Category: Industry News

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News You Can Use: 5/27/2020


Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

  • The office is dead, according to most startup founders

    The implications of these findings offer a glimpse into a post-COVID-19 work world. Sixty-six percent of CEOs are considering letting go of (or downsizing) their offices, according to the survey, because an average of 70% of employees who previously reported for duty at a company’s workspace would be allowed to work remotely once stay-at-home orders are lifted.

    The majority predicted that mandatory shutdowns will be over by the end of Q3, and 67% said that they would make a sanitized/sterilized workspace a priority to keep their people safe. The majority (61%) said they would allow employees to continue working from home until they felt safe enough to travel and could manage childcare. These CEOs said their companies would not incur additional expenses to help their workers with childcare or commuting.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90507601/the-office-is-dead-according-to-most-startup-founders
    Mark Zuckerberg’s new work-from-home zeal is very, very convenient

    Getting out in front on this work-from-home revolution might just be the message for today, when many of us have come to believe that COVID-19 will change work forever and radically deemphasize the importance of brick-and-mortar offices. (Though not everybody buys it.) It’s a feel-good message that comes just after Facebook picked off Giphy in the midst of a pandemic and during the height of anti-trust angst in Washington. Earlier this month, The Washington Post revealed that Facebook is behind the launch of a new lobbying group called American Edge, which will try to calm anti-tech and anti-trust fever in the capital.

    If Zuckerberg follows through on his comments, there are some positives here. Zuckerberg stated that Facebook will immediately start focusing on hiring people who live away from the crowded and overpriced housing markets of the coasts. If Facebook did transition to 50% remote work, it could expand the tech talent pool geographically and make it easier for tech companies small and large to find good people. “It doesn’t seem that good to constrain hiring to people who live around offices,” Zuckerberg eloquently said. It might also extend the economic spillover zones that benefit indirectly from tech industry money to new places farther from the coasts.

    Even here, there’s a dark side. Facebook says it will adjust salaries to fit the location of the employee, so an engineer working in Silicon Valley will make more money than an engineer doing the same work in Nevada. But, to be fair, such an adjustment might be appropriate so long as the quality of life the two salaries can buy in different markets is equal.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90508223/mark-zuckerbergs-new-work-from-home-zeal-is-very-very-convenient

  • Understanding the Economic Shock of the Covid-19 Crisis
  • Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warns about the consequences of embracing remote work permanently

    “What I miss is when you walk into a physical meeting, you are talking to the person that is next to you, you’re able to connect with them for the two minutes before and after,” he said.

    Nadella warned about the consequences of embracing telecommuting permanently:

    “What does burnout look like? What does mental health look like? What does that connectivity and the community building look like? One of the things I feel is, hey, maybe we are burning some of the social capital we built up in this phase where we are all working remote. What’s the measure for that?”

    Nadella’s concern doesn’t appear to be shared widely throughout the technology industry. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey notified staff this week that they should feel free to work from home indefinitely if they choose. Salesforce and Zillow will give employees the option to telecommute for the rest of the year.

    https://www.geekwire.com/2020/pandemic-isnt-hurting-microsofts-bottom-line-changes-still-worry-satya-nadella/

  • The hunt for a work-from-home webcam: A story of broken supply chains, ‘sold-out’ messages and refreshing online carts

    Webcams are sold out or on weeks-long back order nearly everywhere across the Internet, and people are reporting having trouble finding them in the limited number of retail stores that are open as well. E-commerce tracking company CommerceIQ found 78 percent of views on webcam product pages on big online retail sites showed the items were out of stock during the week ended May 9.

    People’s shopping habits have shifted away from just buying bulk amounts of food during the pandemic to facing extended work-from-home periods, CommerceIQ CEO Guru Hariharan said.

    “Now, I think people are slowly starting to realize this is a new normal,” he said. “They realize they need to get prepared for a new operating normal.”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/21/webcam-backorder-coronavirus-pandemic/

Posted on

News You Can Use: 5/20/2020


Photo by Luca Florio on Unsplash

  • Tech Workers Consider Escaping Silicon Valley’s Sky-High Rents

    Christy Lake, chief people officer at San Francisco-based Twilio Inc., says several employees have already approached their managers and HR representatives to discuss plans to relocate. The cloud communications company expects more than 20% of its office-based employees will transition to working remotely in the long term. “It’s percolating big-time,” Lake says. She expects the company will have to come up with formal policies and maybe offer a relocation bonus to employees who decide to make the jump.

    But the trend raises complicated questions. If employees move to a less expensive location, should Twilio adjust their salaries accordingly? “It’s probably not great business practice to pay Bay Area comps in Michigan,” Lake says. And when it comes time to promote, would those employees have the same opportunity to advance as everybody else? “We need to think proactively,” she says.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-14/tech-workers-consider-escaping-silicon-valley-s-sky-high-rents

  • Why beef is the worst food for the climate

    My family’s trade is butchering and I have been paying attention to the meat global supply chain (it is weird when my job in supply chain and butchering connects in some way, but I always jump at the chance to make the connections). With the meat shortages, there is talk that the beef trade shouldn’t come back in the same way.
  • Hiring and Firing: How to Know When You Need to Let Someone Go

    There are two different spectrums on which people can perform their jobs — willing and able.

    When someone is able to do their job, it means they have the necessary skills, competence and expertise to perform their responsibilities.

    When someone is willing to do their job, it means that they are aligned with the company’s mission and values, and are enthusiastic about their role.

    People will fall into one of the following four categories, and if you can pinpoint where they are, you can figure out whether to let them go or give them the opportunity to improve.

    If an employee doesn’t have the skills to do the job well and they aren’t willing to get better, it’s time to let them go.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/343684

Posted on

News You Can Use: 5/13/2020

  • The rise of the human-centric CEO

    At a micro level, the misplaced application of peacetime CEO/wartime CEO can fundamentally change a company for the worse. A wartime CEO, as Horowitz notes, is “completely intolerant, rarely speaks in a normal tone, sometimes uses profanity purposefully, heightens contradictions, and neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements.” In the strictest application, we are seeing this align with a common false trope that has plagued the tech industry: “To change the world like Steve Jobs, I need to emulate all aspects of Steve Jobs’ personality.” A classic logical fallacy many founders/CEOs have learned the hard way — if you emulate all aspects of Steve Jobs’ personality, it doesn’t mean you will change the world like he did.

    At a macro level, peacetime CEO/wartime CEO conjures outdated themes that are at best inaccurate, and at worst, counterproductive. War implies “destruction, ruthlessness, blood, death;” there is an innate sense of machismo and bravado in this language reinforcing a homogeneous tech community. This type of vernacular and attitude increases barriers to a more inclusive community excluding women and underrepresented minority participation.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/05/the-rise-of-the-human-centric-ceo/

  • CIOs Set Aside Rivalry for Collegiality to Tackle Coronavirus IT Problems

    Enterprise tech leaders are finding a lot of value in real-time knowledge-sharing as they seek solutions to IT problems brought on by the health crisis and its fallout in the economy, said Sunny Gupta, a board member of the Technology Business Management Council, a nonprofit trade group that seeks to establish standards and best practices for enterprise IT managers.

    Among other issues, Mr. Gupta said CIOs are being called upon to rapidly support a distributed workforce, replan IT spending and redo budget forecasts, cancel noncritical projects and refocus IT team efforts into capacity upgrades, public cloud and operational resilience—often all at once.

    As a result, the IT industry is seeing an “unprecedented level of peer-to-peer support,” said Mr. Gupta, who is also chief executive of software maker Apptio.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/cios-set-aside-rivalry-for-collegiality-to-tackle-coronavirus-it-problems-11588930203

  • Some employers use software to monitor employees working from home
  • How My Boss Monitors Me While I Work From Home

    With millions of us working from home in the coronavirus pandemic, companies are hunting for ways to ensure that we are doing what we are supposed to. Demand has surged for software that can monitor employees, with programs tracking the words we type, snapping pictures with our computer cameras and giving our managers rankings of who is spending too much time on Facebook and not enough on Excel.

    The technology raises thorny privacy questions about where employers draw the line between maintaining productivity from a homebound work force and creepy surveillance. To try to answer them, I turned the spylike software on myself.

    Last month, I downloaded employee-monitoring software made by Hubstaff, an Indianapolis company. Every few minutes, it snapped a screenshot of the websites I browsed, the documents I was writing and the social media sites I visited. From my phone, it mapped where I went, including a two-hour bike ride that I took around Battersea Park with my kids in the middle of one workday. (Whoops.)

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/technology/employee-monitoring-work-from-home-virus.html

Posted on

News You Can Use: 5/6/2020

  • Managers turn to surveillance software, always-on webcams to ensure employees are (really) working from home

    In the weeks since social distancing lockdowns abruptly scattered the American workforce, businesses across the country have scrambled to find ways to keep their employees in line, packing their social calendars and tracking their productivity to ensure they’re telling the truth about working from home.

    Thousands of companies now use monitoring software to record employees’ Web browsing and active work hours, dispatching the kinds of tools built for corporate offices into workers’ phones, computers and homes. But they have also sought to watch over the workers themselves, mandating always-on webcam rules, scheduling thrice-daily check-ins and inundating workers with not-so-optional company happy hours, game nights and lunchtime chats.

    Company leaders say the systems are built to boost productivity and make the quiet isolation of remote work more chipper, connected and fun. But some workers said all of this new corporate surveillance has further blurred the lines between their work and personal lives, amping up their stress and exhaustion at a time when few feel they have the standing to push back.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/30/work-from-home-surveillance/

  • Coronavirus Ravages the Food Supply Chain
  • Nursing home design is deadly. Here’s how to change it

    Nursing homes have long been seen as grim and sterile, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, they’ve also been fatal—1.3 million individuals living in nursing homes around the world have died from the virus. While elderly people and those with preexisting conditions are high-risk populations, the infection’s rapid rate of spread is also due to the way nursing homes are designed. Most rooms have two or four beds that are placed in close proximity; sinks and windows can be hard to access; and dated systems require surfaces to be frequently touched. In the face of coronavirus, it’s time to rethink how nursing homes are designed.

    Also…

    Reducing these clusters to 12 people maximum, each with their own room, would help limit virus transmission while allowing for more targeted and intimate care. “Within that cluster, they have their rooms but [there’s a] living room, dining room, [and a] nurse station [with] administrative support,” according to Bryan Langlands, a principal at NBBJ who focuses on the design of healthcare spaces. “The easiest way to help mitigate prevention and spread of COVID-19 is certainly to no longer build any double-bedded, semi-private rooms.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90484506/nursing-home-design-is-deadly-heres-how-to-change-it

Posted on

News You Can Use: 4/22/2020


Photo by AC Almelor on Unsplash

  • Meticulous and Orderly, Germany Can Handle a Pandemic

    By reacting to the outbreak early, Germany also bought itself time to build on other “preexisting” strengths. Even before Covid-19 struck, it had far more beds in intensive care units than most other countries. It has been adding many more. So Germany still has spare capacity: About 10,000 of the more than 22,000 beds are free. This lets its hospitals save the lives of more of the patients coming in, and even take some from France and Italy.

    Yet another preexisting advantage, on the socioeconomic side, is a century-old labor law that prevents abrupt layoffs and lets employees get paid even when their work temporarily dries up. Called Kurzarbeit (literally “short work”), the program gets companies to keep paying staff up to 67% of their salaries even when there’s nothing to do, and the government reimburses them. More than 650,000 firms have signed up already, representing millions of employees, from bakers and cleaners to engineers. They and their families can stay financially resilient during the lockdown, and employees will be able to quickly return to work when the virus fades.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-16/coronavirus-meticulous-germany-knows-how-to-handle-a-pandemic

  • The Restaurant Impact From COVID-19
  • Before you forward that ‘uplifting’ email to homebound colleagues, think again

    But here’s why chain email, no matter how well-intentioned, is not the way to do it:

    It’s intrusive. When working from home, it’s hard enough avoiding distractions that siphon away our focus and energy without having to filter out time-wasters disguised as work matters.

    It may offend. One person’s inspiration is another’s irritation. Some people draw comfort from psalms and hymns; others’ love language is dirty limericks and Lizzo lyrics. Either group bombarding the other with their own particular form of “inspiration” is just asking for an HR intervention.

    It’s a security risk. Although this chain mail is benign, if annoying, some forwarded messages can carry malicious payloads. Social engineering spam and memes can lure people into revealing personal information. Scams like these have always been around, but they tend to proliferate during a crisis when people are most vulnerable. The coronavirus pandemic has been no exception.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/16/before-you-forward-that-uplifting-email-homebound-colleagues-think-again/