Ah, the perils of blitzscaling. The pandemic was a time of intense upheaval for every company, but it looked different for different organizations. For some, the pandemic was an incredibly lean time. For others, it was a time of intense scaling up. Tech companies, in particular, reaped the benefits of a lot of people stuck at home for a long time — and that [...]
Leonardo da Vinci is thought to be the inventor of, among many things, the idea of a resume. The brilliant Italian 16th-century painter and polymath appealed to the Duke of Milan when hoping to land a commission. The subject? Instruments of war. Point #3 in his “resume”: “If, because of the height of the banks, or the strength of the place and its [...]
When you think of boomerang employees, you probably think about re-hiring previous employees back into their same jobs. But there’s another path boomerang employees often take: coming back to their old company in a new role. The ideal career arc, for a lot of people, might be to join a great company and climb the ladder from an entry-level position to a senior [...]
At Salesforce, they’re tackling the in-office vs. remote conundrum with a team-specific approach to hybrid work. Instead of mandating company-wide protocols, Salesforce enables individual teams to come up with their own hybrid policies. While offices are, for the most part, open, they’ve been largely redesigned to be collaborative workspaces for when people are onsite. A lot of companies take an approach to hybrid [...]
Who decides how smart you are? YOU, right? It’s about your decision-making skills, and the ability to learn and use what you’ve learned. …to a point. After 40, our brains radically rewire. According to neuroscientists, previously partitioned networks used for different processes become steadily more integrated. As we get older, the number of separate areas declines. Is that good… or bad? A bit [...]
Yes! Your morning coffee boosts alertness. But at what cost? A bunch of recent studies show the good, bad, and… weird(?) ways caffeine impacts our mental health. Since approx. 85% of Americans consume at least one caffeinated beverage each day, let’s look into this! Good things first! Your cup of caffeine makes you more alert, improves focus levels, and makes you better at [...]
We seem to be on a great productivity roller coaster these days, if you listen to the headlines. During COVID-19 shutdowns, the sudden switch to remote work had a silver lining: a heck of a lot of people reported feeling way more productive when working from home. But now, headlines like this late October one in the Washington Post refute that claim: “U.S. [...]
In 2022, in the US alone, there were 2,230,240 Google searches for things like “believable excuses to miss work.” That's bonkers to me. If the number alone does not impress you, know that it has increased by almost 2000% since pre-pandemic times. People are no longer willing to mindlessly show up for jobs they don’t like. So how are you going to keep [...]
The pandemic ruined everything. Or did it? According to Gallup CEO John Clifton, who recently released the book The Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It, we’ve actually been unhappy since before the pandemic. He calls Covid the “strawman” everyone blames for something that was already in motion. Job stress is a huge factor in our collective unhappiness, [...]
The savings of letting your workforce stay remote? $11K per employee, according to an analysis by Global Workplace Analytics. The cost of letting your workforce be remote? Often, a higher IT spend for companies that now have to supply laptops, printers, and remote support where they didn’t before. Also, the average cost of a cyber breach is currently $9.4 million, according to IBM. [...]