah there'll be a link just like this one to the recording on our YouTube channel and to the slides that will have um available as well while we're here on our show archives I'll show you there is a search feature so you want to see if you've done a show on any particular topic you can run a search here and see if the recording is here um and I'll give you a warning here too I'm going to scroll down a bit not all the way because if you notice this is a long long page we have our full show archives here going back to an encompass live first premiered which was in January 2009 so what that worked on like 15 years of shows yes and we have all of our shows on our YouTube channel so uh just do pay attention if you do watch any of our old shows um the original broadcast date is here um some of the shows we find to watch stand the test of time still be good useful information but some things will become old or outdated um services or resources may have changed drastically links might be broken uh stuff resources or services might not exist anymore people might work at a different library than where they did when they presented for us 10 years ago so just pay attention to that date when you do watch any of these um but this is something libraries and librarians do we keep things for historical purposes so um as long as we're in place to host all of our shows which we do right now on our YouTube channel we will always keep them available here uh all right and we got a lot of thank yous coming in thank you very much from Nashville Tennessee so keep your eyes on our page um that we also have a Facebook page that we do post things um keep up uh for the show so you're gonna give us a like over the here here if you'd like to use Facebook we do reminders as a reminder to log in today's show we do a little meet the speaker and then when our recordings are available we do announce that on here as well whenever shows are added to the schedule we announce it on here uh so um if you'd like to use um if you'd like to use Facebook give us a like or encomp live is the hashtag we use that on Twitter and Instagram as well from the library commission um and from my own personal accounts so uh you can um keep eye on things there so I think that'll wrap up for today thank you everybody for being here with us today and hopefully um thank you Lacey it was good to see you and good to have you on the show thank you and uh hopefully we'll see you all on a future episode of Encompass Live bye bye