Tag: Work Life Balance

Posted on

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

Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash

Posted on

News You Can Use: 12/26/2018

  • Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success—Until Users Fled

    Snapchat’s popularity among young people and celebrities once helped give its owner a peak valuation of about $31 billion after its March 2017 initial public offering. The messaging app, which lets a person send a friend “snaps”—photos and videos that can disappear seconds after the recipient views them—once looked capable of becoming a viable social-media competitor to Facebook Inc.

    The redesign mess adds to troubles swirling around Snap and raises questions about whether Mr. Spiegel’s management instincts can help it pull through. His style—trust instincts, take control of details, ignore naysayers—paid off during Snap’s meteoric rise after its 2011 founding.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/evan-spiegels-imperious-style-made-snapchat-a-successuntil-users-fled-11545588892

  • Richard Branson Says the 9-5 Workday Grind Is About to Die. Here’s Why.

    Two other ideas that Branson supports are the proliferation of three and four day weekends and job sharing. These would prioritize a work infrastructure that allows employees to have full lives outside of an office, to spend time with friends and family, to devote time to the things they are passionate about, and to focus on being physically and mentally healthy.

    Branson explained how flexible work is a big part of how he leads Virgin Group. “If you trust people and treat them as adults, they will repay you by working effectively and efficiently,” he wrote. “Choice can empower people to make good decisions and feel positive about their workplace, helping to keep great employees and attract new talent. If we all work smarter, we won’t have to work longer.”

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/324969

  • GoFundMe and a broken healthcare system
  • Advice For Employees: There’s a Limit To Your Complaints

    But to all employees — particularly those who are too young to remember what it was like during the 2009 recession — I do have a warning: you may want to zip it, just a little.

    There’s nothing wrong with giving feedback and by all means if your employer is doing something illegal you should be reporting it. Otherwise — and I say this with peace and love — you may be wise to tread carefully with your concerns about how the owners of the company you work at manage their company. Big firms like Google and Amazon that are in the public eye seem to have a higher tolerance for agitation. But smaller companies? Not as much. We don’t need the headaches. If you’re really not happy with how your employer runs his or her company then by all means: take advantage of the strong economy and make a move. That advantage isn’t going to last forever.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/324626

  • Stop Sending Regular Text Messages

    In more granular terms, the FCC has done to text messaging what it did to the internet when it overturned rules protecting net neutrality. The FCC’s latest decision reclassifies both SMS and MMS texts as “information services” under Title I of the Communications Act. Information services, however, aren’t subject to the same level of regulations as Title II-classified “telecommunication services” like phone calls, which is how they were classified before the December 12 decision. If you’re questioning the comparison to net neutrality, it’s literally the same issue: Broadband internet service was classified as Title II, allowing the FCC to enforce net neutrality rules. But the FCC voted to ditch these rules last year and once again classify broadband under Title I.

    Bottom Line:

    Basically, if you were looking for a push to switch to Signal, this is it. It’s secure, it has a desktop app, and it works across iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows.

    https://gizmodo.com/stop-sending-regular-text-messages-1831258324

Photo by Christophe Hautier on Unsplash

Posted on

News You Can Use: 10/10/2018

  • How to Disconnect From ‘Always On’ Work Culture

    According to a 2016 study by the Academy of Management, employees tally an average of 8 hours a week answering work-related emails after leaving the office. Echoing that, a 2015 Harris Poll for the American Psychological Association found that 30% of men and 23% of women regularly bring work home. Similar percentages admitted to working on vacation and to bringing “work materials” along on social outings (we hope they don’t mean accordion folders). All of this, many experts in psychology agree, causes stress, ruins sleep habits and cripples our ability to stay active and engaged during actual office hours.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-disconnect-from-always-on-work-culture-1538740171?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Never, ever utter these phrases in a salary negotiation

    I am currently making:
    “I call this The Dreaded Salary Question and it’s tricky because it usually comes up early in the interview process, and most candidates don’t think of it as part of a salary negotiation even though it is,” says Doody. “Answering this question by disclosing numbers can make it very difficult to negotiate effectively later on because it can box the candidate in. Once they disclose current or desired salary, the offers they get are very likely to be tied to those numbers. That can be very expensive if the company might have offered them a much higher salary than they disclosed.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90246630/what-not-to-say-in-a-salary-negotiation

  • How to be a better leader: Offer guidance, not instruction
  • The Rumors of Podcasting’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

    In today’s “move fast and break things” digital media culture it isn’t surprising that companies and talent can find themselves off course, and need to back up and change tack. When you move quickly, you have to accept that the risk will increase and you’ll make some decisions that you will later wish you could change. Out of all the companies who have recognized the opportunity in digital audio and podcasting, it isn’t surprising that these pivots are happening. If anything, it would be weird and shocking if everyone made the correct maneuvers every time. It would be depressing if no one was willing to admit some things weren’t working.

    https://medium.com/audio-insurgent/the-rumors-of-podcastings-death-have-been-greatly-exaggerated-a25d4066997c

  • Finish the Year Strong to Carry Momentum Into 2019

    As entrepreneurs, we must watch the bottom line at all times. Every move we make has to bring us a return on our investment. Lately, I’ve seen a big shift in the market. The “cut through to the bottom line” mindset can only take you so far. I’ve been able to grow my business faster by focusing on the impact rather than the income. Don’t get me wrong. I charge for my services, and I’m not running a non-profit, but income is not my main focus.

    I recently helped a client create a framework in his business that gave him a sense of purpose. He was ready to sell all his assets and move to an island with his wife and kids because his idea of success was being met by his expectations in his business. I helped him see that he simply needed to focus less on the transactions and more on the transcendence his business could provide. He owns multiple businesses, so it took him some time to figure out how he could help his clients have a better experience rather than treating them as singular transactions.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/319535

Photo by Janusz Maniak on Unsplash