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Scooped by
Kate Lister
onto Workplace News |
Mark your calendar for these upcoming WEbinars and events. And don't forget, if you missed any, you can always catch the WEbinar reruns here.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
"Web3 is transforming how people present themselves online, yet startup founders and investors are overwhelmingly male."
I was recently on a call where a colleague was demonstrating a prototype Metaverse. As his avatar flew around the beautiful landscape, he pointed out where the roads would go. It was at that point that another colleague on the call went ballistic. "Are you kidding me? Roads? Cars? Why the [expletive deleted] are we putting cars and roads in the Metaverse? Haven't we learned anything?"
A few days later I saw the movie Avatar 2. The women did the cooking while the men went to war. The "colored" kid, in this case white, was bullied and tormented at school. The tall good looking guys ruled. The women giggled. They exploited animals. A female friend and I walked out 2 hours into the 3 hour saga. Our male partners stayed until the end.
Is this really the vision we want for our future? I think we can do better. But unless the designers of the Metaverse represent a diverse thought pool, we will surely drag the mistakes of our past into our virtual future.
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A growing roster of the city’s towers are being rendered obsolete by remote working. Developers spot a chance to meet demand for homes
Nathan Berman has completed 18 office-to-residential conversions. The transformation, he admits, is far from easy but may be necessary if owners expect to survive the reality that the pandemic has permanently changed the need for offices.
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AI can give most knowledge workers across industries their very own assistant because of the myriad of different websites being introduced.
The full article offers 10 tools that use generative AI to help increase your productivity Full disclosure, I have not tried any of them but here are a few that look really interesting.
GPT of Google Sheets cleans lists, converts formats, summarizes and translates Google sheets.
Eleven Labs clones your voice for use in games, story-telling, etc.
PaperCup.com translates and dubs video into over 70 languages
Needless to say, watch this space. ChatGPT wasn't even a thing when the last WEBrief went out. Two months later, I'd be ashamed if I didn't mention it.
One I'm loving that wasn't on this list is genei.io. It summarizes PDFs and web pages!
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
When you use supermarket discount cards, you are sharing much more than what is in your cart—and grocery chains like Kroger are reaping huge profits selling this data to brands and advertisers
Why are we willing to share some of our most intimate details with your local grocer, but fervently against sharing data with our employers? I'm not lobbying for sharing more employee data here; I’m suggesting we think long and hard about the data we collect about our workers.
Based on data about where and when you shop and what you buy, grocery stores and others can infer a great deal about your age, life stage, family, ethnicity, income, gender, health, and much more. Combined with information from your loyalty card, credit card, and data from other aggregators, it's likely your grocer knows more about you than even your closest friends.
Of course, they promise individual information is de-identified and aggregated before it's shared with their “partners and others” but don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security. An MIT study found that 90% of shopper data could be re-identied using as few as four purchases, the purchase date, and store location.
Now imagine if the data from workplace trackers that follow your keystrokes, watch what you're working on, follow where you go, and listen in on meetings was combined your buying behavior, app usage, and more?
Let’s take a lesson here before it’s too late. Just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
Cushman & Wakefield's vision for cities by 2040. The future in an immersive experience created to inspire and challenge everyone in real estate.
I have to be honest. Cushman & Wakefield's metaverse-based journey to the future of cities weirded me out at first, but I found I spent far more time exploring the site and actually watching the videos than usual. The link here will take you to one of my favorites. I particularly appreciated that it wasn't all optimistic and cheery about the future of cities in general and real estate in particular. It acknowledged that the journey between where we are and some better state won't be without its bumps in the road addressing issues like the threat of greater inequality.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
The National Science Foundation and the National Archives and Records Administration have revised their telework policies in response to pandemic lessons.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Archives, (NARA) in collaboration with their unions agreed on liberal telework policies.
At NSF, all full-time workers can telework up to five days a week and can flex their hours around the core hours (10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. EST) Separate negotiations determined that NARA full-time employees can work remotely up to eight days per pay period (two weeks).
“What we found was that by taking care of our people, they took care of us; our data has shown this flexibility has led to increased productivity,” says the agency CHRO.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
UPDATED: The House approved a bill (HR-139) to require federal agencies to roll back their telework policies to those in place at the end of 2019 and to
It's called the “Stopping Home Office Work’s Unproductive Problems,” or The Show Up Act. I kid you not. They want to drag federal employees back to 2019. As the name implies, the supporters of the bill claim that productivity has suffered because of people working from home. Under the “Show Up” bill, any agency wanting to allow telework would have to address:
• "Any adverse effects” of increased offsite work on customer service—I don't even know what that means
• "The cost of paying locality pay to employees receiving higher city-based rates even though they were no longer working there"—Sounds like a policy problem to me
• "The costs of maintaining under-used office space"—Instead we should needlessly force people to come in so our bloated real estate portfolio doesn't draw attention to the opportunity to cut costs?
• "Any technology-related issues that prevented employees from being fully productive"—They're just addressing this now?
Forgive my rant but this whole line of argument needs to be turned on its head. Instead of having to prove telework is causing problems, the government ought to require agencies to:
• Prove there is a problem before they call people back
• Prove how they are going to make up for the extra costs of having them on-site
• Justify why they need to hold on to under-occupied office space.
No doubt the Show Up Act is a reaction to Congressmen Sarbanes and Connolly's proposed Telework Metrics & Cost Savings Act that was proposed last July. Among other things, it would require agencies to measure and report to Congress the results of they telework programs. What a concept! Measuring rather than guessing!
"Federal employee telework has been tested and proven during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Congressman Sarbanes. “The flexibility of this program heightened work productivity, improved employee retention and delivered high-quality government service for the American people."
Fortunately, the bill is not likely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
Employees who operate in human-centric work models – where they are seen as people, not just resources – are 3.8 times more likely to be high performing, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc.
According to Gartner, the three pillars of human-centric work models are flexible work, intentional collaboration, and empathy-based management. Their research shows people who operate in these environments are:
Among the five approaches organizations have taken toward flexibility—fully remote, fully on-site, mandated office attendance, rigid hybrid, and flexible hybrid—Gartner found the only one that achieved significant talent outcomes was flexible hybrid.
The study also found that employees are:
“To gain competitive advantage, organizations must go beyond location flexibility and place human beings at the center of work, rather than treating them as secondary components of their work environment,” said Graham Waller, vice president in the Gartner Executive Leadership practice.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
"...remote work subjects taxpayers to changes that can be difficult to predict, as they depend on each state’s laws."
Way back in 2010, I wrote an article titled, "Greedy states have nothing to lose but their remote work." The warning fell on deaf ears at the time because less than 3% of the workforce was working at home regularly. Now, the myriad of state and even local tax (and labor) laws are a big deal for both employers and employees.
The National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTU) has captured the tax impact of remote and hybrid work in its new report, The Remote Obligations and Mobility Index. In it, they rank U.S. states by how difficult their tax laws make it to have remote employees working there. The greediest among them:
• Subject employees working in their state, for even just a day, to income tax obligations
• Obligate employees who work in a state other than that of their employer, to pay taxes to their employer's state regardless of where the employee works, even if this causes them to suffer double taxation.
Only 10 states scored above 30 (out of 35) on NTU's index (see image). The very worst state, Delaware, managed to earn a negative total score.
If your business is located in one of those low-scoring states or if your employees work there, it might be time to make your voice heard by your elected officials.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
A new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows the majority of time saved by working from home and avoiding office commutes goes toward increased productivity.
Based on a global study by The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), when employees don't commute to the office, they save an average of 70 minutes a day. They spend about 28 of those minutes (40%) actually working, 24 minutes (34%) enjoying leisure activities, and 8 minutes (11%) caregiving. China and Japan have the longest average commute (over 100 minutes a day). Serbia has the lowest (51 minutes) and the U.S. has the second lowest (55 minutes).
The data comes from two NBER surveys with 19k and 25k respondents.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
New research from Greenhouse Software shows that despite economic uncertainty and recent layoff announcements CEOs remain optimistic about the economy and hiring.
In a survey of over 300 CEOs with 100+ employees, 54% said they would look to reduce real estate costs before they would consider laying people off.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
Demand forecast to falter due to fuel efficiency, electric vehicle sales and hybrid working
Based on data from Inrix, vehicle miles travelled (VMT) and gas usage are still below pre-pandemic levels. According to their forecast, the combined impact of fuel efficiency, electric vehicle sales, and hybrid working, suggests it never will!
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
Our conversations give insight into what's on the minds of the business elite, including AI, return-to-work policies, and the economic conditions.
Here's what Business Insider said were their four biggest takeaways from Davos:
1) There will be a recession, but it's not likely that it will be too severe.
2) AI will change everything. With the buzz on ChatGPT running high, there was a lot of chatter about jobs that will be replaced by AI and the need for retraining
3) Sustainability is critical, but companies are struggling for what they actually need to do
4) Many leaders are raging against remote work but it is going to stick. What they need to focus on is redesigning work and workplaces
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
Just for fun, I had genei.io do its own summary of the above article about the Davos summit. Here's the result:
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
For more than 50 years, Cuningham has been a purpose-driven design firm. We choose to design for social and ecological well-being. Our choices reflect the responsibility of our work, in terms of processes and outcomes for our clients and in the communities we serve.
We proactively accelerate the changes necessary in our profession. We call for action to design in ways that reinforce the connection between built and natural environments.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
WE Love our 2023 Sponsors! THANK YOU to our GREAT WE sponsors! Your generous support makes our Community, Programs, and Events possible. You inspire us to maximize member value. Please click on the logos below to learn more about our sponsors.
Download the WE 2023 Sponsor Benefit table for all the details about the benefits of being a WE sponsor at various levels. Contact David Karpook, Susan Spiers, or Pat Turnbull for questions and opportunities.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
Avoid these passive-aggressive phrases in the workplace which can make your colleagues feel misunderstood and devalued. Here are alternatives to such conflicting phrases.
Even seemingly innocuous phrases like "Kind Regards" can be off-putting or perceived as passive aggressive. Here are some others you might want to avoid:
The article offers a number of other examples along with suggestions for alternatives.
Kind Regards,
Kate
Apologies if that sounded passive aggressive.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
The Global Sustainable Competitiveness Report 2022 provides a comprehensive overview of the current State of the World – global, regional, and national - on the six sustainable competitiveness pillars: Natural Capital, Resource Intensity-Efficiency, Intellectual Capital, Economic Sustainability, Social Capital and Governance Performance.
This index has been around since 2012 but it's new to me and well worth a look. Its based on the premise that national success should be measured by more than just economic factors. While it's a fascinating report all by itself, I think the framework and measures used offer an excellent model for companies looking to ensure their own competitiveness and sustainability.
The Index is derived from 188 quantitative measures of a country or regions natural capital, resource efficiency, social capital, intellectual and innovation capital, economic sustainability, and governance performance.
Spoiler alert: Northern European countries receive the top twenty composite index scores with Scandinavian countries taking the top marks. The U.S. is ranked #30.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
This report presents research results from 33 companies and 903 employees in the US, Ireland, and a few other countries.
The results of the Global 4-Day Workweek Trial are in. To be clear, we're talking about working one less day each week with no reduction in pay.
Here are some highlights from the 40-page report.
The report also suggested the trial had a positive impact on company revenue, but IMHO, it would be hard to prove causation here.
It's worth noting that the trial largely included companies based in Ireland (33%) and the U.S. (18%) and more than a third of the employers operated as fully-remote companies.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
OwlLabs and Global Workplace Analytics surveyed 2,300 full-time workers across the United States in this 6th Annual State of Remote Work report.
Based on a survey of over 2,300 U.S. full-time workers conducted by OwlLabs and Global Workplace Analytics, the 6th Annual State of Remote Work report reveals the latest trends and perspectives on a range of issues from remote and hybrid work, trust, intent to move, training offered, workplace redesign, intent and reasons for quitting, technology needs, employee surveillance, the 4-day workweek, and more.
You can download the free 34-page report here.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
New laws in the U.S., Germany, Portugal, and across the European Union have been introduced. All will affect the way we work.
The EU is typically ahead of the U.S. in protecting workers' rights. With the rise in 'work-from-anywhere' policies, employers must stay informed about how new employment laws in other countries might impact them. For example:
Whether these laws apply to foreign employees working in these countries isn't always cut and dry so employers with work-from-anywhere policies should proceed with caution.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
What seemed like a transitory step to avoid infection has become a major force driving the future direction of urban America.
The article does a good job of sharing optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for the future of our cities if the shift to remote/hybrid work persists. Assuming the author didn't stack the deck with research he liked—and I don't feel like he did—the outlook for many cities is bleak, at least in the short run. The problem is a downward spiral where fewer office workers lead to higher vacancy rates, declining property values, a collapse of small businesses, a lower tax base, lower transit ridership, less money to spend on city services, greater homelessness, more violence, and so on. The demise is not inevitable, but cities will need to act fast to reimagine and engineer a better future.
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Scooped by Kate Lister |
Ipsos survey of 10k global citizens reveals where people are in terms of concern vs. commitment to sustainability.
This Ipsos report, based on a survey of 10k global citizens, suggests five personas that exist on the continuum of concern and action toward sustainability. Disengaged Denialists represent 19% of the population, Conflicted Contributors represent 18%, Busy Bystanders represent 16%, Pragmatists represent 29%, and Activists represent 17%. Then it details each group and provides advice on how to reach them where they are. The breakdown by country is particularly interesting. The U.S., Japan, and Australia have the highest percentage of Denialists. Brazil, South Korea, and Australia have the highest percentage of Activists.
The most interesting part of the report is the advice it offers on how to engage each persona. For example, Pragmatists, the biggest group wants to do the right thing but doesn't know how. They can be pulled along with visible signposts of how they are making a difference.
09/14/2021
4:30 PM - 5:00 PM WE hub India: The Role of Office Space
So is the office as we know it dead? With a large majority of the workforce expected to work remotely regularly, is the office dead? Or will it have a different role to play? In this talk by workplace strategist Clart Elliott, understand what will be the new role of the office will be and how one must navigate that.
09/15/2021
8:00 AM - 6:00 PM FM-Day 2021 Veränderung leben. Chancen nutzen.
FM.day 2021 der IFMA Chapter Austria und FMA,
Mehr Details unter:
Programm – FM-Day 2021
09/16/2021
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM September: Stakeholder Engagement in a Hyper-Connected world
Hosted by Cristina Herrera
Join us as we demystify stakeholder engagement once and for all. As well as explore real ways to co-create and engage your project management communities using human-centric approaches and collaborative technology to save you time, money and the pain of ignoring stakeholder needs.
09/21/2021 - 09/23/2021
11:00 AM - 1:00 PM Workplace Strategy & Leadership (WSL) M2-W4: Virtual Workshop Module 2
In this workshop, we will use a case exercise based on a real situation to consolidate learnings. Participants will work in teams to define the change needed, build a Change Program and deliver the program to satisfy the Board of Directors.
10/05/2021
4:30 PM - 5:00 PM WE hub India: The right Tech Tools for Hybrid Work
More details coming soon.
10/12/2021 - 10/14/2021
11:00 AM - 1:00 PM Workplace Strategy & Leadership (WSL) M3-W4: Virtual Workshop Module 3
In this workshop, we will use a case exercise based on a real situation to consolidate learnings. Participants will work in teams to build a workplace management plan which identifies: 1. What success looks like. 2. How success is measured. 3. How risks and rewards will be evaluated and managed.