Tag: Workplace Culture

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News You Can Use: 2/20/2019

  • We Reject the Side Hustle

    Maybe this was all true, but what was also true is that working outside of work quietly became a major drain on my energy levels, negatively impacting my mental, emotional, and even physical health. I also started spending money more stupidly (some might say compulsively) as a response to rising stress, which had the perverse effect of making me feel that I needed that extra cash flow even more. Rather than acting as a financial security blanket, my outside income became a specter that I kept in my life mostly out of fear. When I finally bit the bullet and focused on having just one job at a time, unsurprisingly, all that extra stress and anxiety dissipated almost immediately. I slept more, I took fewer overpriced cabs, I was better at my actual day job.

    https://lifehacker.com/we-reject-the-side-hustle-1832566443

  • We need to stop striving for work-life balance. Here’s why

    Balance is a limiting concept, and if we set the bar too low, we won’t demand enough of ourselves, our leaders, and our companies. Right now, too many companies are still operating in an either/or mentality (though thankfully, it’s starting to change). That’s why there are still workplaces that penalizes parents who choose to take parental leave or assume that employees who don’t put in as much “face time” aren’t committed to their jobs.

    I always like the mantra that “you can have it all, just not all at once.” There are seasons of life where you’ll have less time for yourself and will devote more to school or family or work. This is part of the normal ebb and flow of life. When you think big and expect that you can have a positive experience with all that work and life have to offer, you’ll be more likely to make that happen.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90308095/why-you-should-stop-trying-to-achieve-work-life-balance

  • Alexa, are you exploiting me?
  • Taxed out: Here’s why your refund may be smaller or nonexistent in 2019

    So far, the average refund paid to taxpayers is down 8.7% to $1,949, from an average of $2,135 this time in filing season last year, according to the IRS.

    Some taxpayers actually do owe more under the new tax law, which capped deductions for state and local taxes, especially affecting homeowners in high-property tax coastal states, and eliminated some deductions, such as those for unreimbursed expenses incurred as an employee.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90308731/tax-refunds-2019-heres-why-yours-may-be-smaller-or-why-you-may-owe

Photo by Alekzan Powell on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 2/13/2019

  • Your Company Wants to Know if You’ve Lost Weight

    Disney , Whole Foods and dozens of other companies have introduced programs to reward employees for meeting certain criteria on health indicators such as weight-to-height ratio and blood pressure. Some incentivize workers to hit a target number of step counts and eat well: One wellness provider, Vitality, works with 31,000 grocery stores to analyze participants’ food choices and award points for healthy purchases, which can be redeemed for prizes.
    ~~
    In addition to tests measuring indicators like blood pressure, wellness programs often involve taking detailed online health assessments that can include questions on alcohol consumption and pregnancy plans. Many programs employ wearable devices that track step counts, sleep and heart rates. Some privacy experts fear that by opting in, individuals may put their data at risk. Wellness programs that are run as part of group health plans are covered by HIPAA, the nation’s main health-privacy law. However, many others aren’t, leaving protection for employee data more porous, said Joy Pritts, who served as chief privacy officer at the Department of Health and Human Services until 2014.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-your-company-need-to-know-your-body-mass-index-11549902536?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • How to Get Better at Small Talk

    As Quartz mentioned, there’s the “triangulation” approach to small talk (named by Kio Stark, author of When Strangers Meet). This method involves three points: you, your partner, and the observable thing in front of you—in other words, your common ground.

    It’s simple. Find the thing that ties you together and bond over it, even if it’s right in front of your eyes. The weather’s terrible! I can’t wait for lunch! Not again, Trump!

    https://lifehacker.com/how-to-make-better-small-talk-1832124157

  • Returning to the town that Walmart left behind
  • We Need a Radical New Way to Understand Screen Use

    The cruel irony, from a social scientist’s perspective, is that much of the data we seek (more, in fact, than has existed at any point in history) already exists on the servers of Facebook, Google, and several more of the most powerful companies on earth. Those corporations are the gatekeepers that hold researchers back from asking more urgent and incisive questions. For example: When college freshmen with depressive symptoms open YouTube, what do they watch? For how long? What does YouTube recommend them when they’re done, and what do they watch next?

    Researchers would give almost anything to make these observations, because it would allow them to begin untangling the web of causes and correlations that bind our thoughts, behaviors, and development to our increasingly connected ways of being in the world.

    https://www.wired.com/story/we-need-a-radical-new-way-to-understand-screen-use/

  • I Studied Buttons for 7 Years and Learned These 5 Lessons About How and Why People Push Them

    Yet in many contexts, both past and present, buttons are anything but easy. Have you ever stood in an elevator pushing the close-door button over and over, hoping and wondering if the door will ever shut? The same quandary presents itself at every crosswalk button. Programming a so-called “universal remote” is often an exercise in extreme frustration. Now think about the intensely complex dashboards used by pilots or DJs.

    For more than a century, people have been complaining that buttons aren’t easy: Like any technology, most buttons require training to understand how and when to use them.W

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pand5v/power-button-politics-of-pushing-buttons

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News You Can Use: 1/9/2019

  • Stanford professor: “The workplace is killing people and nobody cares”

    There is a tremendous amount of epidemiological literature that suggests that diabetes, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome—and many health-relevant individual behaviors such as overeating and underexercising and drug and alcohol abuse–come from stress.

    And third, there is a large amount of data that suggests the biggest source of stress is the workplace. So that’s how Chapman can stand up and make the statement that CEOs are the cause of the health care crisis: You are the source of stress, stress causes chronic disease, and chronic disease is the biggest component of our ongoing and enormous health care costs.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90282735/the-workplace-is-killing-people-and-nobody-cares

  • Amazon, to Win in Booming Rural India, Reinvents Itself

    Amazon’s efforts here face direct competition from Walmart Inc. and local startups, who are all trying to capture customers jumping directly to e-commerce thanks to the recent rollout of 4G mobile internet across India. Amazon expects the number of online shoppers in India to triple in the next few years, most of them from rural areas. More than 80% of its new customers this year are from outside India’s biggest cities, it said.

    The Seattle giant has modified its app to work with inexpensive smartphones and patchy cellular networks. It has added hundreds of thousands of Indian language descriptions of products and videos for those who can’t read, and it has opened physical Amazon stores to walk people through the process of ordering online. It brought on tens of thousands of local distributors to deliver packages, often by bicycle down dirt roads, where it will accept cash or digital payment on delivery.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-win-in-booming-rural-india-reinvents-itself-11546196176

  • Corporations are getting political… and it sucks
  • Amazon Promised Drone Delivery in Five Years… Five Years Ago

    Of course, there’s nothing wrong with dreaming big, especially when it comes to tech that has the potential to help humanity. But this 60 Minutes segment about Amazon’s vaporware delivery drones never should’ve seen the light of day. Drone delivery is certainly a technological possibility today just as it was in 2013, but just like so many other billionaire-led pipedreams (anyone remember the Hyperloop?), the hurdles are more political than technological. As the Associated Press notes, federal rules that would allow drones to be flown outside of an operator’s line of sight are probably at least 10 years away.

    https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/amazon-promised-drone-delivery-in-five-years-five-ye-1830818625

  • Want to Be a Great Leader? Here’s Why Personal Mastery Is the Single Best Place to Start.

    “One of the tragedies of workplace politics and turf wars is that nobody wants them, but we all get caught up in them and feel powerless about it,” says Hughes. “We assign blame to someone else, or the organization as a whole.”

    The goal, according to Hughes, is for executives to learn to recognize ways they’re inadvertently and involuntarily perpetuating this dynamic. By becoming comfortable with self-diagnosing their contribution to the problem and talking about turf wars with their staff and colleagues in a more transparent way, they can begin to reduce the powerlessness people feel over it.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/310795

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Posted on

News You Can Use: 11/28/2018

  • Managers, consider these things before you give someone a promotion

    Moving into a managerial role is usually considered a high point in one’s career. It’s a sign that the company recognizes your leadership potential. In actuality, being a good employee doesn’t automatically translate to being a good leader. That transition requires learning a lot of new skills, sometimes from scratch.

    When new managers struggle, so do their teams. The likelihood of losing employees under a struggling manager is high. And that gets costly when you look at all that goes into replacing employees. Statistics on the cost of replacing a new hire run from tens of thousands of dollars to 1.5 to two times the employee’s annual salary.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90268727/managers-consider-these-things-before-give-you-give-someone-a-promotion

  • You Didn’t Get the Promotion: Now What? 3 Options For Moving On When You Can’t Move Up

    Forget society’s formula. Ask yourself what you want. Do you really want to sink more hours into a job that may or may not have anything to do with your passions and beliefs? Is managing a small chain of stores specializing in Halloween costumes for pets worth the extra twenty-plus hours of your existence you’ll put in? If it is, great – but don’t buy into the notion that you need to constantly curb-stomp your fellow man to chase something you never wanted to begin with.

    https://www.primermagazine.com/2018/earn/didnt-get-promotion

  • The connection paradox: Why are workplaces more isolating than ever? | Dan Schawbel
  • How to Be Wrong Without Losing Face

    When JFK went on national television and took full responsibility for the Bay of Pigs disaster, the nation didn’t throw up their hands in collective horror and ask themselves how they could have possible elected such a moron to high office. The opposite was true. His popularity rose. Far from losing the trust of the citizenry, he gained even more of it. There’s something inspiring about a leader who can come right out and confess their faults.

    The reasons for this aren’t hard to discern. For one, you become relatable, because there isn’t a single person on the planet who hasn’t been in your shoes. Secondly, letting down your guard, showing vulnerability, is attractive and inspiring. Instead of locking the door to your soul, you let folks in.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/321911

  • Half of Jobs at Amazon’s Two New Headquarters Won’t Be Tech Positions

    New York City officials said during a presentation Tuesday night that of the at least 25,000 jobs that the online retailer plans to bring to a new headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, 12,500 will be in tech.

    The other half will be “administrative jobs, custodial staff, HR, all those things,” said Eleni Bourinaris-Suarez, vice president of government and community relations at the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which helped broker the Queens deal with Amazon.

    Virginia officials said they expect the same job breakdown for Amazon’s new headquarters in Northern Virginia. The company has also promised to bring at least 25,000 jobs to that site.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/half-of-queens-amazon-jobs-wont-be-tech-positions-1542829226

Photo by Caleb Frith on Unsplash

Posted on

News You Can Use: 8/15/2018

The Source: Burned Out: Joey Lombardi

  • 5 Signs Your Employees are Nearing Burnout

    Forty-four percent of workers said a serious business mistake or shortcoming has been the result of a miscommunication at some point in their professional experience. And 18 percent said that miscommunication lost a sale — a third of those sales valued above $100,000.

    For efficiency and profitability’s sake, miscommunication is one thing you don’t want running rampant around the workplace. Sadly, when employees are overworked and overstressed, miscommunications are inevitable — and they’re often a sign that you need to hire more people, clean up processes or redistribute existing projects from certain employees.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/317535

  • Are middle children really going extinct? Here’s a reality check

    Sadly, statistics from Pew Research back up this up. In honor of Middle Child Day, which is today, the research organization parsed some of the demographic data around family size to dig deeper into the question of middle child extinction. Broadly speaking, middle children in America are a lot less common than they were 30 years ago. In 1976, 65% of American mothers aged 40-44 had three or more children, Pew writes. By 2016, that number had fallen to just 38%.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90216974/are-middle-children-really-going-extinct-heres-a-reality-check

  • Is War With China Inevitable?
  • Why You Should Get Good at Small Talk

    It’s quite beautifully phrased that “Small talk brings us into the present moment with one another.” You might have been thinking about two different things, or feeling separated by unfamiliarity, but even a point of contact over your favorite coffee flavor (uh, mocha?) can make you feel like you’re sharing an experience with someone. A small experience. Big experiences come with big talks, and you will build to that together.

    https://lifehacker.com/why-you-should-get-good-at-small-talk-1828174579

  • How to Actually Make Money as a Travel Blogger or Lifestyle Brand

    Before you start dreaming up an online course, ask yourself how to best serve your community. “It’s actually been proven that only 3 percent of people will ever complete the course. I don’t want people spending money on my stuff if they’re not going to implement,” she shared. Instead, she asked herself, What’s the best way to get in front of them and make it so valuable that they absolutely love it? She went on to create experiences and workshops that helped people learn and implement right away.

    “Get back to basics — to caring about your community and your customers and asking them all the time, ‘What matters to you? What’s important?’ And then [work backwards and create a solution] for them.”

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/video/317848

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash