from NYTs Brenda Handy started doing temp work nearly 40 years ago. Back then, landing jobs took time and effort, even for a licensed practical nurse. In the 1990s she lived in Tampa, Fla., with her three children, but got her work through a man named Tony Braswell, who had his offices a half-hour away, in St. Petersburg. Braswell would call nurses with the details of their next jobs. Handy would learn her assignment and drive the family van an hour south to Sarasota, or maybe 40 minutes east to Lakeland, to reach one of the care facilities that contracted […]
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How Much Is Your Boss Spying On You (And Can You Do Anything About It)?
from Fast Company Despite the shift we felt toward worker empowerment, flexibility, and a more humane way of working, there can still be a lot about living and working in 2023 that feels slightly dystopian. The news is filled with layoffs, economic uncertainty, and the rise of artificial intelligence impacting fields and skills once thought to be the domain of human-exclusive knowledge work. Add to those concerns the rise in so-called bossware monitoring software that companies use to ensure that employees are staying productive. It’s not an anomaly at a few companies. Research found that eight of the ten largest […]
Continue readingThe Key to Success in College Is So Simple, It’s Almost Never Mentioned
from NYTs For Emily Zurek Small, college did what it’s supposed to do. Growing up in a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania, she had career and intellectual ambitions for which college is the clearest pathway. “I just kind of always wanted to learn,” she told me recently. “I wanted to be able to have intelligent conversations with people and know about the world.” She enrolled at a small nearby Catholic college, majored in neuroscience and in 2016 became the first person in her family to earn a bachelor’s degree — and later, a master’s. She now works as a school […]
Continue readingThe Rise of the Worker Productivity Score
from NYTs A FEW YEARS AGO, Carol Kraemer, a longtime finance executive, took a new job. Her title, senior vice president, was impressive. The compensation was excellent: $200 an hour. But her first paychecks seemed low. Her new employer, which used extensive monitoring software on its all-remote workers, paid them only for the minutes when the system detected active work. Worse, Ms. Kraemer noticed that the software did not come close to capturing her labor. Offline work — doing math problems on paper, reading printouts, thinking — didn’t register and required approval as “manual time.” In managing the organization’s finances, […]
Continue readingThree Interconnected Trends To Change The Way We Live And Work
from Forbes Distributed Leadership is going to be the norm because we are changing how we relate to each other (remote work, generational shift, digital working and living methods) so leadership is changing to. The natural distance has shrunk from things like social filtering to email, collaboration tools, social, real-time interactions, so the flow of communications and the associated frictions that occurred have almost totally disappeared. This changes how our relationships work from positional hierarchies to ones based on a constant test of trust in relationships. In effect problem solving is no longer going to be driven be external experts, […]
Continue readingWall Street’s Rigid Culture Bends to Demands for Flexibility at Work
from NYTs When Tom Naratil arrived on Wall Street in the 1980s, work-life balance didn’t really exist. For most bankers of his generation, working long hours while missing out on family time wasn’t just necessary to get ahead, it was necessary to not be left behind. But Mr. Naratil, now president of the Swiss bank UBS in the Americas, doesn’t see why the employees of today should have to make the same trade-offs — at the cost of their personal happiness and the company’s bottom line. Employees with the flexibility to skip “horrible commutes” and work from home more often […]
Continue reading4 Ways To Make Time For ‘Watercooler Conversations’ In The Hybrid Work Setting
from Fast Company A critical part of filling your personal and work lives with happiness is cultivating strong relationships. Some of these ties can be deep, meaningful, and longer-term relationships, but they can also be more casual and occasional connections, which are still effective at lifting moods and helping you feel satisfied in life. Research at the University of British Columbia found that when people had greater numbers of acquaintances (even if they were more distant connections), they were happier. Further, studies by the University of Chicago found even small talk with strangers contributed to happiness. In other words, social […]
Continue readingThe Great Resignation and The Great Deflate
from Serendipity35 2021 was the year of the “Great Resignation.” We have been told that it was a year when workers quit their jobs at historic rates. This is an economic trend meaning that employees voluntarily resign from their jobs. Blame has been aimed at the American government for failing to provide necessary worker protections in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This led to wage stagnation. There was also a rising cost of living. The term was coined in May 2021 by Anthony Klotz, a professor of management at Texas A&M University. It’s now 2022 and unemployment rates have fallen […]
Continue readingThe Pandemic Changed Everything About Work, Except the Humble Résumé
from NYTs Two years into a pandemic, many aspects of work have changed drastically. In that time, some people have started new jobs, Zoomed their days away and then left companies where they never even met their co-workers in person. But one aspect of work remains remarkably unchanged: the importance of the traditional, single-page résumé created in a word processor. “Hiring managers and recruiters still rely on the résumé,” said Vicki Salemi, an expert on the job-search process at Monster, the online job-posting site. The résumé, Ms. Salemi continued, is still “the standard to apply for a job and get […]
Continue reading‘The Great Resignation’ Misses the Point
from Wired IN EARLY MAY, Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University, did an interview with Bloomberg about a possible spike in job turnover. “The Great Resignation is coming,” he warned. A few weeks later, the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed a record 4 million Americans had left their jobs in April. Suddenly, people were reaching for ways to refer to the phenomenon unfolding before them—to brand it, to make sense of it. Klotz’s catchy off-the-cuff terminology, now printed on Bloomberg’s pages, seemed to fit the bill. And just like that, a name was born. We […]
Continue readingWhy Upping Your Communication Game Is A Huge Part Of Redesigning Your Work Life
from Fast Company In the new hybrid workforce model, everything needs to be more intentional, and that’s probably a good thing. Expectations will have to be made more clear, and two-way communication and feedback will have to be more explicit in a remote work scenario. That’s a good change. And workers will be rewarded for what they produce, not just for “face time” with the boss (pun intended). In fact, useless video meetings, where nothing gets done, will become less and less tolerated as “video fatigue” and effective time management become more important and more visible. When there’s no one […]
Continue readingThe Virtual Internship
from Serendipity35 Internships for college students (and sometimes high school students) have long been a good experience. They help young people develop a professional aptitude, learn real-world skills, and often create an opportunity for a follow-up job. They took a hit during the pandemic with offices closed and a reluctance on both sides to be out in the world. Virtual internships became a thing. I assume some existed before but not in great numbers. I read about some undergrads at Brown University who began Intern From Home in March 2020. They wanted to salvage internships during the pandemic for classmates […]
Continue readingBoston Dynamics’ Robots Won’t Take Our Jobs … Yet
from Wired IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO talk about Boston Dynamics robots without acknowledging two things: They’re a marvel of modern engineering, and their agility can be incredibly unnerving. A 46-second video of Spot the robot “dog” opening a door has more than 56 million views on YouTube. Atlas, the company’s headless humanoid robot, can go for a jog or do parkour. And just last week, the company released new footage of Spot the robot recharging on its own. (If it sounds like a Black Mirror episode, well, that’s because it sort of is.) But even as many observers joke about a […]
Continue readingChange Is The New Normal: What Are Organizations Abandoning Since COVID-19 And What Will They Not Continue To Do Once Things Return To ‘Normal?’
from Forbes Our weekly discussion last week with leaders in the Future of Work and open talent ecosystem was powerful and open. We first addressed some of the issues surrounding our individual mental wellness and connectivity. Carin Knoop, from Harvard Business School has been conducting a bunch of research lately, “We may all come out of the COVID-19 experience with some form of PTSD and loneliness and burnout, all of which are things that we used to address or face or handle on our own, but with no outlets in the form of gyms or faith groups or other sources […]
Continue reading5 Things To Practice If You Want To Be More Creative
from Fast Company Two years ago, a report was published by the World Economic Forum that showed creativity is one of the top three most important skills for future workers. It went on to explain that by 2030, roughly 85% of the jobs that will exist haven’t even been invented yet—the idea being that with how quickly technology is changing the landscape of our world, jobs like being a cashier clerk or even an accountant will soon be replaced entirely by machines. Which begs the question: So then what are the most valuable skills worth cultivating today? Creativity was listed […]
Continue readingThe Future Of Work Looks Like Staying Out Of The Office
from ars technica It’s 2020: we finally live in the future! Or at least a future—one where broadband Internet connections and portable, reasonably high-powered computing tools are pervasive and widely accessible, even if they aren’t yet universal. Millions of workers, including all of us here at Ars, use those tools to do traditional “office jobs” from nontraditional home offices. Tens of millions of jobs at all points of the income and skill spectrum are of course not suited to remote work. Doctors, dentists, and countless other healthcare workers of the world will always need to be hands-on with patients, just […]
Continue readingImproving Workforce Success Among America’s College Students
from Brookings As the presidential campaign of 2020 kicks into high gear, the stagnation of worker earnings in recent decades has drawn much attention and comment from the candidates. Yet, outside of advocating for a few trendy proposals like free college, the candidates have said little to date on how to improve education and skills, especially those that are highly rewarded in the US labor market, among the roughly two-thirds of Americans who do not attain BAs. The candidates’ relative silence is especially noteworthy in a year when both the Higher Education Act (HEA) and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity […]
Continue readingA Dear John Letter to HR
from Reimagining The Future Nahal Yousefian is a Chief Human Resources Officer. She reached out recently to discuss her passion for disrupting the Human Resources function. She has moved from conforming in the system to learning about and experimenting with more effective models of organizational design, capability, and ultimately psychology. She pointed out that many systems and structures were designed precisely to reinforce a centralized, command and control flow of work versus an agile and responsive model. She has reframed her personal purpose at work and strives to create the world of work anew. I will let her tell you […]
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