News You Can Use: 1/15/2020
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash
- Even 4-year-olds dislike freeloaders
Children from ages 4 to 10 were presented with scenarios in which they had to give up chocolates in order to get a cake or plant seeds in a garden to get tomatoes. All children expressed dislike for those who did not contribute and were even willing to give up stickers to punish them. The youngest subjects exhibited a stronger aversion to free-riders than 9- and 10-year-olds.
However, when a freeloader has a good excuse for not contributing — e.g. her pet ate her chocolate — the aversion was greatly reduced, the researchers report.
“Even young children expect cooperation and are willing to work to sustain it even at cost to themselves,” Dunham said. “I find this very positive. The seeds that sustain cooperation seem to emerge early on, and while as a society we need to sustain and nurture these values, we may not need to instill them in the first place.”
https://news.yale.edu/2018/07/23/even-4-year-olds-dislike-freeloaders
- Hiring hack: How to better evaluate your candidates | Simon Sinek
- This Japanese Company Charges Its Staff $100 an Hour to Use Conference Rooms
At the heart of the program is a compensation system that meticulously tracks how much every person and team contributes to earnings. Workers receive a base salary, which they augment by earning Will for completing tasks. Quarterly bonuses can rival a year’s pay for top performers, says Naito. “It’s enough to buy a foreign-brand car every year,” he says. “We call it the ‘Will Dream.’ ”
Earning virtual currency begins at the team level, where bosses allocate a portion of the group’s Will budget to each task they must complete. Team members then use an app to bid in an auction for those jobs. Assignments that don’t attract any bids often turn out to be unnecessary, Naito says. And managers who’ve misused or abused the system have been abandoned by their workers, who are free to move to other teams.
- How to write the best résumé for 2020
Whether it’s accounts won, servers maintained, leads gained, or warehouses managed, all of our activities in our professional careers can be quantified. By sharing your specific high scores rather than vague duties, you give your future boss the ability to understand how far you can run, how high you can jump, in your career.
When you start to think in high scores, you’ll banish boring phrases such as “seasoned executive,” “responsible for,” and “managed.” And you’ll recast your experiences to include the most exciting and impressive outcomes you’ve achieved in each area of your job. Share your high scores attained, achievements unlocked, and badges won to attract your future boss’s attention in 2020.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90446884/how-to-write-the-best-resume-for-2020
News You Can Use: 12/18/2019
Photo by Antonino Visalli on Unsplash
- Administrative assistant jobs helped propel many women into the middle class. Now they’re disappearing.
The United States has shed more than 2.1 million administrative and office support jobs since 2000, Labor Department data shows, eroding what for decades had been a reliable path to the middle class for women without college degrees.
The job losses affecting administrative assistants, bookkeepers, clerks, data entry specialists, executive assistants and secretaries have largely continued even as the economy recovered from the Great Recession, suggesting these jobs aren’t coming back.
- Tech recruiters were once welcomed on campus. Now they face protests
At universities across the country, including Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Duke, Carnegie Mellon and Brown, students have staged protests at recruiting events and demonstrated against tech companies that do business with ICE or U.S. Customs and Border Protection, including Microsoft, Palantir and Salesforce. They have called out Amazon for marketing its facial-recognition technology to immigration authorities and hosting Palantir on the Amazon Web Services cloud.
Some 3,000 students from 30 schools signed a document pledging they would not work at Palantir until it severs its contracts with ICE; roughly 800 people signed a petition calling on the dean of UC Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department to drop its partnership with Palantir.
It’s not clear whether these tactics are having a significant impact on recruitment.
- What skills will set you apart in the age of automation?
- 6 lies you probably tell yourself about giving feedback at work
You only need to begin documenting notes for legal purposes if you’ve given the person much face-to-face feedback for several months, and they show no sign of improvement. In my research as a performance coach, I’ve learned 95% of employees can (and will) improve any skill with your honest, frequent coaching. Just talk to people! Be open, be honest, and give them helpful examples and ideas. When they realize you’re on their side, they’ll ask for more feedback. Have confidence in yourself. If you provide feedback to everyone all the time, it will be much easier to prepare written documentation that you might need later.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90436990/6-lies-about-feedback-that-you-need-to-stop-believing
- How to Insult Your Enemies More Effectively
The more creative you’re getting, the easier you can slip up. Years ago, I wrote a bad blog post, and commenters were roasting it. I retorted that they were misreading it. I didn’t want to tell them “learn to read” because it didn’t quite fit. So I came up with “Learn to parse.” That, of course, is lame as hell, something that kid from the “you frickin fricks!” video would say.
I’d just made things much worse for myself. If your insults become illegible, overwrought, or sloppy, you’ll lose. And that’s not the only way you can self-own here.
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-insult-your-enemies-more-effectively-1839501124
News You Can Use: 10/2/2019
Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash
- Team Productivity: Striking a Balance Between Being a Boss and Friend
“All strong relationships are built on honesty,” writes Tamara Luzajic for Humanity. “And just like a good friend would tell you when you are doing something wrong no matter how much it hurts, a good manager will use open communication to help employees become better at what they do.”
“Honesty is one of the best principles you can use to establish a healthy balance between caring your employees and leading them professionally,” adds Luzajic. “The closer you get to someone on a personal level, the harder it becomes to give them honest feedback as employees.”
Additionally, build trust with each of your employees. For example, grant them autonomy and flexible schedules. Trust in your employee builds resilience — shows you rely on them enough to work where, when, and however they prefer. As a result, this will create a more positive and productive culture.
And, if someone needs to take a day off because they’re attending to a sick family member, don’t freak out on them. Give them the day off without penalizing them.
- The hackable technology that worries even a legendary con man
- How is Meritocracy Damaging Our Economy?
Interesting podcast about how high-achieving workers are stuck on a treadmill that they can’t get off of. If you are reading this blog, this probably hits home. Not a bad way to spend 30 minutes.
https://beta.prx.org/stories/291960
Thanks LJP! - For millennials, unlimited vacation isn’t always a perk
But unlimited vacation policies can be a Trojan horse, particularly for young people who are newer to the workforce and less likely to take time off in the first place. On the surface, the offer seems generous, even altruistic; it implies employers trust their employees and encourage work-life balance. In practice, however, “unlimited vacation” is a misnomer. Employees often take fewer vacation days if their company has an unlimited policy, since there’s no framework for how many days they can—or should—take off.
Managers can decline to approve time off, especially if there’s an implicit assumption that nobody can take more than two to three weeks of vacation per year. And when they leave the company, employees can’t cash out on the paid time off that they have accrued (which is required by law in a number of states). For workers in their twenties who are more likely to job hop and let vacation time go unused, that can mean foregoing a sizable chunk of cash.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90398810/for-millennials-unlimited-vacation-isnt-always-a-perk
News You Can Use: 9/25/2019
Photo by Frank Busch on Unsplash
- Hey, Jeff Bezos: I work for Amazon – and I’m protesting against your firm’s climate inaction
Since late last year, a group of workers within Amazon have been organizing to push the company to radically reduce its carbon emissions. Yesterday, they announced a major new action: on 20 September, Amazon workers around the world will walk out of their offices to join the Global Climate Strike. So far, more than 1,000 workers have pledged to participate. The organizers have three demands. They want the company to commit to zero emissions by 2030, to have zero custom cloud computing contracts with fossil fuel companies and to spend zero dollars on funding climate-denying lobbyists and politicians.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/10/jeff-bezos-amazon-climate-strike-aecj
- Dozens of Google employees say they were retaliated against for reporting harassment
After the retaliation document began circulating internally in late April, Google employees continued to use internal listservs to share similar retaliation cases related to sexual harassment and discrimination. In one anonymous mailing list dedicated to discussing mental health, at least seven stories about retaliation were shared in just the past few months, according to a source.
Since many employees are reluctant to report HR violations through official channels, they have turned to anonymous platforms like these mailing lists for communicating with their colleagues. But some unofficial platforms for candid discussions, such as a previously employee-run newsletter for sharing complaints, are now being overseen by HR, which sources say is making matters worse.
“In general, there’s a culture at Google where people were afraid to talk to HR — and in many cases for good reason,” Liz Fong-Jones, a former Google engineer and activist on internal company issues who said she faced retaliation for her activism, told Recode.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/9/9/20853647/google-employee-retaliation-harassment-me-too-exclusive
- What Tech Leaders Really Want
- Government Orders Google: Let Employees Speak Out
The NLRB’s settlement comes in response to a pair of complaints about Google’s reaction to workplace dissent. The settlement orders Google to inform current employees that they are free to speak to the media—without having to ask Google higher-ups for permission—on topics such as workplace diversity and compensation, regardless of whether Google views such topics as inappropriate for the workplace.
The settlement was approved by an agency director this week, according to a document. It is slated to go into effect after an appeals period.
The NLRB action is the second formal reminder to Google in a week to stay within the law. Last week, Google’s YouTube unit settled an investigation into alleged violations of child-privacy law with a $170 million fine and an admonishment from regulators not to track the internet activity of children under age 13.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/government-orders-google-let-employees-speak-out-11568284582