Tag: Workplace Culture

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News You Can Use: 3/25/2020


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  • Silicon Valley Was First to Send Workers Home. It’s Been Messy.

    In recent days, software developers sent home by Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook have complained of slow download speeds and mounting confusion over still-evolving new internal rules about what work they are allowed to perform, staffers say. Some workers can’t access crucial internal systems from home due to strict security policies meant to fend off outsiders—which now includes off-site employees.

    Alphabet Inc.’s Google was overrun with requests after it told its 119,000 employees to put in for “work from home” kits of monitors, cables and other technological must-haves, employees say. Facing a backlog and no certain date of delivery, many San Francisco employees came in over the weekend, despite requests from Google to avoid doing so, and hauled home desktop equipment and personal effects like family photos back with them.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-was-first-to-send-workers-home-its-been-messy-11584190800

  • Farts, cats, naked bodies: People are failing hilariously at working from home

    Work culture will need to adjust to the new normal, in which toddlers and flatulent dogs are our coworkers. It inevitably will. But until then, here are some of the worst work-from-home fails we’ve seen in the past week. They prove that, however rough your work-from-home experience has been, it could have been a lot worse.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90478967/farts-cats-naked-bodies-people-are-failing-hilariously-at-working-from-home

  • Your Company Culture Isn’t an Office, It’s the People
  • At Schools Closed for Coronavirus, Online Work Won’t Count

    Schools are expected to advance students to the next grade, come fall, even with all the months of missed coursework, though many administrators say they haven’t addressed it yet. Teachers already dread what they call “the summer slide,” or information children lose over summer vacation, and schools haven’t yet said how curricula in the fall may need to be adjusted to make up missed work.

    In Washington state, where schools are closed statewide until at least April 24, the Education Department has warned against using online learning that isn’t equitable. At least one district in Bothell, Wash., halted the online model it had rolled out to students to address equity issues. Now, the Northshore School District superintendent said, in a letter to families this week, the district has launched a resource page online for families to keep students moving forward. This week, students are being encouraged to create projects that could be useful in relation to the current health situation, such as building a hand-sanitizer dispenser. A petition to restore online learning had over 11,000 signatures on Thursday.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/schools-closed-for-coronavirus-online-work-wont-count-11584643049

Posted on

News You Can Use: 12/23/2019


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  • Survival of the Richest

    This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

    The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.

    https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1

  • What detoxifies a negative work environment?
  • How Sears Lost the American Shopper

    Alan Lacy: If there’s a significant strategic failure on the part of Sears over quite a long period of time, it was the inability to get off mall with a viable, important retail format.

    In my era, we tried the Sears Grand format, basically a big-box store that was right across the highway from Walmart, Target, Home Depot and Lowe’s. Those first few stores that we did, they were doing $45 million and our mall-based stores were doing $25 million in annual sales.

    We couldn’t build enough stores to really catch up to what was happening at that point with 1,000 new competitive outlets being opened every year by Home Depot, Lowe’s, et cetera.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-sears-lost-the-american-shopper-11552647601?mod=e2tw

  • The Secret to Writing Emails with Military Precision

    A CTA, or call-to-action, is the last bit of an email where you encourage your reader to do something: shop now, learn more, sign up, etc. Sometimes, the CTA is a button, but it doesn’t have to be. It does have to be concise, attention-grabbing and easy to understand. For marketers, CTAs are non-negotiable because they help businesses get more customers.

    In our everyday emails, this device can be just as useful for accomplishing the purpose of our message. Be it organizing a meeting, requesting feedback or assigning a project, a concise, final reminder of what we’re after can improve the utility of any email. In fact, it’s so important that I tend to start my emails with CTAs and work backwards.

    To make your CTAs pop, separate them from the body of the text and play around with bold text and colors. If you have several action items, separate them with bullet points, and try to limit your action items to two per email. Another helpful practice: If you’re addressing multiple recipients, use “@” to assign action items to different people, e.g. “@Pam: review slides and send feedback by Tuesday EOD.” That way, there’s no ambiguity about what’s expected from whom.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/343044

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News You Can Use: 4/17/2019

  • Old, Online, And Fed On Lies: How An Aging Population Will Reshape The Internet

    Four recent studies found that older Americans are more likely to consume and share false online news than those in other age groups, even when controlling for factors such as partisanship. Other research has found that older Americans have a poor or inaccurate grasp of how algorithms play a role in selecting what information is shown to them on social media, are worse than younger people at differentiating between reported news and opinion, and are less likely to register the brand of a news site they consume information from.

    Those digital and news consumption habits intersect with key characteristics of older Americans, such as being more likely to live in rural and isolated areas, and, perhaps in part as a result, to experience a high degree of loneliness. A survey conducted by AARP of Americans found that 36% of people ages 60–69 were lonely, while 24% of those ages 70 and older registered as lonely. (The survey focused on adults over 45.)

    https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/old-and-online-fake-news-aging-population

  • Why Videogames Trigger the Nightly Meltdown—and How to Help Your Child Cope

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-videogames-trigger-the-nightly-meltdownand-how-to-help-your-child-cope-11554206405
  • These are the most common roots of workplace drama

    A lack of authenticity creates or perpetuates a belief that management is hypocritical and that they only talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. In this environment, employees lose enthusiasm for their jobs, passion for what the company represents, and, most dangerously, they lose trust.

    A lack of authenticity leads to inconsistency, usually seen in the form of the failure to implement solutions in an evenhanded way. Over time, this creates actual unfairness and also creates a perception of a lack of workplace justice.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90330054/these-are-the-most-common-roots-of-workplace-drama

  • 4 Essential strategies for managing millennial salespeople

    As such, they’re likely to have less patience for old-school classroom sales training and bootcamps. They’re happier using their mobile devices to access virtual training sessions and videos on their schedule. After all, flexibility is key for millennials.

    To ensure engagement, training sessions should be short and concise. Millennial sales people are apt to tune out during long presentations.

    Since millennials embrace technology, sales tools that leverage automation and artificial intelligence will go a long way towards keeping them motivated and productive.

    https://www.the-future-of-commerce.com/2019/04/02/managing-millennial-salespeople/

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Posted on

News You Can Use: 3/27/2019

  • Workplace tracking is growing fast. Most workers don’t seem very concerned

    The single area that worries watchdogs the most is, perhaps, wellness. A majority of large companies and a significant percentage of smaller ones have programs today that, in the name of encouraging their workers to be in good physical and mental shape, seek out personal health information. This can include questions about whether workers are anxious or depressed, drink alcohol or use drugs, or take medication.

    The Americans with Disabilities Act and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act are supposed to ensure that an employee’s sensitive details are held close. Yet there are gaps in these laws, experts say, and companies may not always adhere strictly to the regulations that are on the books.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90318167/workplace-tracking-is-growing-fast-most-workers-dont-seem-very-concerned

  • Amazon is aggressively blocking ads for unprofitable products as part of a plan to bolster its bottom line

    In recent months, Amazon has been telling more vendors, or brand owners who sell their goods wholesale, that if Amazon can’t sell those products to consumers at a profit, it won’t let them pay to promote the items. For example, if a $5 water bottle costs Amazon that amount to store, pack and ship, the maker of the water bottle won’t be allowed to advertise it.

    The added stringency, which CNBC learned of from conversations with vendors and emails they received from Amazon as well as from outside experts, reflects a broader push to squeeze earnings out of a historically low-margin business. In its most recent quarter, Amazon posted $3 billion in net income, the highest in company history, while profit for the full year more than more than tripled to $10 billion.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/20/amazon-aggressively-suspending-ads-of-unprofitable-products-as-focus-on-the-bottom-line-grows.html

  • The colossal problem with universal basic income
  • No sleep, no sex, no life: tech workers in China’s Silicon Valley face burnout before they reach 30

    “One thing Chinese founders or unicorns haven’t figured out is how to become a sustainable business. If you continue those [long hours] for 10 years, people will have no personal life any more, they will have no kids, they will go crazy,” Wingender said.

    Yang is pondering what comes next. With more than 10 years of experience, he now holds a mid-level position at a top-tier internet company but has reached a career ceiling. He compares himself to a construction worker, who can earn good money due to high work intensity but can easily be replaced by younger, cheaper labour.

    https://www.scmp.com/tech/apps-social/article/3002533/no-sleep-no-sex-no-life-tech-workers-chinas-silicon-valley-face

  • The New Social Network That Isn’t New at All

    Newsletters could be a more reliable means of increasing readership for major publishers whose relationships with social networks have soured. Remember when Facebook moved away from promoting videos on the platform? Or when it decided to show more posts from friends and family, and de-emphasize content from publishers and brands? With every shift, big media companies had to adjust.

    Also

    “You don’t have to fight an algorithm to reach your audience,” Casey Newton, a journalist who writes The Interface, a daily newsletter for the technology news site The Verge, told me. “With newsletters, we can rebuild all of the direct connections to people we lost when the social web came along.”

    It can be more than just a creative endeavor: Newsletters can make a fine one-person business. Writers can charge readers to a monthly fee for their newsletters. Substack takes a cut of that fee; Revue charges writers using a tiered-pricing system based on the size of newsletter’s subscriber base.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/technology/new-social-network-email-newsletter.html

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Posted on

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

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