How to Motivate Your Team When People Keep Quitting

Summary.   

When teammates leave, it can have a ripple effect. How can you help mitigate further attrition and keep everyone motivated and engaged when someone else quits? The authors offer six strategies: 1) Create certainty for your team wherever you can 2)  Solicit feedback to assess individual and collective capacity. 3) Enable autonomy. 4) Give your team permission to push back. 5) Shield your team. 6) Create connection.

Maintaining good morale and engagement is part and parcel of strong leadership. When you have turnover on your team, it is especially imperative that you take measures to keep your team positive and motivated. Research has shown that, due to social contagion, when a coworker quits, it can spread to affect other employees’ quitting behavior. That is, when one person leaves your team, it increases the likelihood that others will do the same.

Given this, here are six strategies to keep your team motivated when someone quits:

Create terra firma.

The human brain was not built for the amount of uncertainty we are facing at work and in our lives, write social psychologist Heidi Grant and the Chief Learning Officer for EY Americas Tal Goldhamer. With ever-changing shifts in the business landscape, customer and employee expectations, work arrangements, and an unclear end to the pandemic, it can feel like the ground is continually shifting underneath our feet. This uncertainty produces a threat state in the brain, which can result in decreased motivation, cooperation, self-control, and overall well-being. Turnover on your team only adds to this threat state.

To counter this, create certainty for your team wherever you can. If you have no plans to leave the company, make that clear. You might say, “Just so you know, I don’t have any plans to leave. I will be here for you.”

Or, if your team is looking for clarity on the company’s strategic direction and you have questions about it as well, instead of saying something like “I’m sure we’ll find out soon,” provide process certainty by informing your team of your plan to seek the answer and a specific date by when you’ll get back to them.

This will help create more solid ground and a sense of stability for your team members..

Complete Article at HBR

 

Empathy Rules

 

Summary.   

Sociologist Emile Durkheim coined the phrase anomie to describe a destabilized and destabilizing state when rules and rule givers lose legitimacy. It’s what we feel when we face a virus that plays by one set of rules, politicians who play by another, and a professional life that proceeds independent of each — and when we face all of this in social isolation. Empathy can help us navigate this period of anomie. The author outlines four practices, which she calls “empathy rules,” that can help us cut across the divisions in our lives and build a sense of community.

In August 2021, my employer, MIT, announced that all instruction, without exception, would be in person, with vaccination and regular testing. In context, I found this anxiety-provoking. As soon as I took a Covid test, I was cleared to teach, even though I wouldn’t get my results until the next day. The protocol was designed not to protect individuals but to prevent community spread. Students would wear face coverings; my classrooms were a jumble of surgical masks and makeshift bandanas. Faculty were asked to teach without masks, a directive everyone seemed to ignore.

But those rules were only for MIT. The week after MIT began classes, I gave the freshman convocation address at Boston College. There, I was told, no masks were allowed on campus. I lectured by Zoom, my electronic presence an affront.

So it was, across offices and industries, corporations and legal jurisdictions — a patchwork of hygiene and work protocols, each fiefdom declaring its reality.

Complete Article at HBR

What Ford and Tesla's Digital Presence Can Teach Us

Ford and Tesla's web designs can give lessons as to why no brand can afford to ignore its digital presence.

From clothing to big-ticket technology items to vehicles, more than 87% of buyer journeys now start online, according to Salesforce. Still, so many legacy brands continue to underinvest in their online presence, even as they spend tremendous amounts on above-the-line (ATL) advertising (think TV ads, magazine ads and billboards). As CEO of a global digital agency, I see this often — large corporations that are too slow to recognize and capitalize on new opportunities, even moves as basic as creating an effective website. Take Ford: Once a pioneer in the auto industry, the manufacturer has kept its focus on ATL, even as younger and more dynamic brands like Tesla started eating into its market share by appealing to digitally-accustomed consumers.  

I recently compared Ford and Tesla websites to analyze how well they understand online audiences — in the process of examining messaging, user flow and UI/UX design — and some of its key points are explored below. The most fundamental takeaway, however, is that no brand, big or small, can afford to ignore its digital presence

A quick look at today’s car buyer 

2020 research from the tech journalism/report aggregator DataReportal indicates that “the average American spends 7 hours and 11 minutes looking at a screen every day,” which is just over the global average. Pandemic-related home-based work and lockdowns will likely have added to this already amazing number.

Complete Article at Entrepreneur India

To Find Creative Solutions, Look Outside Your Industry

Summary.   

The chaos and crises of the last two years have created all kinds of questions for leaders and organizations. One of the biggest questions is: Do we have new ideas about where to look for new ideas? When it comes to innovation and problem-solving, there will always be a place for old-fashioned, time-consuming R&D — research & development. Today, though, there is also a place for a different kind of R&D — rip off and duplicate. The fastest way for organizations to make sense of challenges they are seeing for the first time is to survey unrelated fields for ideas that have been working for a long time. Why gamble on untested strategies and insights if you can quickly apply strategies and insights that are already proven elsewhere? That’s how leaders can help their colleagues keep learning as fast as the world is changing.

A big challenge in times of disruption and uncertainty is for people and organizations to keep learning as fast as the world is changing — to analyze problems they haven’t encountered before, to make sense of opportunities they haven’t thought about before, to process emotions they haven’t experienced before.

That’s why leaders should encourage their colleagues to learn from experts in fields they haven’t worked in before. Practices that are routine in one industry can be revolutionary when they migrate to another industry, especially when they challenge conventional wisdom in that industry. What better way to fuel your company’s imagination than to look for inspiration outside your field? If you want to learn fast, learn from strangers.

Complete Article at HBR

3 Strategies for Holding Yourself Accountable

Summary.   

As you progress in your career, it often gets harder to ask for help in reaching your goals and staying accountable to yourself to achieve them. If you’ve reached a career plateau, the author recommends three strategies to hold yourself accountable to your goals: 1) Enlist an accountability partner. 2) Go public in declaring and sharing goals. 3) Change your environment.

At the beginning of your career, you were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. You asked for help and soaked up the wisdom of your mentors and managers to climb the mountain. But once you experienced success, you found yourself scared to look down. After all, it’s intimidating at the top, when you think of everything you could lose. At this point asking for help begins to feel a lot less like a learning experience and a lot more like proof that you might not be cut out for the job at hand.

And the more successful you become, the less accountability you have. It’s not that you aren’t responsible to anyone; it’s that your goals become a lot more subjective: Lead the legal team, run the company, manage a department. So no matter the outcome, you can say, “Well, I tried my best.” At the same time, your calendar starts filling up with stuff you “have to do” as opposed to things you should be doing. So you find yourself in meetings you don’t fully believe add value and fighting tooth and nail to make time for tasks and projects that actually create impact.

Compelete Article at HBR

 

4 Ways Managers Can Increase Flexibility Without Losing Productivity

Summary.   

If employees want the benefits of flexibility, they’ll also need to shoulder some of the responsibility that goes with it, like autonomous problem-solving and providing and checking for updates. However, that doesn’t mean setting them adrift in the storm. Managers are still responsible for making sure everyone is rowing to the correct location in the same direction — even if they’re rowing at different times. To increase flexibility for employees without losing productivity — or sanity — managers will need to think differently about when employees work together, who works together, and how to share information and with whom, all while being careful to stay abreast of any changes and rapidly communicating changes in priorities.

The past two years have shown that employees desire greater flexibility — and they’re willing to change jobs to get it. Flexibility has tremendous benefits for employees, including reduced burnout and greater job satisfaction. However, it can also result in spiraling coordination costs for managers, untenable amounts of wasted effort, and the inability to respond quickly to client requests. The brief huddles that once allowed teams to promptly brainstorm solutions and align efforts are now harder to pull together. It can take days to get most members in the same virtual place at the same time (including one person who’s half-listening from the dentist’s chair).

To increase employee flexibility on their teams, managers need guidance and support — otherwise, they could burn out on the job or check out to find a new one. Here are four ways managers can offer their teams flexibility without breaking under the coordination costs or significantly stalling progress.

Rethink When Employees Work Together

For complex tasks that require teamwork, it’s not feasible to provide employees with complete flexibility (i.e., the ability to work for any duration at any time). However, returning to the standard in-office work week won’t work either. Thus, managers will need to think differently and deeply about project requirements and schedule accordingly.

Complete Article at HBR

 

The A to Z of testing before hiring

 

Before diving into the how and why of testing before hiring, it’s important to understand the objective behind it.

What’s the goal of testing before hiring? Many hiring managers view this as the magic bullet that is going to get them the perfect hire, while some view it as a necessary hurdle to closing positions.

However, mostly it is important to enhance the interview process and remove bias from it to hire the right fit. Because in an average interview many things are oversold including both experience and work accomplished, so testing can help us see though some of this fog, equip a trained interviewer to ask targeted questions and understand the responses much better, and remove bias from the hiring process.

In an exclusive webcast in association with Pearson, Yuri Roy, who heads Talent Acquisition at Tech Mahindra Business Services, shared insights into the A to Z of testing before hiring and why it becomes imperative in an interview process.

Defining the primary objective of testing before hiring

Before diving into the how and why of testing before hiring, it’s important to understand the objective behind it. Yuri shared that testing before hiring is a very individual activity-as an organization you need to decide what is the purpose the testing needs to serve. 

Complete Article at People matters

Want to Become a Millionaire? Follow Warren Buffett's 4 Rules.

How many entrepreneurs are as confident now as they were before the Covid-19 pandemic began? Yes, we know the majority of the S&P 500 are companies that began in down markets. And yes, the best entrepreneurs intuitively use hard times to lean in and listen even harder to their market and customers, innovating where necessary and making their companies more resilient than ever before. 

But for many of us, the current climate feels different. The exits many or even most were aiming for are now delayed or entirely different. Consumers are different in ways we could not have predicted. Employees are different and even the fundamental forms of employment have changed. 

Given this, is it still possible to become financially secure enough to retire? From my perspective, it absolutely is, but quite possibly through different methods than the ones you’d expected. I believe we can build a map for what we need to do now in four words: Think like Warren Buffett. 

That’s it. But when I say this, know that I’m defining a type and not necessarily extolling the person. Listen closely to the rules Buffet has defined through a variety of mediums (spoiler alert: the fourth rule was given to financial advisor Adiel Gorel, who created and hosted the PBS specials Remote Control Retirement Riches and Life 2.0, in the form of a personal note). These rules have been consistent for decades but are even more important during our current political- and pandemic-related economic travails. 

1. Pay your savings first

As Buffett has noted and demonstrated on multiple occasions, you should “pay yourself first” by putting a portion of your funds away first. 

Complete Article at Entrepreneur India

Employee-employer thoughts about salary interests of job seekers differ: Adecco survey

 

The research was conducted across ten countries and the Latin America region over more than a 1,000 workers and 155 companies.

According to the findings of a survey conducted by The Adecco Group, salary, workplace atmosphere and career growth are the three most important criteria that workers are taking into account while looking for job opportunities. According to the official communique, the survey aims at comparing what workers want and what employers think that workers want.

Salary and workplace atmosphere

The communique reads that at first glance employers and workers seem to be aligned on the main criteria that motivate people to apply for a job. Both the sides agree that salary is the topmost consideration followed by workplace atmosphere and career development. 

Commenting on the angle of salary,  Christophe Catoir, President of Adecco wrote in the communique, “GenZ and GenY workers are more likely to be swayed by salary, while older generations focus more on the content of the job and work atmosphere. Only workers in Latin America and Spain tend to prefer collaborative to individual work, though companies think this preference applies more widely.”

However, against 53% of the employees considering salary as the most important factor, 72% of employers look at it as the first priority. In fact, the perception of the employers and employees differ to a great extent in terms of the brand image of the employer. While according to the employers brand image and size is kept at the seventh position by the employees, the latter has kept it in the sixteenth position in terms of priority. 

Complete Article at People matters 

Can AI Teach Us How to Become More Emotionally Intelligent?

Summary.   

Emotional intelligence matters more to one’s success as a manager than IQ or technical skill. The principal takeaway: emotional intelligence is just as important as any “hard skill” and investing in it helps individuals and teams succeed at work.

Companies are wise to explore AI solutions that can help make their teams more emotionally intelligent, and better communicators. Indeed, AI can enhance our emotional intelligence by making us more self-aware and helping us manage key work relationships. Enhancing our emotional intelligence and communication skills makes us more efficient, productive, and empathetic. Although the technology is far from perfect, it is becoming more intelligent every day as platforms increase in data, scale, and sophistication. The technology is in place to make our teams more emotionally intelligent and companies more successful and profitable.

The debate over whether AI will replace humans in the workforce often boils down to a handy, twofold explanation: AI will replace humans for most repetitive and manual labor tasks, while humans will excel at soft skills like creative communication and relationship-building. While some of this is true — humans and machines will each play to their strengths — it probably oversimplifies AI’s role in our professional lives. We believe AI will help humans do better human work, namely by helping us improve our emotional intelligence, soft skills, and interpersonal communication skills.

Complete Article at HBR

How Leaders Can Build Connection in a Disconnected Workplace

Summary.   

For too long, workplace connection has been thought of as something that just happens during the workday, whether via hallway conversations, water-cooler moments, or grabbing coffee. With spontaneous moments of connection more challenging to recreate in a remote or hybrid environment, managers need to take a more proactive approach, especially given how important connection is to retention. Consider this: If employees don’t have a best friend at work, there’s only a 1 in 12 chance that they’ll be engaged. The author offers four practical ways to build stronger relationships on your team: 1) Make workplace connection a ritual; 2) Make it easier to ask for support; 3) Make onboarding more experiential; and 4) Make recharging a reality.

Another way to think of the Great Resignation is as the “Great Disconnection.” In the wake of the pandemic and the vast shift to flexible work from anywhere policies, 65% of workers say they feel less connected to their coworkers. Employee disconnection is one of the main drivers of voluntary turnover, with lonely employees costing U.S. companies up to $406 billion a year. Research by Cigna shows that lonely employees have a higher risk of turnover, lower productivity, more missed days at work, and lower quality of work. Meanwhile, BetterUp found that employees who experience high-levels of belonging have a drop in turnover risk, an increase in job performance, a reduction in sick days, and an increase in employer promoter score, which results in an annual savings of $52 million for a 10,000-person company.

Complete Article at HBR 

Communicating Authentically in a Virtual World

Summary.   

Authenticity is important at work, but sometime’s it’s challenging to identify and maintain. Plus, what if the authentic emotions you’re feeling conflict with the message you’re trying to convey to colleagues or employees? When is it useful to lean into authenticity, and when is inauthenticity actually a better strategy? Research on how people perceive authenticity during in-person, email, and phone conversations sheds some light on how to navigate this issue, particularly amidst hybrid work. The short answer: if your communication is authentic, try to speak with someone in-person. If you need to suppress emotions, consider using the phone or another audio method. And if you need to use email, make sure it’s clear to the recipient that you chose that method because others weren’t available.

One of the most common leadership buzzwords amongst both executives and academics is “authenticity.” Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg emphasized that “leaders should strive for authenticity over perfection,” while Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks, noted, “the companies that are lasting are those that are authentic.” Indeed, research studies have similarly affirmed the importance of authenticity as a key driver of overall work outcomes for everyone from frontline workers to leaders. Alternatively, being perceived as inauthentic has been shown to destroy trust and relationships, damage customer loyalty, worsen performance evaluations, and decrease organizational profits.

Yet, despite the importance of authenticity, it can be challenging to develop and maintain. Take communication: while being perceived as authentic is ideal, actually always behaving authentically can lead to disaster. Imagine a manager who, while laying off an employee, expresses underlying happiness because her soon-to-be spouse just accepted her marriage proposal that morning. Or an executive sending out a message about a new company diversity initiative, but doing so in a dour tone because his child just dropped out of college.

Complete Article at HBR

 

Convincing Your Company Leaders to Invest in New Technology

Summary.   

It’s no surprise that factors such as cost, and the availability of skilled workers, can stall the pursuit of digital strategies. More surprising, however, was the observed inertia around technology (especially at times that necessitate digitalization to remain agile), which can be explained by psychological factors holding business leaders back.

For business owners and leaders tasked with driving digital strategy, it is their perception of risk that is more impactful on success than anything else. Deciding to incorporate digital tools or infrastructure can be daunting because of the unknown it represents, but shying away from the process can be a far riskier path. By understanding the psychological barriers behind digital decision-making, industry stakeholders can and should encourage technology adoption in small and medium-sized businesses — in doing so, they will strengthen the backbone of the global economy.

Human decision making is a complicated phenomenon. Many studies on the topic highlight the parameters defining our mental processes, even if they can’t fully explain them. These studies often find that we can be guided towards an outcome that we know is against our best interests. And this is the case in business, too.

It’s easy to view corporate decision making as something steeped in careful consideration — a binary process led by data and best practice. However, businesses are ultimately run by humans. Commercial progress is determined by the choices that we make, either alone or as a group.

As a result, the unpredictability of the human brain can influence a range of business decisions. This is even more pronounced when processing the outcomes of technology-related decisions, which teases out every dimension of our psyche. This is because for lots of companies, especially small and mid-sized firms, new tech is still very much a leap into the unknown.

Complete Article at HBR

5 Ways Managers Can Support Pregnant Employees

 

Summary.   

Pregnancy discrimination still occurs frequently in the U.S., and new research shows that it may be linked to poor health outcomes for mothers. There are actionable strategies employers can adopt to reduce detrimental health and well-being outcomes for pregnant employees. Specifically, the data suggests that supportive coworkers and supervisors act as stress-reducing resources for them, and employees who felt supported by both coworkers and supervisors benefitted from the largest reductions in prenatal stress. Furthermore, this reduction in stress was associated with long-term reductions in postpartum depression and quicker physical recovery following the birth of their child. Instead of turning a blind eye to pregnancy discrimination, leaders can promote a more positive organizational environment and offer support by engaging in the five practices discussed here.

Although there are laws against pregnancy discrimination in the workplace, discrimination still occurs frequently. In fact, statistics show that there have been almost 15,000 pregnancy discrimination claims filed in the United States in the past five years. While we know that discrimination can have real consequences for a pregnant employee’s career outcomes, including reduced salary, promotions, and social capital, an outstanding question is whether there are health consequences for pregnant employees or their babies.

To answer this question, we conducted two studies examining the workplace experiences and health outcomes of new mothers and their babies. We found that experiences of pregnancy discrimination linked to an uptick in moms’ stress, which raised their risk for postpartum depression. This stress also led to lower birth weights, lower gestational ages, and an increased number of doctors’ visits for the babies a few weeks after birth. While it may seem obvious that pregnancy discrimination negatively impacts pregnant employees, we were surprised to find that it indirectly impacted the babies they were carrying while they were experiencing the discrimination. This shows the far-reaching implications of workplace discrimination and highlights the importance of addressing it.

Complete Article at HBR

How to Find a New Job: An HBR Guide

Summary.   

Are you ready to look for a new job? This comprehensive article covers everything from how to update your resume and write a cover letter to how to ace your interview and follow up. The piece also includes sample language to try and links to resources in the HBR archive.

Looking for a new job is both exciting and daunting. On the one hand, you may be envisioning what your next opportunity will look like and dreaming about resigning from your current role. On the other hand, you may be overwhelmed with all of the job hunting-related tasks, and worried if — or when — you’ll actually land your next gig.

We know from research that breaking down big goals, like finding a new job, into smaller, concrete tasks helps because we’re able to see progress. You likely won’t secure your next role in one day, but you can take steps toward your ultimate objective — for example, by sending out your resume to two recruiters or having three networking calls.

Finding a job is a topic that HBR has hundreds of articles on, so I sorted through our archive to surface our best advice to help make the challenge feel a little more manageable.

Complete Article at HBR

Finding the Right Balance — and Flexibility — in Your Leadership Style

 

Summary.   

It’s an outdated idea that a leader should adopt a fixed leadership style that’s agnostic to the specific context in which he or she is operating. A single approach to leadership is not going to meet the myriad of challenges that today’s leaders face. Thus, rather than perfecting a “leadership sweet spot,” a leader needs to develop and broaden his or her “leadership sweet range.” The wider this range becomes, the more effective or versatile the leader will be. The authors identify seven core tensions between traditional and emerging leadership approaches and offer strategies for leaders looking to broaden their range.

There have been many calls for leadership approaches to shift to meet the demands of a fast-changing, unpredictable world. Traditional “command-and-control” styles are considered outdated, while newer, more agile, and collaborative approaches have become de rigueur.

However, the reality for today’s leaders is more complex than “out with the old, in with the new.” For example, we found that some aspects of leadership that seemed to be outdated, such as top-down decision-making and a focus on tactical execution, were extremely valuable to get through the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus, rather than settling on a more static model of emerging behaviors, we found that “seven leadership tensions” between the traditional and emerging worlds were a much more accurate way to describe the current state of effective leadership.

Complete Article at HBR

When Being Indispensable Backfires

Summary.   

If you’ve become so valuable to your manager that your career has stalled because they don’t want to let you go, it’s time to become dispensable. But how can you do it gracefully? The author presents four ways to keep your value as an employee from halting your career growth. While you show your value and expertise to your manager and team and make an impact in your current role, set boundaries, take on work you’re excited about, network within your organization, and set the person who comes after you up for success.

“The critical mistake you made is that you became indispensable,” a mentor once said to me. “That’s why you can’t get off his team and move on to your next assignment.”

After more than four years in the same role, I found that my career had stalled even though I had gone above and beyond my job description. My boss frequently volunteered my time to other leaders to build their strategy decks. He asked me to call vendors to get them to purchase annual gala tables for the nonprofit board he served on. He had me write his speeches for external events. He asked me to help manage his LinkedIn profile, and soon other leaders came to me with similar requests. Finally, he asked me to help the CEO and other executives prepare for interviews, because I was so good at crafting media briefs.

The observation from my mentor was a rude awakening. Because I had said yes to every assignment, in hopes that would help me move on to my next opportunity, I had become indispensable, and my manager wouldn’t let me go. Being indispensable had temporarily killed my career.

Complete Article at HBR

 

In the Hybrid Era, On-Sites Are the New Off-Sites

Summary.   

If your goal is to bring people together in real life at work — sometimes, all the time, or anytime — you need to design a day employees won’t want to miss. At the very least, it’s critical to be intentional about how you plan your company’s days in the office, not only to add incentive, but also to make it worth your employees’ and your company’s time. The author recounts her experience working with a company to design in-person, monthly “Superdays” and presents three elements of a successful on-site.

Remember off-sites? Those once-a-year — maybe once-a-quarter — get togethers where we gathered for deep-dive strategy work, bonded on ropes courses, binged on professional development, and just hung out and got to know our colleagues and customers? While these gatherings used to be something to look forward to, these days, many employees don’t want to come into the office, let alone to an off-site.

If your goal is to bring people together in real life at work — sometimes, all the time, or anytime — you need to design a day employees won’t want to miss. At the very least, it’s critical to be intentional about how you plan your company’s days in the office, not only to add incentive, but also to make it worth your employees’ and your company’s time.

Since the early days of the pandemic, I’ve been partnering with CEOs and senior HR leaders to help them manage and even thrive during these turbulent times. As offices have slowly reopened, some leaders have asked me to help them design intentional “on-sites” (in-person days) to bring their teams together in new and impactful ways in a hybrid environment.

Reuben Daniels, managing partner of EA Markets, agreed to allow me to share the details of our work together when I was hired to help the company design their in-person, monthly “Superdays.” The details of this one case study can help guide leaders of companies of any industry or size to make the best use of their resources as they create in-person experiences with an ROE — return on engagement — in mind.

 Complete Article at HBR

Have Remote Employees Lost Touch with Customers’ Needs?

 

Summary.   

Before their companies went remote or hybrid, non-sales employees usually had some sight line to customers. However, as time marched on, non-customer-facing teams started to lose their connection to customers. They didn’t run into a sales rep in the elevator or sit next to a customer success agent in the cafeteria. The anecdotal, hallway conversations stopped. Losing sight of customers means internal teams are more likely to double down on their own metrics and agendas, putting the organization at risk for silos (in the short term) and at risk of being out-innovated and eventually becoming irrelevant (in the long term). Here are three ways leaders can bring your customers to life for teams who don’t interact with them.

After months of successfully working from home, the finance, HR, and legal teams of a mid-sized bank decided that they were going to adopt a hybrid model, permanently. Covid-induced remote work had proven that physical presence wasn’t a requirement for productivity.

Some employees elected to be 100% remote, others came in a few days a week, and those who wanted to work in the office were given safe spaces to do so. It all seemed fine at first; productivity stayed high. Yet after several months, they began to realize that something was missing from their daily conversations — or rather someone. 

One operations leader put her finger on it when she said, “We used to start meetings talking about customers. Now we hardly mention them at all.”

They’re not alone.

While much has been written about the need to keep teams connected to each other in a virtual environment, losing your organizational tether to the customer is more insidious, and perhaps even more dangerous.

Here’s what we’ve observed in our clients: Before their companies went remote or hybrid, most employees throughout the organization had some sight line to customers. Even if they didn’t interface with them directly, they had regular conversations with customer-facing teammates, and when the organization talked about “customers,” everyone was clear on who they were and what they needed. And when the pandemic hit, people rallied. The top priority was keeping the business afloat, so teams leaned into taking care of customers.

Complete Article at HBR

How to Become a Master at Talking to Strangers

Entrepreneurs must become experts at connecting with anyone-and with a few simple strategies, you can. Here's what happened when I tried them myself.

A couple of years ago, I started to talk to strangers. 

That’s not to say I hadn’t talked to strangers before that, because I had. I’m the son and brother of highly social small-­business owners, and I’m a journalist, so talking to strangers has been both a way of life and a livelihood for me. And yet, a few years ago I noticed I wasn’t doing it much anymore — if at all. Between balancing a demanding job and a really demanding small child, I was often tired, distracted, and overscheduled. The prospect of striking up conversations with random strangers in coffee shops, or bars, or on the bus started to feel daunting. Eventually, I just stopped doing it.

This was a coping strategy, of course. I was overwhelmed, so something had to go. And talking to strangers can, as it turns out, be taxing. Psychologists have found that just making small talk with a stranger can be cognitively demanding, tiring, and even stressful. That makes sense. You don’t know the person, you don’t know where the conversation is going, so you must pay closer attention than you would if you were talking to someone you know well. But psychologists have found that talking to a stranger actually boosts your mental performance — for that same reason: It’s a workout. I was saving myself a bit of effort, but I also noticed that my life was becoming less interesting, less surprising, maybe even a little lonely.

After my epiphany, I got to wondering: Why don’t we talk to strangers more, what happens when we do, and how can we get better at it? It turns out, many researchers are asking the same questions. I started flying around the world to meet them: psychologists, evolutionary scientists, historians, urban planners, entrepreneurs, sociologists, and — you guessed it — a ton of fascinating strangers I met along the way. They all taught me that talking to strangers can not only be fun but also enhance our sense of well-being, make us smarter, expand our social and professional networks, and even help us overcome some of our most intractable social problems.

Complete Article at Entrepreneur India

 

Our Favorite Management Tips of 2021

Summary.   

Our Management Tip of the Day newsletter continues to be one of HBR’s most popular newsletters. In this article, we list 10 of our favorites from the past year. Topics range from why you should use timeboxing to get a better handle of your to-do list to how to prepare for a tough conversation.

Another year, another set of challenges and responsibilities for managers to tackle. Hybrid work, the Great Resignation, mass burnout — on and on. Each weekday, in our Management Tip of the Day newsletter, HBR offers daily tips to help you better manage your teams — and yourselves — through this period of profound change and uncertainty. Here are 10 of our favorite tips from 2021.

Making the WFH Case to Leaders Who Want to Return to the Office

As companies start returning to the office, managers are finding themselves caught in the middle between employees who want to keep working from home and senior leaders who want everyone back at their desks. How can you navigate this tension? Start by finding out what’s driving leaders’ concerns. Do they doubt that people are taking work seriously? Are they worried that employees aren’t collaborating enough? Once you know what’s behind their push to return, find ways to address those concerns. Show that remote work is beneficial to the company, not just to individuals. For example, you can emphasize your ability to retain skilled employees who would otherwise leave. You might point out that remote work offers the ability to draw from a wider talent pool. Consider asking your HR department if they have data on how working from home is paying off for your company. Also, demonstrate that your team is engaged no matter where they’re located. For example, you might invite leaders to video meetings that include both in-person and remote workers so they can see that everyone is committed and participating regardless of where they’re calling in from. If leadership is applying pressure for employees to come back to the office, and you believe there’s a balance that could work better for everyone, try these strategies to make your case.

Adapted from “What to Do If Your Team Doesn’t Want to Go Back to the Office,” by Liz Kislik

How to Give Critical Feedback — Remotely

Giving critical feedback is one of your most challenging responsibilities as a manager — and if you’re working remotely, it’s even harder. How can you update your approach to giving feedback in a WFH world? Here are some key steps to keep in mind:

Start by asking questions. You need to understand your employee’s perception of their performance before expressing yours.

Complete Article at HBR