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How Managers Can Support Employees With Long COVID

Implementing workplace accommodations can help companies retain employees experiencing long-term effects from COVID-19 and other chronic illnesses.

Fiona LowensteinMarch 14, 2022

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-managers-can-support-employees-with-long-covid/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=other%20chronic%20illnesses&utm_campaign=Enews%20BOTW%203/18/2022

In the two years since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been nearly 80 million COVID-19 cases in the U.S. While a majority of people infected with the virus recover and return to their daily lives in days or weeks, many suffer from “long COVID,” or PASC (post-acute sequelae of a SARS-CoV-2 infection), a chronic illness that is still not widely understood.

Long COVID typically refers to symptoms following a COVID-19 infection that last for more than four weeks, although many people suffer from symptoms for months or even years. While more data is needed to better understand the wider implications of the illness, studies estimate that long COVID may occur following 10% to 30% of all COVID-19 infections and may be responsible for at least 15% of current labor shortages.

This is an issue that businesses and leaders cannot afford to overlook. Some long COVID patients are unable to work at all; others can work if provided with accommodations. Creating supportive policies for people with long COVID can help employers retain workers and better support chronically ill and disabled employees.

Educate yourself on long COVID. Understanding how long COVID can affect employees is the first step in supporting them. While long COVID is an umbrella term that includes a diverse array of symptoms and experiences, there are some typical symptoms that can impair people’s ability to work. These include but are not limited to fatigue, “brain fog,” tinnitus, smell and taste disorders, gastrointestinal issues, new allergies, shortness of breath, dizziness or fainting upon standing, and post-exertional symptom exacerbation — the worsening of symptoms after physical, mental, or emotional exertion.

Dr. Tenesha Wards, D.C., A.C.N., founder and medical director at Infinity Wellness Center in Austin, Texas, said she was better prepared to accommodate a new hire with long COVID because she was already familiar with the illness. “You can’t learn everyone’s disease,” she admitted. “But [you can] have an open conversation.” Wards recommends that employers talk with employees about symptoms, methods of symptom management, and how long periods of worsened health typically last.

Employers can start by learning about post-exertional symptom exacerbation, or post-exertional malaise (PEM), a common symptom of long COVID and related chronic illnesses. People with PEM often have to carefully pace work tasks with rest, because overexertion can lead to temporarily or permanently worsened health.

When Catherine Thomson returned to work as a physiotherapist after contracting COVID-19 in January 2020, she felt that there was a “mismatch” between what she was capable of and what her employer expected. After attempts at coaching clients, Thomson “crashed big-time.” She developed tachycardia, breathlessness, and extreme sensitivity to light and noise. “It took me about 12 months to get back to where I was before,” she explained.

Thomson, who is also the cofounder of a support group for physical therapists living with long COVID, explained that “episodic disability” can be confusing, so it’s important that employers learn about PEM and other symptoms that may be less widely understood.

Dr. Benjamin Abramoff, M.D., director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Post-COVID Assessment and Recovery Clinic, noted, “It’s not uncommon for returning to work to re-trigger symptoms that had been improving or resolved.”

“I think what carries us to … our recovery are the people around us,” said Ibrahim Rashid, a graduate student at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, who has long COVID. “The most important relationships [are] our employer and our partner.”

Create a safe environment for open communication. Disclosing information about a disability or chronic illness can be intimidating for employees, but transparent communication is crucial for employers to provide the right kind of support. Some employees may choose to disclose their illness while interviewing for a job. In these situations, it benefits both parties if the employer can offer a prompt response confirming that they have understood the employee’s disclosure and any requests for accommodations.

“It is terrifying to disclose a disability … before you have an offer,” Rashid said. Rashid’s fear is reasonable; disabled and chronically ill people face pervasive stigmas, and workplace disability discrimination persists despite legal protections. Rashid once had to wait a month to hear back from a potential employer after his disclosure, which led him to pursue other opportunities instead.

In some cases, it may be helpful for coworkers to be aware of an employee’s illness. Some employees may prefer for employers to disclose their illness to coworkers on their behalf, whereas others might prefer to speak directly to coworkers. Lesley Macniven, a human resources consultant and founding member of Long COVID Support and Long COVID Work — international support groups based in the United Kingdom — suggests that one way to provide better understanding and support on teams is to give employees who have long COVID the option to lead interactive team sessions, where open discussion is welcome, upon their return to work.

Offer remote options. Many long COVID patients find that remote work is a better option for managing symptoms than being in an office. “Working from home can allow patients to pace themselves, which can be important for individuals’ recovery,” Abramoff explained. “It also allows them to conserve energy by not having to deal with the commute, walking into the building, [or] settling into the office. That way, the energy that they do have can be devoted to work.”

Remote work may also feel safer for patients who are worried about reinfection. Research indicates that long COVID patients may be at greater risk for reinfection, and some may have been unable to get vaccinated.

“I’m so scared of getting it again,” Rashid said. He explained that working remotely has given him “peace of mind.”

Some employees with long COVID may feel comfortable returning to the office. The important thing is for employers to avoid making blanket assumptions or policies and instead defer to individual employees living with chronic illnesses about their preferred methods for mitigating risk.

Consider job flexibility and be open to change. Employees with long COVID may need to reduce their work hours or transition to new roles. Nisa Malli, a labor researcher and COVID “long-hauler” in Canada, recommends offering training and retraining programs “for those that cannot physically or cognitively do the same jobs as before.”

Flexible hours and long lead times for work deadlines and events can also be helpful. “If I’m trying to schedule meetings on Zoom that [my employee] needs to be on, I’ll try to schedule them a week out to give her time to prepare,” Wards explained. She emphasized that it was more important to find sustainable long-term solutions than to force the employee back into her original workflow. “They’ve learned to work differently and adapt,” she said. “[If] you believe in them … give them that grace to heal.”

Reevaluate benefits and paid leave policies. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the pandemic has prompted many companies to expand their benefit programs in order to better support employee mental health and well-being. In a survey of 2,504 HR professionals across the U.S., SHRM found that 78% of employers “developed benefit packages specific to the more socially distanced workplaces.” There’s a growing recognition by companies that employees need more diverse benefits when it comes to offerings like telemedicine, family caregiving, and mental health. At a time when companies are thinking more expansively about the needs of employees, those living with chronic illnesses should not be left out.

Employers should consider expanding benefit packages to include part-time employees, stipends for specialists, and partnerships with holistic health centers. They should also be prepared to offer extended leaves of absence and rethink traditional leave restrictions that may be more difficult for people with complex chronic illnesses. Most companies’ current leave policies require extensive documentation, which may be a roadblock for people with long COVID, because they often face doubt from clinicians and are sometimes unable to provide proof of infection. In addition, sick leave policies that allow for only a certain number of “episodes” are less likely to be useful to long COVID patients than policies that renew.

Invest in peer-mentorship programs. While some of the issues long COVID patients face are unique to the current pandemic, many are shared across the disabled and chronically ill populations. “Creating a workplace culture that is supportive for long-haulers means creating a workplace culture that is supportive for workers with disabilities [and] chronic and episodic illnesses,” explained Malli.

Employers should consider funding peer mentorship programs and workplace support groups for chronically ill or disabled employees. When Rashid was first grappling with his return to work, he connected with another disabled employee at his company via LinkedIn. “Every week, we would meet and talk about how to navigate being disabled,” Rashid said. “Having a peer mentor made me feel comfortable.”

Encourage collaborative work systems. A collaborative workplace environment can make it easier for chronically ill employees to communicate their needs. “If you have a company culture where people say, ‘How are you?’ and mean it … it’s so much easier to get help,” explained Macniven.

21 Jun 2022/0 Comments/by B.E.T

Business, News

Why Every Leader Needs to Worry About Toxic Culture

Pinpointing the elements of toxic culture in an organization can help leaders focus on addressing the issues that lead employees to disengage and quit.

Donald Sull, Charles Sull, William Cipolli, and Caio BrighentiMarch 16, 2022

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-every-leader-needs-to-worry-about-toxic-culture/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=elements%20of%20toxic%20culture&utm_campaign=Enews%20BOTW%203/18/2022

Toxic culture, as we reported in a recent article, was the single best predictor of attrition during the first six months of the Great Resignation — 10 times more powerful than how employees viewed their compensation in predicting employee turnover.1 The link between toxicity and attrition is not new: By one estimate, employee turnover triggered by a toxic culture cost U.S. employers nearly $50 billion per year before the Great Resignation began.2

While most everyone agrees that toxic workplaces are bad news, there is much less consensus on what makes a culture toxic as opposed to merely annoying. Scholars have proposed multiple, sometimes conflicting definitions of toxic culture, and a quick review of blog posts and managerial articles surfaces dozens of warning signals of toxic culture with little overlap across them.3 In Glassdoor reviews, employees criticize their corporate cultures for hundreds of flaws — including risk aversion, excess bureaucracy, insularity, and an impersonal feel, to mention just a few.

Employees grumble about a lot of things, but which elements of culture are so awful that they qualify as toxic? You might gripe about an old-school or bureaucratic culture, but is that enough to knot your stomach as you pull into the parking lot in the morning? How can we distinguish between a culture so awful that it qualifies as toxic versus one that’s merely irritating?

Pinpointing the elements that make a culture toxic is the first step to improving it. Leaders will dissipate their effort and attention if they try to improve every aspect of corporate culture that some employees find irritating. Instead, they should focus on addressing the core issues that cause employees the most pain and lead them to disengage, bad-mouth their employer, and quit.

To understand what makes a culture toxic, we analyzed the language employees use to describe their organization. When workers write a Glassdoor review, they rate corporate culture on a 5-point scale and also describe their employer’s pros and cons. The topics they choose to write about reveal which factors are most relevant to them. By analyzing the relationship between how they describe their employer and how they rate its culture, we were able to shed light on the cultural factors that best predict a toxic culture. We studied more than 1.3 million Glassdoor reviews from U.S. employees of Culture 500 companies, a sample of large organizations from 40 industries.

In an earlier analysis of the Culture 500 data, we focused on the topics that best predict a company’s overall culture rating based on the average of all employee reviews in that organization.4 Measuring company-level culture is an excellent way to identify factors that matter to many employees, such as benefits, perks, and job security. Focusing on company-level averages, however, might miss elements of toxic culture that are highly significant for a small percentage of the workforce. Therefore, for this study, we analyzed culture at the individual level.

To home in on what makes a culture toxic for employees, we focused on their negative comments. We used the text analytics platform developed by CultureX to identify which topics each employee discussed negatively. (We measured 128 topics in total.) We then analyzed which of the topics mentioned had the largest negative impact on how employees rated corporate culture on a 5-point scale.5

The Toxic Five Culture Attributes

We grouped closely related elements into broader topics and identified what we call the Toxic Five attributes — disrespectful, noninclusive, unethical, cutthroat, and abusive — that poison corporate culture in the eyes of employees. (See “The Toxic Five.”) While organizational culture can disappoint employees in many ways, these five elements have by far the largest negative impact on how employees rate their corporate culture and have contributed most to employee attrition throughout the Great Resignation.

Noninclusive

Seven of the 20 most powerful predictors of a negative culture rating relate to how well Culture 500 companies encourage the representation of diverse groups of employees and whether they are treated fairly, made to feel welcome, and included in key decisions. Collectively, this cluster of topics is the most powerful predictor of whether employees view their organization’s culture as toxic.

The CultureX platform’s assessment of whether organizations provide a fair and inclusive environment for specific demographic groups includes five topics: gender, race, sexual identity and orientation, disability, and age. All of these identity-related topics rank in the top decile of strongest predictors of a toxic culture. If an employee speaks negatively in a review about how members of the LGBTQ community are treated, for example, their culture rating will be 0.65 lower on a 5-point scale on average.

Two other topics capture comments about exclusion that may or may not be linked to an individual’s demographics or identity. The topic cronyism includes comments about nepotism and managers playing favorites — for example, by promoting their buddies or graduates from the same college rather than the most qualified candidates. The topic general noninclusive culture includes reviews containing terms like “cliques,” “clubby,” or “in crowd” that indicate that some employees are being excluded without specifying why.

None of the diversity, equity, and inclusion topics emerged among the top predictors of a company’s overall culture in our previous analysis using collective employee ratings. This absence highlights the danger of measuring corporate culture exclusively in aggregate terms. If leaders focus on the average review of corporate culture among employees, they may miss issues that affect a small number of employees in profound ways. Respect, for example, is mentioned 30 times more frequently in employee reviews than LGBTQ equity is, but both topics have the same impact on an employee’s view of culture when they are discussed negatively in a review.

Disrespectful

Feeling disrespected at work has the largest negative impact on an employee’s overall rating of their corporate culture of any single topic. Surprisingly, mentioning disrespect has a slightly stronger negative impact on the culture rating than when an employee comes right out and describes their culture as toxic (or uses other extremely negative terms, like “dystopian,” “dumpster fire,” or “soul-crushing”).

In our previous research, we found that respect — or the lack thereof — was the single strongest predictor of how employees as a whole rated the corporate culture. This further analysis demonstrates that whether you analyze culture at the level of the individual employee or aggregate to the organization as a whole, respect toward employees rises to the top of the list of cultural elements that matter most.

Unethical

Ethics, like respect, is a fundamental aspect of culture that matters at both the organizational and individual levels. The topic unethical behavior captures general comments about integrity and ethics within an organization. The most common terms in reviews classified under this topic include “ethics,” “integrity,” “unethical,” “shady,” and “cheat.” Under a related topic — dishonesty — employees described dishonest behavior in dozens of ways, including “lie,” “mislead,” “deceive,” and “make false promises,” as well as adjacent terms that suggest shading the truth, such as “smoke and mirrors” and “sugarcoating.”

The topic regulatory compliance includes comments in which employees explicitly discussed their employer’s failure to comply with applicable regulations. Frequently mentioned regulations include the Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards, which protect workers’ safety on the job, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which safeguards sensitive patient information.

Cutthroat

Nearly 10% of employees in our sample made a comment related to teamwork or collaboration in their Glassdoor review. Employees frequently grumbled about uncooperative teammates or the lack of coordination across organizational silos. Comments about friction in coordination, while common, have a very modest impact on how employees rate their corporate culture. These run-of-the-mill frustrations are not clear warning signs of toxic culture.

In contrast, when employees talked about colleagues actively undermining one another, their comments strongly predicted a negative culture score. The 1% of employees who cited a cutthroat culture employed a vivid lexicon to describe their workplace, including “dog-eat-dog” and “Darwinian” and talked about coworkers who “throw one another under the bus,” “stab each other in the back,” or “sabotage one another.”

Abusive

We define abusive management as sustained hostile behavior toward employees, as opposed to a boss who has a bad day and takes it out on team members.6 The most frequently mentioned hostile behaviors in our sample are bullying, yelling, or shouting at employees, belittling or demeaning subordinates, verbally abusing people, and condescending or talking down to employees.

Nearly one-third of employees said something about management in their review, but just 0.8% described their manager as abusive. When employees did mention abusive managers, however, it depressed their culture rating by an additional 0.50 on average.

When employees join a company, they expect to find a culture that is inclusive, respectful, ethical, collaborative, and free from abuse by those in positions of power. Not only are these baseline elements of a healthy corporate culture, they are also what companies typically promise in their official core values. In an earlier study, we found that “integrity” — mentioned by nearly two-thirds of companies — was the attribute most frequently listed among companies’ core values, while collaboration ranked second, respect fourth, and diversity and inclusion ninth. When corporate culture fails to deliver on these fundamental commitments, employees understandably react with something stronger than annoyance or disappointment.

The High Costs of a Toxic Culture

By identifying the core elements of a toxic culture, we can synthesize existing research on closely related topics, including discrimination, abusive managers, unethical organizational behavior, workplace injustice, and incivility.7 This research allows us to tally the full cost of a toxic culture to individuals and organizations. And the toll, in human suffering and financial expenses, is staggering.

A large body of research shows that working in a toxic atmosphere is associated with elevated levels of stress, burnout, and mental health issues.8 Toxicity also translates into physical illness. When employees experience injustice in the workplace, their odds of suffering a major disease (including coronary disease, asthma, diabetes, and arthritis) increase by 35% to 55%.9

In addition to the pain imposed on employees, a toxic culture also imposes costs that flow directly to the organization’s bottom line. When a toxic atmosphere makes workers sick, for example, their employer typically foots the bill. Among U.S. workers with health benefits, two-thirds have their health care expenses paid directly by their employer.10 By one estimate, toxic workplaces added an incremental $16 billion in employee health care costs in 2008.11 The figure below summarizes some of the costs of a toxic culture for organizations. (See “The Organizational Costs of Toxic Culture.”)

According to a study from the Society of Human Resource Management, 1 in 5 employees left a job at some point in their career because of its toxic culture.12 That survey, conducted before the pandemic, is consistent with our findings that a toxic culture is the best predictor of a company experiencing higher employee attrition than its industry overall during the first six months of the Great Resignation. Gallup estimates that the cost of replacing an employee who quits can total up to two times their annual salary when all direct and indirect expenses are accounted for.13

Companies with a toxic culture will not only lose employees — they’ll also struggle to replace workers who jump ship. Over three-quarters of job seekers research an employer’s culture before applying for a job.14 In an age of online employee reviews, companies cannot keep their culture problems a secret for long, and a toxic culture, as we showed above, is by far the strongest predictor of a low review on Glassdoor.15 Having a toxic employer brand makes it harder to attract candidates.

Other costs of a toxic culture are harder to quantify but can still add up. Extremely disengaged employees are nearly 20% less productive than their engaged counterparts because they put in less effort and miss more days on the job.16 Nearly half of employees who felt disrespected at work admitted to decreasing their effort and time spent at work.17

Then there’s the reputational risk. Among U.S. CEOs and CFOs surveyed, 85% agreed that an unhealthy corporate culture could lead to unethical or illegal behavior.18 For example, after fraudulent sales practices at Wells Fargo were exposed in 2016, the bank paid billions of dollars in fines and lawsuits and saw its corporate reputation suffer the largest single-year drop in Harris Poll history.19

Why Every Leader Needs to Worry About Toxic Culture

You might think that toxic culture is somebody else’s problem, limited to a handful of high-profile flameouts like Wells Fargo or The Weinstein Company and not something your organization needs to worry about.

Unfortunately, cultural toxicity is widespread. On average, 10% of American employees in large companies mentioned one or more elements of a toxic culture in their Glassdoor reviews in the five years between 2016 to 2020.20 This translates into more than 6,000 miserable workers for the average large American company.21 There is a wide spread around that average: Culture 500 companies ranged from 2% to 22% of employees discussing toxicity in their Glassdoor reviews. When 1 out of every 4 employees mentions toxicity, it’s fair to say that the corporate culture as a whole is toxic.

9 Jun 2022/0 Comments/by B.E.T

Business, News

The 7 Qualities of People Who Are Highly Respected

By Jacqueline Whitmore March 15, 2016

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/271849

Respect is something not automatically given. It must be earned. When you’re in a leadership position, it is imperative that the people with whom you work respect you. They might respect your work habits, your intelligence, or your ability to close a deal. Yet, there’s more to respect than that. If you can earn their respect as a person, then you’ve really won the game.

Here are some tips for earning more respect.

1. Be polite.

Always be polite to everyone you meet during the day, from your family members to your co-workers, to the checkout person at the grocery store. Give others the same respect you’d like to receive yourself. Seek out actions you can take to offer politeness. Open the door at the coffee shop for the person behind you, or let the person with one item go ahead of you in the grocery store. Say please and thank you whenever possible.

2. Act respectfully.

Eliminate disrespectful behaviors such as rolling your eyes, interrupting or talking negatively about someone. Not only are these actions not respectful of the person you’re interacting with, they deter or prevent further involvement or resolution of issues, and create a wedge that can become permanent. Instead, foster an environment of respectful listening. Everyone deserves to be heard, even if you don’t agree with a person’s views or opinions. Consider how you’d like to be treated if you have something to say, especially if there is an important issue at hand.

3. Listen well.

Listening is an active process, not a passive one. Think before you speak. Most often in today’s conversations, one person’s comments “trigger” thoughts in the listener, who then brings forth their own story along the same lines. Instead of telling your tale, ask questions that encourage the speaker to tell you more. Most people will be flattered that you care.

4. Be helpful.

People earn respect by always being ready to lend a hand or an ear whenever they’re needed or notice an opportunity to help. Look for opportunities to help that you might have previously overlooked. Does a co-worker need help with a big project? Can you grab a cup of coffee for someone? Strive to be helpful several times a day.

5. Don’t make excuses.

Your actions are based on your choices, and barring some unforeseen circumstance, there is no reason for excuses. Own your actions. For example, if you’re constantly late, don’t make lame excuses. Own up to your mistakes and instead of dwelling on them, look for opportunities to move past them and do better next time. Instead of focusing on your shortcomings, ask, “How can I rectify my behavior or situation?”

6. Let go of anger.

Holding on to anger or a grudge doesn’t hurt anyone but yourself. If you get upset, allow yourself to be angry momentarily, then move on and either rectify the situation or put it behind you. Give yourself and others a break. Forgive, and then forget.

7. Be willing to change.

Being intractable won’t get you anywhere. Realize that the process of evolution includes change. Make an effort to grow as a person; learn new skills, try new activities, and especially, re-examine your automatic behaviors. And don’t forget to congratulate yourself on progress you make along the way to becoming a better person.

2 Jun 2022/0 Comments/by B.E.T

Business, News

How to Instill an Entrepreneurial Spirit Across Your Entire Team

By Eric Kasper May 16, 2022

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/427694?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email

Let’s face it — instilling an entrepreneurial spirit across your team doesn’t happen by accident. Stale ideas won’t help a business thrive, especially when there’s no entrepreneurial spirit. Competition is so keen in so many industries that you must separate your business from others. Keeping the entrepreneurial spirit alive the way others have been doing it won’t make you stand out from the pack.

Because of technology — even industries with the same basic precepts are wildly different now. For example, consider the news industry; It might still be about reporters who can ask questions, gather facts, and fashion them into a story.

Watch for information, like podcasts you can share with your team that show the entrepreneurial spirit.

Instead of calling people on the phone, banging out a story on a typewriter, and seeing the final product in a front-page headline, reporters can ask those questions via text or email. And those stories that might have lived in newsprint even a generation ago are now being shared on websites, videos, and podcasts.

The changes happening in the world, fueled by technological advances and people’s expectations around those advances, mean your business needs to be iterating and ideating new ideas on the regular. It’s not enough to be merely good anymore.

People up and down the org chart in a company need to think with an entrepreneurial spirit and anticipate what their customers might want, especially with companies like Amazon actively transforming how we experience our interactions with businesses and, indeed, the world.

We have some tips on instilling the entrepreneurial spirit across your entire team, so everyone can contribute to helping your business thrive.

1. Empower people to share new ideas

Even businesses convinced that there are no new ideas possible in their industries should still take time at least a couple of times a year to think differently. As a result, they could develop fresh, new ideas that might drive the innovation the company needs.

Creative brainstorming sessions can even be more frequently needed if you’re in an industry where new ideas are your lifeblood. So, a company that makes apps might want monthly meetings to generate new ideas.

Conversely, a warehouse business might be surprised with how a process embarked on every six months can unlock incredible innovations.

Like Professor Victor Poirier said in a recent Calendar article, almost everyone possesses innovative traits. While they lie dormant for some, a brainstorming meeting with a skilled facilitator (or even an inviting format) can be the key to getting some really unique ideas to the table.

2. Make sure management listens to every employee

The best way to get great ideas from your employees, and make the entrepreneurial spirit thrive is to make sure each team member feels like they’re heard. Empowering people to share ideas is one thing, but employees will be less motivated to share new ones if management doesn’t show they’re at least considering the ideas.

Listening means that there should be time and space set aside to get employee feedback, but it doesn’t need to be traditional meetings — that’s especially true given the last two years where Zoom screens have added a whole new dynamic to meetings.

As Calendar noted in an article on thinking about how teams should coordinate at this moment, “We need to discover new working methods not to spend all our time in meetings and our weekends and nights on ‘serious work.’” If there’s a tool like Slack that connects an office, that can be a tool for “listening” to what employees have to say.

3. Hire the right people (who won’t be okay with the status quo)

Complacency often happens in office settings because the people within them are complacent. Change can be disruptive and even scary. And as such, many people just want their workplaces to be predictable, reliable, and unchanging. But complacency is the enemy of innovation, as it’s hard for people who want things to stay the same to embrace change.

So, from the outset, when you’re in the hiring process, you want to make sure that you’re thinking about the workplace culture that you want to foster. You should design interview questions that gauge how willing candidates are to embrace change and ensure that your workplace culture encourages that change.

This doesn’t just mean putting systems in place that generate new, actionable ideas and then charting the course for change. It also means rewarding employees who have successfully navigated implementing innovation. And it means acknowledging the mental effort that it takes to execute that.

It means checking in along the way and ensuring that employees are doing well to keep their bearings while putting the change into motion. It also means checking in along the way with all team members to make sure they’re “playing well in the sandbox.”

Of course, managers need to keep an eye on the prize and keep perspective on everything going on. But, they should ensure that employees are genuinely navigating the disruption that might occur when making changes, whether that’s adding new team members or new technology.

Additionally, checking in will help them feel taken care of and will help them to stay invested, even when it’s at its most unsettling.

4. Get different perspectives to instill the entrepreneurial spirit

Part of hiring the right people is hiring a diverse group of people. In doing so, you’re getting a number of different perspectives on the status quo and how it needs to be changed. Of course, there are some obvious markers of different perspectives in our society: race, gender, age, and sexual orientation. But, other kinds of diversity can also be sought after and brought into a team.

Where people grew up and the life experiences they’ve had can shape their worldviews considerably. Consequently, it can be helpful to the composition of a workplace team to have those views in the mix.

Dhristi Shah noted, “Engagement means instilling a sense of welcoming and ownership to the employees. When employees are effectively engaged within their organization, they care more about it. They are involved and focused on the well-being of the organization and to help it grow rather than just a monthly paycheck.”

That means as you’re assembling a team, you not only want diversity — but considerable diversity, as opposed to just seeking a single person representing a particular group of people to tick a diversity box. Think about who you’re bringing on. Consider how the new employees will be able to relate to the existing team. And think about how they’ll help each other feel engaged and bring forth their ideas.

5. Encourage and reward good ideas

Employees might be highly invested in a company and its culture. But, they’re going to respond better in a culture where there are tangible rewards for what they do and accomplish. For example, companies offer performance bonuses as incentives for the work employees do. Reward those who innovate in a way that instills and keeps the entrepreneurial spirit alive — and well — in your business.

So, if you’re seeking good ideas from your employees, it stands to reason that you should offer some sort of reward for ideas that will drive the company forward.

In his employee engagement article, Shah also pointed out, “No matter how much you’re paying to your employees, if they do not feel valued and recognized within the company, they won’t stick beside the company. So every company needs to follow a proper recognition structure where the employees’ hard work is brought out in front of everyone.”

So, it’s not just about an employee feeling acknowledged by the management team; It’s also about an acknowledgment that engenders peer recognition. What that reward actually consists of is for you to determine. However, the recognition that comes with it is an essential component of the reward that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Keeping the Entrepreneurial Spirit Alive

An entrepreneur is only as good as the team they work with. If you have a solid group of people working towards your shared goal, you have a chance of succeeding.

But when businesses start and fail every day, you need to ensure you’re instilling an entrepreneurial mindset in your employees. This way, they incorporate it into everything they do to truly help your company succeed.

24 May 2022/0 Comments/by B.E.T

Business, News

Seeing the Unseen: A New Lens on Visibility at Work

Martha Bird March 17, 2022

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/seeing-the-unseen-a-new-lens-on-visibility-at-work/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=take%20for%20granted&utm_campaign=Enews%20BOTW%203/18/2022

During a recent trip to company headquarters, I arrived much more aware of the surfaces I might encounter than before COVID-19: the turnstile at reception, door and faucet handles, elevator buttons, lunch trays, my keyboard and desk. Given the invisibility of viruses, I was anxious about what I couldn’t see. Still, I was confident that safety protocols had been taken extremely seriously, because a good many other people had worked to make all these surfaces shiny, clean, and fresh.

These essential workers continued to perform these important and oftentimes risky jobs throughout the pandemic, even as “knowledge workers” generally did their jobs from the comfort of home. These shadow workers do the important stuff behind the scenes that many of us who have been working remotely throughout the pandemic take for granted in our relatively frictionless social worlds — until the system breaks down. We expect that the items we’ve ordered online will arrive on time because by and large they do; when they don’t, we become irritated. We wonder in frustration why the school bus routes have suddenly changed. We lose our way when our Wi-Fi signal is weak.

Back-ordered items and understocked shelves make visible the complex global supply chains — operated by people worldwide — that keep commerce moving. For many of us in the Global North who have long assumed the abundance and availability of most products, these disruptions force us to engage in a new way of seeing. We recognize the surfaces as no longer smooth and frictionless; the seams have begun to show. But friction is a creative force, an energy that opens up the possibilities for innovation and positive change.

The past two years have taught many of us that what’s visible isn’t a straightforward proxy for truth or fact. Just because someone looks well doesn’t mean they are; people with COVID-19 can be asymptomatic, and people who appear happy may be burned out. Likewise, unequal access to health care remained largely out of the public eye before COVID-19. Statistics on disease-related mortality rates have made visible the failings inherent in many of our “unseen” systems — political, economic, and social. When the invisible comes into view, it should become more difficult to ignore the ways in which inequity has been normalized by those who benefit most from it.

While we tend to assume that everyone is in the same boat, we may have many more choices than the people around us: the single mom who is required to go to a physical place of work while trying to manage remote learning for her young children; the home health aide who also cares for an elderly parent; the retail worker reliant on public transportation; and the many front-line workers whose jobs put them at risk daily and who find it difficult to cover their basic costs of living.

The disruptive forces of the current historical moment have moved many people to look anew at the invisible and unequally distributed power flows reproduced in our health care and educational systems, public policies, financial institutions, technologies, and, of course, workplaces. Seeking visibility into systems, practices, and policies is one way to begin to start seeing more clearly.

Leading With Intention and Attention

In some sense, “seeing what you want to see” means seeing what you already believe. That’s fine if you seek consensus, but it’s not a good formula for innovative thinking. Pressure is necessary to effect real change. This often involves challenging the status quo and stepping out of what has not been recognized as a fixed perspective.

Surrounding yourself with people with similar experiences, beliefs, and perceptions about the world can foreclose on the possibility of thinking differently. On teams, shared assumptions can result in people coming up with the same or similar solutions to a set of challenges. While these solutions may help people like you, they may fail to address the needs of others who are not. Take, for example, the failure to optimize early smartphone cameras for darker skin tones, or how facial recognition technologies identify White faces with a higher degree of accuracy compared with those of people of color. Technological biases of this kind ensure that some people are seen, while others remain unseen or perhaps seen in a very unfavorable light. This lack of recognition has wide-ranging social, economic, and political ramifications.1

Leading with intention and attention means embracing a questioning mindset and accounting for the ideas and individuals we are listening to as well as those we are not. Good leaders understand that the most imaginative teams are made up of individuals from different backgrounds. These leaders seek to orchestrate opportunities within the team for respectful debate and deeper inquiry and, in the process, invite the possibility of new ways of thinking and doing.

It takes proactivity and a sustained commitment to engage in conversations with people with experiences different from your own. Leaders can create significant change by embracing friction, modeling new values, and listening with genuine curiosity. Here, adopting the mindset of an anthropologist is of great value: being open to diversity, asking questions respectfully, listening with care, and developing an awareness of the systems that shape and are shaped by the social realities of individuals and communities.

As cultural anthropologist Gillian Tett wrote, “Trying to navigate the 21st-century world only using the tools developed in the 20th century, such as rigid economic models, is like walking through a dark wood with a compass at night and only looking down on the dial. Your compass may be technically brilliant and tell you where to aim. But if you only focus on the dial, you may walk into a tree. Tunnel vision is deadly. We need lateral vision.”2

One part of this lateral vision is an appreciation for context and a genuine curiosity to learn about the pulls, pressures, and resulting practices — seen and unseen — that shape how individuals go about their daily lives. For instance, companies that have created policies around flexible work arrangements are responding to what they have learned about the unique contexts of working parents (especially women) and caretakers who would otherwise be forced to leave their jobs. Formalizing back-to-work policies that allow for remote and hybrid arrangements can reinforce the message, “Just because we don’t see you here, that doesn’t mean you’re not seen.”

7 May 2022/0 Comments/by B.E.T

Business, News

Effective Leaders Decide About Deciding

Nancy Duarte April 27, 2022

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/effective-leaders-decide-about-deciding/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Read%20the%20new%20article%20now%20%C2%BB&utm_campaign=Enews%20Leadership%205/24/22

Every leader should design and communicate how they want to make decisions. Making it clear what you care about, what you need to know about, and what you’re tasking others to move on will help minimize confusion about who should be making which decisions. It also helps clarify when you as the leader can be kept out of a decision, when you should be pulled in, and how requests for your feedback should be communicated.

I’ve learned this the hard way. Because I’m passionate about multiple facets of my company, my executives were getting confused at times about why I was inserting myself into a conversation. Sometimes, it was simply my excitement, and other times, it was from a place of concern. Sometimes, I didn’t see how their execution of a strategy lined up with what I saw in my mind’s eye. This made my executives blurry about what they had the power to act on and when they needed to loop me in — in part because I wasn’t clear on those things myself. Decisions would stall. Frustrations would run high.

Convoluted decision-making processes waste time. Respondents to a 2018 McKinsey survey, for instance, said they spent 37% of their time making decisions, on average — and they estimated that more than half that time was spent ineffectively. On the other hand, delegating decisions and trusting the people you’ve handed them to isn’t always easy.

But we’re fans of models and visual representations of processes at Duarte Inc., and after talking through the problem and the confusion, the executive team cocreated a new model. In this two-by-two matrix, decisions are categorized into four boxes along axes representing how urgent the decision is and how high or low the stakes are. Each box has a correlating expectation about whether I should be involved, ranging from “Decide without me” and “Inform on progress” to “Propose for approval” and “Escalate immediately.” (See “Help Your Team Make Faster Decisions.”)

Once we landed on the framework, each executive populated a matrix for their own business unit. They piled up all the topics for decisions that needed to be made regularly into the four quadrants. We talked through the choices, and they then had a clear idea of when and to what extent I should (or wanted to) be involved. Each leader could cascade this model as far into their organization as they chose to.

Yes, there are other models about how leaders and managers communicate decisions, like RACI (an acronym for “responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed”), but those are for decisions at the project level, not the executive table. Once we aligned around this model, it became clearer to all of us what I should let go of — while also giving me permission to poke my head in if something was derailing that they thought they had handled.

Here are the kinds of decisions we chose to put into each category.

Decide without me: Your direct reports should have most of their responsibilities piled under this item. This would include successfully executing the agreed-to strategy, fulfilling the duties of their role, hiring, spending, solving personnel issues, and managing the departments through their dashboard. A leader’s job is to help establish missions, not to micromanage how each person gets there.

Inform on progress: A leader may want to “watch” some matters as they unfold. These include initiatives that have risk, general budget creep, or employee issues that might escalate. Sometimes I ask execs to use the channels of their choice to inform me on projects they are working on that I have personal passion for. This way, I stay informed and don’t need to ask about it but still get the joy of watching it develop. We found that before, when I would proactively ask questions, executives thought I was questioning their performance. In reality, I simply wanted to be informed along the way without taking any action.

Propose for approval: Things that come up during the year that fall outside of our planned strategy or approved funding belong in this category. Most approvals can be addressed in our quarterly planning meetings, but sometimes unexpected issues need faster feedback — like spending money over the approved budget, making major policy changes, or quickly deciding on a large opportunity that has popped up. Depending on the scale of risk, the team might send me a handful of slides making a case for the proposal, which I can simply approve over email. Other topics are meatier and need the input and approval of the whole executive team.

Escalate immediately: This category mostly evolves around high-risk or high-reward areas. These include scenarios where there are major risks to the strategic plan, changes in governance, shifts in the market, threats to data security or physical security, or even an unexpected acquisition opportunity.

Probably the hardest category for me as a company leader is “Inform on progress.” It takes a lot of self-control to remember that being informed is not the same thing as being asked to weigh in. Using the matrix has given my staff a polite way of telling me, “Just informing! You said you’d keep your nose out of it, remember? I’ve got this.”

27 Apr 2022/0 Comments/by B.E.T

Business, News

Sincerely, Leaders of Color: Onboarding isn’t just for early career staff

Here’s how you can help new BIPOC managers and experienced hires succeed.

By Jahna Berry Posted on: March 4, 2022

https://source.opennews.org/articles/sloc-onboarding-isnt-just-early-career/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=early%20career%20staff&utm_campaign=Enews%20BOTW%203/11/2022

About this series: Sincerely, Leaders of Color is written for everyone in the journalism industry who cares about creating a more supportive environment for journalists of color to do their best work. Have a question for the team? Drop it here and watch for it in a future column. This column is proudly sponsored by the Executive Program and the Tow Knight Center at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and our guest writers budget is sponsored by The American Press Institute.

It’s been electrifying for me to see so many brilliant people of color step into powerful leadership roles in the two industries I work in, the nonprofit world and the media world, and it’s made me think more deeply about how to best support those BIPOC leaders and other more experienced hires during their first year of joining a new organization.

As chief operating officer at Mother Jones, it’s my job to hire and support managers. Plus, I’ve experienced this transition personally – I know what it’s like to be a new leader at a new organization, and I also know what it’s like to be promoted from within.

There are a lot of articles that talk about thoughtful onboarding practices (here, Amaris Castillo writes about onboarding challenges during the pandemic), especially for people who are early in their career. But, I’ve seen few that talk about how to support new managers who are BIPOC or experienced hires during their first months on the job. In my experience, they may have a few specific needs.

For example, I’ve found that newly hired senior level workers may get invited to more get-to-know-you meetings, but may experience an overall less robust onboarding process than people early in their careers. Why? In past jobs I’ve had onboarding teams say they didn’t want to insult me by going over something that seems like a “101” issue, like workplace conduct norms or basic workflows they assume I’ve seen before. In other situations, a new hire’s supervisor might assume a more experienced hire or someone promoted from within might not require much guidance. If a new hire is joining a small organization or startup, their boss may not have experience onboarding other supervisors.

Here are some things you may want to consider when you onboard an experienced BIPOC employee or a person of color who is a manager.

Create a formal, modified onboarding plan for internal promotions. This doesn’t have to have all of the bells and whistles of a new employee welcome, but consider creating a framework with goals and details about key transitions, like the one below. This is helpful for BIPOC employees who are further along in their careers or taking on new leadership roles, because they may feel additional pressures, which I will talk about in more detail in a bit.

Collaborate on a flexible 30/60/90 day plan, and ruthlessly prioritize. New BIPOC managers and experienced hires often step into their role after a long search, (it’s not uncommon for senior level management searches to take months or more than a year) so right away there are a lot of urgent tasks. Having a 30/60/90 conversation (or series of talks) will help prioritize, especially if it includes what they are expected to master within the first 30, 60 and 90 days. This framework (especially the 30 day goals) will help them prioritize as they are inevitably hit with competing requests. Expect to revisit this 30/60/90 plan often, because they may need more than one assurance it’s OK to deprioritize something. An ambitious new hire may set up their own 90-day plan, but if their manager helps draft it, then it’s easy for the new hire and manager to refine and update it together as things change.

Instead of shortening or skipping parts of the usual orientation when you onboard an experienced hire, try this: After you send an initial orientation schedule, ask the new hire what parts of the organization or their role they want to prioritize briefings on or they think they need to learn more about.

If the job includes any DEI work, help the new employee establish and communicate boundaries around those tasks. If a BIPOC manager works in a predominantly white department, they may feel unspoken pressure – from front line staff, leadership team, or themselves – to help fix or diagnose pre-existing diversity issues in the organization, whether that is explicitly part of their role or not. If the role is involved in DEI, the new hire and that person’s manager should help define the boundaries of that work and, together, proactively message that to the staff.

For example: sending out an email that explicitly states: “Eric leads the task force tracking diverse experts who appear in our news stories. DEI questions about hiring are owned by the CEO and Human Resources.” My boss is great at this and I try to remember to do it whenever I can.

Consider giving the new hire a business briefing. Does business reporting generate the most sponsorships? Does a project’s funding come from a grant with key deliverables? Explaining the nuances of the core business is a really helpful context for senior level hires, even if that information is not crucial right away. This is especially important for editorial hires and promotions. Help folks who have previously worked in silos gain a more holistic understanding of the organization and its revenue model.

Think about power dynamics during orientation. Orientation buddies are great. Don’t forget to give the new hire more than one go-to person for their questions. If possible, give the new hire at least one orientation buddy who is at their level – not a subordinate or their supervisor – so they can ask frank questions and get candid answers. In an ideal situation, at least one orientation buddy is a BIPOC person at their level within the new hire’s department or similar department. Some organizations might be too small or have too few employees to accomplish this, and that’s okay. If you do everything else on this list, that will still be great onboarding.

Ask thoughtful questions about tech needs. Set aside a block of time at the beginning, and perhaps a month after their first day, so the new hire can get answers to a batch of tech questions all at once. It’s my experience that seasoned hires who are BIPOC are often so focused on supporting their new team, they often backburner their own personal tech needs, which may make their jobs harder. For example, I’ve seen experienced hires delay requesting job-specific hardware, ordering ergonomics gear needed for working from home, or seeking training for hard-to-understand systems that they use on a regular basis.

Consider making a user manual about your work style or exchanging one with each other. I have not tried this yet, but I am obsessed with the examples I’ve seen on blogs like this one and this one. At the very least, make sure you have one one-on-one dedicated to this discussion.

Give them the insider’s tour of the org chart about a month in. This is a great opportunity to answer questions they may be pondering after their first few weeks whiz by. Discuss any people, teams, or projects they need to prioritize.

If their predecessor is available, ask them to have a coffee meeting with the new hire about six months after they start their new job. This is a terrific idea I saw from Race Forward’s Maria Smith Dautruche.

Consider offering management training designed for BIPOC managers during the first year on the job. There are some great training programs tailored to support leaders of color like Maynard 200 and Poynter’s Leadership Academy for Diversity in Media. I’ve found that getting management training during the first year at a new job often inspires me to try things in my new role and to shed old management habits that don’t work. Also these programs offer a community for BIPOC leaders, which is helpful because their roles can feel isolating at times. If this kind of training isn’t an option, look at more general training programs that have a DEI lens, like The Management Center, which specializes in training nonprofit leaders. Offer to connect your new hire to a peer who is BIPOC who does similar work at another organization.

Keep an eye on their workload. New BIPOC employees who are more experienced or who are supervisors often project confidence, yet have the same instincts and feelings as other new employees. They want to make a good impression. They hope that people will like them. They might be perfectionists. They could be battling imposter syndrome. BIPOC experienced hires may not have spaces at work where they can be vulnerable about this, especially in the early days at a new job. If you are the new hire’s manager, factor in how these very human impulses may play into dynamics at work, including how many projects they voluntarily take on.

Sincerely,
Jahna Berry
Chief Operating Officer, Mother Jones

18 Apr 2022/0 Comments/by B.E.T

Business, News

Don’t Hire for Culture Fit

Hiring for culture fit is among the most widespread and exclusionary hiring practices today. Leaders must concentrate on culture add to be inclusive.

By Ruchika Tulshyan

https://www.shrm.org/executive/resources/articles/Pages/dont-hire-for-culture-fit-tulshyan.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=exclusionary%20hiring%20practices&utm_campaign=Enews%20BOTW%204/15/2022

Tiffany Tate was eagerly awaiting the phone call informing her that she had gotten the job as career center director at a recognized college.

Not only was she qualified—overqualified, in fact—as a college career development expert with two degrees, her interviews with the university’s hiring team had gone exceptionally well. The team was selling the role to her; she had spent ample hours in the interview process including having dinner with the team that she was sure she would be working with.

Tate was excited to move to a beautiful part of North Carolina with her then two-year-old daughter. The role would give her a growth opportunity, she would manage a significant budget, and the person she would be reporting to had bonded with her over the fact that they graduated from the same college.

It was all laughs and smiles. The fact that the 12 people who had interviewed her were all white was par for the course in Tate’s experience in North Carolina. As a Black woman, she had learned to navigate being the only at work.

When the hiring manager called back, she had all but packed her bags. She was ready. “Tiffany, I really hate to call you with this. It was such a tough decision. The search committee struggled with it, and it came down to you and one other person. And they just felt like the other candidate was a better fit. I’m sorry,” he said.

The blood drummed in her ears. Did she hear correctly? But she quickly collected herself, dusting off the disappointment.

“OK, well, can you offer any feedback?” she inquired. “Can you share what would make me a better fit for this role?”

He responded, “No, I just want you to know you asked all the right questions. I don’t have any feedback, I want you to keep being who you are. I love your transparency. You are obviously very skilled at what you do.”

It’s been five years since that day, but Tate remembers those words perfectly.

She wonders, “Weird! I’m not a good fit, but they’re telling me to continue being the way that I am. That doesn’t make any sense.”

When a hiring manager can’t offer constructive feedback, despite a candidate having all the experience and certifications, despite them being able to demonstrate skill in navigating institutional leadership and customers—students in Tate’s case—it’s a red flag. Considering that she had all the pedigree and all the best references, but was then told she wouldn’t fit the culture of the institution, she couldn’t ignore the only noticeable difference she had with everyone on the selection committee and eventually the person they hired: her identity as a Black woman.

“I felt defeated,” she says.

Culture Fit Is Exclusionary

Hiring for culture fit is among the most widespread and exclusionary hiring practices today. When you’re hiring for a fit—given that most companies in Western countries are led by white men—by default, you’re hiring for sameness. “Culture fit” is an unspoken code that people have around what’s acceptable and what’s not within an organization, or even in society.

It reminds me of when I first moved to the United States as an adult in my twenties. When people encountered my unfamiliar name, they frequently asked if there was an easier or shorter way to say it. Depending on the situation, I would come up with an Anglo-Saxon nickname (like Rachel). If I had to interact with them often, say at work, I’d let them call me Ria, removing most of my name to make it easier for them to write or read it.

As I grew older, I got more comfortable with telling people I didn’t have a shorter name and that Ruchika was the only version I would respond to. But even then, for years later, I wouldn’t correct them if they mispronounced it. A common mispronunciation still is for Westerners to call me “Roo-sheek-ah” instead of “Roo-cheek-ah” (like it’s spelled). Now I’ll correct people and remind them until they get it right. In the past, I was so eager to fit into the culture—both what I considered U.S. culture as well as assimilating into the workplace culture. Now I see that my biggest asset is the difference that I add to the culture.

Focus on Culture Add

Rather than focusing on culture fit, organization leaders must concentrate on culture add to be inclusive. A plethora of research shows that harnessing the power of diverse teams leads to better outcomes, such as less groupthink, more innovative solutions, and overall more profitability. My favorite data point, though, is how culture add can lead to justice and fairness.

Tufts University psychologist Samuel Sommers created a mock jury experiment with 200 adults. Some juries were racially mixed with white and Black jurors, and some were all white. After watching a video trial of a Black defendant facing charges of sexual assault, the juries were first to submit their own verdict of guilty or not guilty, and then deliberate as a group. Even prior to deliberation, the mixed juries were nearly 10 percent less likely to presume that the defendant was guilty, compared with the all-white juries. During deliberation, the racially diverse juries had a more thorough consideration of the evidence and deliberated on average for longer, making less factual errors and being more open to discussing the role of racism in the process. In general, even though there may be more debate, or what psychologists call “interpersonal conflict,” when teams are diverse, the benefits of better outcomes far outweigh the drawbacks.

When teams prioritize hiring a candidate who would be a culture add rather than a culture fit, they’re more likely to benefit from out-of-the-box thinking and better outcomes.

Culture Fit Persists

Yet the language of who is a culture fit persists—and one survey of global organization found 84 percent of recruiters look for it in their selection process.

Think back to the last time that you talked about someone being a fit or not. The more trouble you have articulating why a candidate is not a culture fit, the more likely your judgment is biased. Instead, seek to hire people you don’t already have represented, whether by race and gender, educational background and experience, country of origin and languages spoken, or other identities.

Tate, whom we met earlier, is a hiring expert with over a decade of career development experience. She advises her clients to move away from an outdated model of assessing how much you “like” a candidate to how well could they do their jobs.

“The old culture fit model relied on deciding whether to hire someone if you thought you could be stuck in an airport or blizzard with them. It’s a bizarre metric—and riddled with biases, because you would likely choose to be stuck in an airport in a blizzard with someone who looks like you,” she says. But that isn’t the best assessment of who would best perform a job on your team.

Hiring practices that revolve around assessing for culture fit result in bias. One such example? Black women are earning college degrees at record numbers, but remain underrepresented and underpaid in corporate workplaces, with low access to leadership opportunities, as most workplaces still hire for a fit with Eurocentric culture norms.

Structural racism cannot be dismantled overnight, but declaring that your workplace is no longer seeking a culture fit for new roles and disrupting peers when they reject a candidate for not being a culture fit is a quick win. So is creating a workplace environment where diversity and inclusion are valued, and culture add is celebrated.

Ensure that your organization prioritizes the hiring of a diverse range of employees, especially women of color. This is not just HR’s job; it is every manager’s responsibility.

As for Tate? She’s since founded a company where she coaches clients to navigate the recruiting process and advises countless leadership teams and boards on hiring and retention best practices.

During these interactions, she advises her clients to inquire of interviewees, “How will you add to the culture on our team?”

Ruchika Tulshyan is an inclusion strategist, CEO of Candour and author of Inclusion on Purpose: An Intersectional Approach to Creating a Culture of Belonging at Work (MIT Press).

12 Apr 2022/0 Comments/by B.E.T

Business, News

Have We Been Thinking About Burnout All Wrong?

A term suggesting rock bottom stops meaning rock bottom when we’re all there and, somehow, still going.

Eve Ettinger investigates whether our definition of burnout is all wrong.

By Eve Ettinger

https://www.bustle.com/wellness/burnout-definition-what-we-get-wrong?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=defining%20burnout%20all%20wrong&utm_campaign=Enews%20BOTW%203/11/2022

My peers started talking about burnout when Anne Helen Petersen first wrote about what she called the “impossible” task. She described a situation where a small, non-urgent task that would normally feel easy feels insurmountable (in her case, getting a pair of boots resoled). Burnout, she argued, was the overall condition of millennials as a generation. She made this argument back in 2019, before the pandemic.

I have experienced insurmountable exhaustion and hopelessness, but I never found myself totally incapable of doing the little things necessary to keep going. It might not be pretty — the laundry might remain undone for weeks, and the dishes for days — but I fed myself and I slept and I showed up for work and friends. So I hadn’t experienced burnout, I told myself.

But then the pandemic happened, and the stakes were raised for everyone around me. People were quitting jobs, people were anxious and hypervigilant, people were broke and angry. Inflation spiked, stimulus payments hiccuped and stopped, and promises of student loan forgiveness were walked back as rent prices blew up in urban areas and new variants of the virus peppered the map in clusters. And all through the last two years, the term burnout keeps getting thrown around. Everyone has it, everyone is on the edge of it, but the term has little of the shock value it had when I first heard it. Burnout isn’t special anymore.

When journalists began covering the societal effects of COVID-19, burnout was a free space on the bingo card of hot, pandemic-caused issues for media outlets to cover with great consternation. Piece after piece talked about it. Burnout in the medical field. Burnout among the educators. Burnout among parents. Burnout for cis, heterosexual mothers. Burnout for the therapists.

But a term suggesting a rock bottom stops meaning rock bottom when we’re all there and, somehow, still going despite the struggle. Which made me wonder whether the term was a misnomer. And in order to discuss it in any meaningful way and find solutions, we have to understand it. After all, we cannot fix that which we don’t understand.

The World Health Organization defines burnout as a syndrome resulting from workplace stressors, but it’s not recognized as a diagnosis by the DSM-5 — the standard manual of diagnosing psychiatric disorders in the United States, put out by the American Psychiatric Association — even though it’s studied and discussed as a serious topic of research in the field. Other definitions abide by the WHO’s guidepost, limiting it to an experience tied to work, which is in keeping with the origins of the term as first defined in 1974 by an American psychologist. At the most practical level, this makes it difficult to get official medical support for dealing with it. If it’s not in the DSM-5, it doesn’t officially exist to your health care provider.

The thing that made me wonder the most about what burnout might actually be, in terms of a diagnostic definition, was when we headed back into winter in 2020 after a summer of lockdown, before vaccines were rolled out, and my friends and colleagues started expressing a relationship to time and the future that alarmed me. They began talking about the future as if it didn’t exist, as if their imaginative powers were gone. There was no future, there was only this moment, this week, this day, and getting through it. We could be stuck here forever was the vibe at large. This shift was alarming, because up until that point, I was the only person I knew who consistently related to time that way — thanks to complex PTSD.

Complex PTSD, or C-PTSD, is a medical condition that results from long-term trauma, and is discussed as being a subset of PTSD, which is in the DSM-5 as a diagnosable condition. C-PTSD is often experienced like PTSD (e.g., flashbacks, hyperarousal, a distorted newly negative sense of self), but also can show up as emotional dysregulation and detachment from the self. Unlike PTSD, the experience of C-PTSD tends to be more chronic, in ways that make functioning at work or in relationships difficult without therapeutic intervention.

In my case, the long-term trauma was 20-ish years in an abusive religious environment. Over that period of time, sustained levels of cortisol and adrenaline leave a mark on the brain and body that is indelible and permanent. I’ve struggled with planning and time management for forever, and routinely joke that “time is fake,” as if I’m some kind of stoner bro. I’m not, I just really struggle with imagining possible futures. Only a crisis makes me feel truly alive. When the crisis is every day, though, I feel numb and fatigued. And that’s what I was watching happen to the people around me in the fall of 2020. But everyone was calling it burnout.

Writer Eve Ettinger explores whether our definition of burnout is incorrect or incomplete.

In August 2021, Evette Dionne announced her departure as Bitch magazine’s editor in chief with an overt statement about burnout being part of why she was resigning. It caught my eye — she’s been talking about burnout for years.

“When I think about burnout, I think about exhaustion beyond the point of repair,” says Dionne, who now works as an editorial and publishing manager at Netflix. “It’s not something that can be solved with a nap or a massage or a vacation. It’s long, deep, soul-deep exhaustion. … I can’t do anything other than the basic minimum requirements for life,” she explains.

This, to me, sounded like my own rough patches, ones I’d attributed to C-PTSD and being broke. Dionne had symptoms like negative self-perception, emotional dysregulation, reduced mental capacity, and task avoidance — all of which align with C-PTSD, which was first defined by Dr. Judith Herman in 1988. So is burnout just a trauma response in disguise?

As I organized notes from my conversations with successful professional women of color, I found out I’d been rejected for yet another job I thought I had a good shot at getting. It’d been a long year of freelancing and getting rejection after rejection. I cried, and told my concerned friends that I didn’t want to talk about it. I have to finish this piece on burnout, I told them. The irony, they said. All I wanted to do was give up, stop working. I wanted to eat dinner and then go to bed early and call it quits.

But I wasn’t willing to call my employment search “trauma,” since — all things considered in 2021 — it wasn’t “that bad.” I’m also buffered from immediate consequences. I have stable housing, I have people I can ask for help if I’m floundering. I don’t want to say I’m burned out because it feels indulgent to say so, but probably I am. Yet, who gets to call in as burned out seems to be correlated to a person’s class-based access to resources.

“Who can take time off from work to recuperate from burnout?” says Dionne when I bring this up. “I think when we are talking about impoverished people, many of those people are indigenous folks, Black folks, brown folks — exhaustion is the baseline so often because capitalism is eating these people alive,” she says. “There is no safety net for those folks, so it really is either work yourself into the ground, or starve.”

Petersen, the author of the Buzzfeed article that launched burnout into the popular consciousness, has come around to echo this perspective, to some degree, in her writing about burnout. But in other industries, such as hospitality, it’s been the de facto reality for years. “It seems like this [term] became popular when white people were the ones going through it,” says Malandra Hastick, a longtime employee of the food and beverage industry and creator of The Wellness Sauce. “But in terms of the rest of us, it’s just like, No, you’re lazy. You don’t deserve to take a break.”

Hastick defines burnout as “the inability to sustain your wellness,” which severs the definitional tie between burnout and the workplace, and flips the focus onto what is being harmed. Instead of burnout being a set of symptoms, it’s a situation, she says. If that’s the case, in order for healing to happen, the person’s circumstances must change.

This idea is echoed by Hassel Aviles, the executive director of Not 9 to 5, a nonprofit in Toronto that advocates for mental health improvements in the hospitality industry. Burnout prevention is basically her bread and butter. “One of the biggest differences between exhaustion and burnout is that it is strongly associated with inadequate support in your environment,” Aviles tells me. You can address exhaustion through rest. To address burnout, she says, you need to step away from work.

Reframing burnout as what’s getting in the way of your wellness and a symptom of inadequate support led Aviles to conclude that the problem isn’t the burnout. It’s an economic system that makes individual workers essentially dispensable, so that the workplace becomes a site of survival struggles. “I really think it’s a tool of oppression, to keep folks constantly busy, and we’re overworking and underpaying them,” she explains. “You’re not allowing people to rest and relax and rejuvenate and refresh their minds and their bodies, [and] oftentimes, you can’t make clear decisions if you’re in that state.”

Every person I spoke with mentioned a physical breaking point. Trips to the ER often preceded massive lifestyle changes to prevent another crash. “You have to shut things down yourself and just completely pause,” says Hastick. “Because if you don’t pause, you’re going to be forced to.”

The definition of burnout feels increasingly watered down as the term's increasingly used.

As I ended my conversation with each source, I asked them to open an email I’d sent with a short list of recognized symptoms of complex PTSD, such as emotional dysregulation, avoiding relationships due to mistrust or feelings of inadequacy, and feelings of helplessness, guilt, shame, or self-loathing. Do you see any overlap here, I asked, between these symptoms and your experience of burnout?

The conversation slowed to a halt each time. “Wow,” they said, or, “Oh yes.” The recognition was instantaneous, and I felt like I could hear each person on the other end of the phone call begin to recalibrate the stories they had been telling themselves. If their burnout was a response to trauma, perhaps they would have approached their recoveries differently.

Diagnosing a mental illness is a process that’s often misunderstood and regularly changing. A diagnosis is often a summary of a cluster of symptoms, which provides insurance companies with a code that in turn allows patients access to treatment. You don’t have to have every symptom on a list. Your symptoms just have to line up most consistently with that particular diagnosis’s cluster of common symptoms. This means that, while burnout might not be recognized by the DSM-5 as a medical condition — despite much of the medical community studying it as such — PTSD is recognized by the DSM-5, and C-PTSD is recognized globally by the ICD-11. Having one of those diagnoses would make tailored therapeutic support easier to get.

But it’s hard to address a problem in any real, lasting way if you’re playing whack-a-mole with symptoms. And sure, giving employees mental health benefits at work is a nice way to mitigate their immediate experiences of burnout, but it’s unlikely to fix the cause of the issue. Plus, this puts the responsibility for healing burnout on the individual.

“I felt so ashamed that I didn’t say anything for a very long time,” Dionne tells me, “because I’m — at the time — a 30-year-old magazine editor who writes books. Like, who am I to feel entitled to feel exhausted living out my dream? … There’s so much shame that comes with that, and guilt, that it doesn’t permit many people, including myself, [to ask] for help. I did not ask for help for a very long time.”

At Edinburgh Napier University, Professor Thanos Karatzias focuses his research on traumatic stress. “One of the conversations [I’m having] with colleagues at the moment is explor[ing] the phenomenology of this distress,” says Karatzias, the university’s director of research. “Is it occupational stress? Is it depression? Is it anxiety? Is it burnout? Is it PTSD? Is it complex PTSD?”

He is hesitant to claim that burnout is caused by trauma, because trauma is generally characterized by surprise. (“A traumatic life event is a significant life event [such as] abuse in childhood or road traffic accidents, things that you wouldn’t expect to happen that would cause an intense, emotional reaction,” he says.) But work is changing. We’re expected to be constantly available and more productive for less money. This new landscape raises new questions, he says. “People are struggling with work, but why? Is there a label for this distress? Is this a hybrid of different things? We do not know that yet.”

If we don’t fully understand burnout and how it manifests in the body, it’s difficult to solve it. And even aside from individual remedies, what’s to be done on a structural level?

Fortunately, this path has already been laid for us by radical Black feminists like Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Audre Lorde, who conceptualized anti-work and abolitionism as a path toward liberation. (It’s been adopted by the movement du jour, dubbed fifth-wave feminism, according to journalist Mary Retta.)

When I spoke with Dr. Paul DeChant, a former family physician who now helps hospital leadership teams prevent physician burnout, he reiterated the need for structural change. “Oftentimes, people want to [make a better work environment], but don’t have the structural or process mechanisms by which to do it,” he says. “So once they get those in place, people start to get hopeful pretty quickly.”

Since starting this piece, I’ve landed a new job as a temporary teacher. It feels good to be working again, to be teaching, to have something organizing my everyday life. I also hold this loosely, knowing that all good things in 2022 are more fragile than we think. I am grateful for it, but also just one contract-ending away from feeling panicked about my stability all over again. The last year has taught me (and many of us) that work won’t love you back and that fixing our individual approaches to it likely won’t prevent burnout. Sometimes the only way to fix a broken system, it seems — to move toward a restorative approach to sustaining ourselves and our labor — is to refuse to play by the old rules. Work is good, but I am not my job.

5 Apr 2022/0 Comments/by B.E.T

Business, News

Business Tech Trends For 2022

A lot has changed for businesses in the past two years, especially as they adopt digital services at a rapid pace. This sets 2022 up to be an interesting time for business technologies, so we continue our look at the trends that can define the year ahead. You can see the first four predictions in Part 1.

AI and Cybersecurity

“Though AI and machine learning have been used in security products for some time, they are becoming increasingly important in modern incident response orchestration,” noted TechTarget.

Computer systems can create billions of alerts every second, amounts that are impossible for humans to keep up with. Called ‘alert fatigue, it’s a prime reason why many cybercrime attacks on companies are successful. But artificial intelligence is changing the rules – using AI, security people can identify key problems much more quickly.

Cybersecurity must be a priority for every business, and the rising use of AI in security makes it more affordable for companies to have reliable digital security. Some security companies use this to create highly-automated systems that they then offer to customers – this is called Managed Security Services (the same as managed services, but for security). Overall, AI is helping digital security become more effective and affordable.

Blockchain

“Developers are realising blockchain technology can be equally useful in traditional, commercial applications,” wrote the Voice of America in 2017.

To be fair, every year someone predicts blockchain will become a big deal. In essence, it’s a way to keep a near fraud-proof ledger of information. Nobody can change that information without others on the blockchain network knowing about it.

Whether you want to maintain clean business records or track the origin of wild-caught fish, blockchain provides tamper-proof records. Many people really want blockchain to become a big deal, even though it’s still primarily used for cryptocurrencies and, as of 2021, NFTs (a controversial way to identify digital collectables). But those are the faddish examples. The interesting blockchain stuff happens behind the scenes. Chances are, if you work in finance or logistics, you’ll come in touch with blockchain systems this year without necessarily knowing it.

Discovery vs Search

“Search is great — if you know what you are looking for. However, as the amount of online content (especially video) increases exponentially, general search is often struggling to deliver meaningful results, unless you’re very explicit and goal-oriented,” said this article on Medium.

We all already use discovery search. Formally, things such as Facebook feeds or product suggestions on Takealot count as discovery search. Informally, the ads you see on Instagram or the things punted by TikTok users also count as discovery. Ditto for recommendations on Netflix or Spotify.

Discovery is in essence finding what you didn’t know you were looking for, and it’s a trend expanding the search world beyond Google and Bing. For any business selling products or services, discovery can be every potent marketing tool. But it means different things – it may require you to have good social media positioning or perhaps you need to find some influencers and give them free stuff.

Platforms

“Once a novel idea, digital platforms have become increasingly common. At the most basic level, platforms help to make resources and participants more accessible to each other on an as-needed basis,” Deloitte wrote in a report.

Your business already relies on platforms. It could be Gmail, Office365, Salesforce or Clickup. Maybe you have business pages on Facebook or Linkedin. Perhaps you do your accounting on Sage or you receive payments through PayGate. These are all platform technologies.

Think of a platform as a mall. It’s one place but offers many different things, and you only pick what you need. Large companies, especially banks, have built platforms to make their services more efficient and help them quickly create new products. Smaller companies use platform services because they are cheap (and sometimes free). Platforms have been growing for several years already, so this is not so much a prediction for 2022 as a clear trend for the foreseeable future.

https://now.vodacom.co.za/article/business-tech-trends-for-2022-part-2

28 Feb 2022/0 Comments/by B.E.T

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2. Act respectfully.

3. Listen well.

4. Be helpful.

5. Don’t make excuses.

6. Let go of anger.

7. Be willing to change.

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1. Empower people to share new ideas

2. Make sure management listens to every employee

3. Hire the right people (who won’t be okay with the status quo)

4. Get different perspectives to instill the entrepreneurial spirit

5. Encourage and reward good ideas

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