Tag: culture

You Can Learn a Lot About Your Culture If You Look Closely at HOW Employees Quit

DESPITE THE FOCUS on improving how we recruit and hire new employees, we also know that we should spend as much, if not more, time on how we can better retain the people who are already on our staff. That’s a great thought, but there’s something to consider: No matter how good a job we do

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Starbucks Training Day Was More About Changing Culture Than Anything Else

HERE’S THE BOTTON LINE on the recent anti-racial bias training at Starbucks, and it was captured perfectly in the headline on The New York Times story about the big event. It said: Starbucks’s Tall Order: Tackle Systemic Racism in 4 Hours Yup, the NYT is right; it’s unlikely that Starbucks, or any other company, is going to make much

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It’s Finally Time to Kiss the Office Christmas Party Goodbye

THE HEADLINE ON A STORY in a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal pretty much said it all: Welcome to the Post-Weinstein Holiday Party. What followed was 1,400 depressing words that basically said, without actually saying it, something that you probably already know — the company Christmas/holiday party as we know it is officially dead and gone.

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Fake News or Pure BS? Why You Should Be Skeptical of Generation-Bashing Surveys

WHY ARE SO MANY people today so into generation bashing? For years, I’ve heard people gripe about the shortcomings of the Millennial generation, as if Gen X and the Baby Boomers (of which I am one) are somehow perfect and didn’t have their own challenges. I’ve written this before, but I’m sick and tired of

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Kicking Him When He’s Down: The Complicated Legacy of Hugh Hefner

NO MATTER HOW you felt about him, the death of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner, who died last week at his famous mansion in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles, was one of those passings that got a lot of people worked up. Since Hefner passed away at the ripe old age of 91, a

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Millennials May be Job Hoppers, But There’s a Really Good Reason For That

IT SHOULDN’T COME as any great surprise, but according to Gallup, Millennials aren’t particularly engaged in their jobs. As Gallup’s How Millennials Want to Work and Live report points out, a whopping “71 percent of employees in the Millennial generation (people born between 1980 and 1996) are either not engaged or actively disengaged at work.” Are Millennials really big job

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Why Life and Work Is So Very Different in the Aloha State

IT’S BEEN NEARLY 20 years since I’ve been in Hawaii, but the moment I arrived back in Honolulu last January, it felt like I had never left. My connection with the Aloha State goes back a long way. Not only did my wife and I honeymoon on Waikiki, but we lived on Oahu for three years in

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I Have a Big F***ing Problem With People Who Swear at Work

LAST SEPTEMBER, Fast Company published a story that intrigued me just as it should intrigue anyone who has navigated the day-to-day rants and mutterings of co-workers on the job. The title said it all: Do You Have a F*cking Problem With Swearing at Work? The article was filled with a boatload of statistics about how

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Don’t Forget That Clueless Management Never Goes Out of Style

IT’S LATE SUMMER, everybody out here in the People’s Republic of California seem to be on vacation, and Labor Day is still a couple of weeks away. So, it’s time for some old school clueless management from the good people over at Tronc. Don’t know what “Tronc” is? I’d be surprised if you did, but

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It’s Not Easy, But Here’s How to Deal With Passive-Aggressive Behavior

ALTHOUGH IT PAINS ME to say this I’m somewhat of an expert on passive-aggressive behavior. The good people at Wikipedia describe passive-aggressive behavior as follows: The indirect expression of hostility, such as through procrastination, stubbornness, sullen behavior, or deliberate or repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible. That’s a pretty

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