COVID-19 Resources: Leadership, Wellness, Remote Working Tips, and More

Welcome to this week's Retail Resources, which features a curated list of the best content and resources that I hope will help you navigate through the coronavirus pandemic. This week, I offer information and resources about leadership, wellness, remote working tips, and more. If there's anything you would like me to share in a future post, please let me know by dropping me a line at mcampanelli@napco.com.

Leadership

• Total Retail and its sister brand, Women in Retail Leadership Circle (WIRLC), will be hosting their second Women in Retail and Total Retail Virtual Exchange event on May 28! The virtual event will feature interviews with retail leaders, who will address a variety of topics, including everything from how they’re pivoting their business strategies during the pandemic to best practices for leading and motivating their employees, and more. This month's virtual exchange features interviews with Chieh Huang, CEO, Boxed (who will be interviewed by Sucharita Kodali, vice president, principal analyst, Forrester); Winnie Park, CEO, Paper Source; Anthony Marino, president, thredUP; and Deirdre Quinn, co-founder and CEO, Lafayette 148 New York.
• This Deloitte Insights article features five fundamental qualities of resilient leadership, which is more important than ever today. The article offers specific steps you can implement to help blunt the crisis’ impact — and enable your organization to emerge stronger.

Wellness

• As unemployment soars amid the coronavirus pandemic, meditation app Headspace is offering free, year-long subscriptions to those out of work. The offer unlocks access to all of the meditation app’s hundreds of hours of content, including a new collection focused specifically on managing the stress of unemployment. The deal is available through headspace.com/unemployed, and relies on the honor system for verification.
• Online learning platform Coursera offers classes, certificates, and degrees across a broad list of topics, subjects, and skills. The instruction is offered by high-profile companies and institutions, including Google, IBM, Stanford, and Yale, and taught by some of the most notable academics and professionals in the world. Right now, Coursera is offering “The Science of Well-Being” (Yale University’s most popular course ever) for free. Taken by one in four students at Yale, the class teaches participants to “increase your own happiness and build more productive habits” — aka skills we could probably all benefit from right now. Check it out!

Remote Working

• Online resume-writing firm Novorésumé has created a handy remote working guide, designed specifically for people working from home during the pandemic. The guide offers information on how to be more productive when working from home; how to find a remote job and stand out from the rest of the candidates; how to manage a remote team using some of the best tools on the market; and more.
• WIRLC recently surveyed its members about how they're managing working from home. Here's the article that was created from select interviews, which includes 10 interesting and productive tips for working remotely.

Fun Stuff

• When it comes to offering fun and creative activities for families to do during the pandemic, Ikea takes the (marketing) cake. Since the pandemic began, the retailer has made public its famous — and sacred — Swedish meatball recipe. In addition, Ikea has turned its iconic catalog into a coloring book. Now, Ikea Russia, has issued a step-by-step, Ikea-style instruction manual featuring activities such as homemade ways to construct a wigwam, cave, fort, tent and playhouse using blankets chairs, books, clothes pegs and fairy lights (which, the manual stresses, don't need to be from Ikea).People are then invited to share their constructed playhouse photos on social media.
• Speaking of coloring books, adult coloring books are selling like hotcakes on e-commerce sites right now, and you can probably guess why. Looking for a list of the very best ones? Check out this article, which features a list of adult coloring books that run the gamut from inspirational to wry.