Sweet Reason with a dose of Common Sense
THANK GOD FOR GALLUP, because if it weren’t for them, I doubt that anyone would be focusing very much on employee engagement these days. Just last week, Gallup came out with their latest installment of “How low can engagement go?” with this headline — U.S. Engagement Hits 11-Year Low. The subhed on the story told
HERE’S A PROBLEM that I struggled with when I was a middle manager. It popped up in places I worked from Kentucky to Hawaii, and was detailed recently in a Harvard Business Review story titled When New Hires Get Paid More, Top Performers Resign. First. As the summary in HBR describes it: “To attract new
Editor’s Note: I’ve been occasionally reposting some popular articles from the past. This one was published here back in March 2019. HERE’S A WORKPLACE TRUISM : Good people frequently get fired. Steve Jobs got fired from Apple, eventually returning to build it into the high-flying, trend-setting company that it is today. Oprah Winfrey, Walt Disney, and
HERE’S ANOTHER WRINKLE to the debate over remote and hybrid work — it’s called chronoworking. That’s not a word that rolls off the tongue easily, and it was new to me when I read a BBC Worklife story about it titled The ‘chronoworking’ productivity hack that helps workers excel. So, what is “chronoworking?” As BBC
Editor’s Note: I’ve been occasionally reposting some popular articles from the past. This one was published here and on LinkedIn back in June 2018. I LOVE IT WHEN a long-time workplace practice gets re-defined by some silly new terminology. Yes, I was excited when I discovered what The New York Times is now calling that time you get off
I’M NOT GOING TO spend a lot of time writing about the ebb and flow or the ups and downs of Artificial Intelligence. There’s already a TON of that coming from everywhere else. This isn’t a big surprise. As I wrote here recently, “You’ll be seeing a lot more stories about the overhyping of AI
THERE’S A TON of workplace jargon we all have to navigate, but here’s a new term to get your head around — “workplace friction.” This isn’t terribly new. Stanford Professor Bob Sutton — well known for his book The No Asshole Rule — says that workplace friction is “simply putting obstacles in front of people
REWARDING EMPLOYEES can be a tricky business. It’s also hard for many organizations to get right no matter how good their intentions are. The key to it — and this is critically important — is that whatever you give employees to say thank you for their hard work must make them feel like you sincerely
Editor’s Note: I’ve been reposting some of my popular articles from the past. This one was published here back in August 2017. THE OLD ADAGE is true — there’s nothing new under the sun. But once in awhile even I get surprised by a new insight that makes up for the crap that passes for management
YOU DON’T HEAR all that much about employee engagement anymore. It’s still an important metric for organizations to get a fix on the state of their workforce, but after years of debate and lots of money spent on how to improve engagement, it seems to be another thing that slipped away after the pandemic-driven lockdown.
