Merle Riepe focuses on helping businesses increase profitability through people. He helps companies build better internal relationships, improve employee engagement and provides candidate assessments to ensure better hires.
As an organization psychologist, his focus is on creating a good relationship between people and their work. “Too many people seem to have a broken relationship with their work.” This could be attributed to either that they do not agree with the leadership of the company that they work for or that they feel as though there is no meaning behind the work they are doing.
With our current challenge of COVID-19, organizations are trying to develop skills and hire candidates remotely. At the same time, many are experiencing layoffs. With distance being a factor, we need to ensure trust and transparency on both sides.
Merle offered some tips to handle bad thoughts that will come up during stay at home orders and social distancing. Write down the bad thoughts so that you can see them and write down what the distortion is in the thoughts. He also advised against using the terms “should” and “must” and to try reframing things as “want” when it comes to doing things. This can help against self-shaming which is very easy to fall into during this time. An example of this would be framing a task as “I want to get this done” vs “I must get this done”. He also mentioned the focus should be on feeling better during this pandemic vs. getting better.
Some books that Merle mentioned that were helpful to him were Feeling Good and When Panic Attacks, both by David Burns, who also has a podcast. He also mentioned The Power of Full Engagement by Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr as well as Why by Simon Sinek and Peak Performance by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness.
With his company SOLVE, he looks to get to the heart of an issue and figure out a way to fix it. His background in psychology helps him with providing the right solutions for his clients. You can reach him at merle@solve.com.
