🚨Data: women are quitting RTO firms🚨

ALSO: a practical guide of how to run 'team level agreement' discussions

• Surprise surprise senior women are leaving RTO firms: Nick Bloom’s research about RTO and office mandates suggests that up to half of all workers will quit if asked to return to the office five days a week:

• And it seems that effect is impacting some of the biggest organisations in the world, Goldman Sachs is seeing a huge exodus of top female leaders as they press on with their five day office regime: ‘Roughly two-thirds of the women who were partners at the end of 2018 have left the firm or no longer have the title, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. The same can be said of just under half of male partners at the time.’

• GenZs & phones - more research: While I am a little cautious on some of his conclusions Jonathan Haidt is someone who demands to be read right now as he reflects on the societal impact of mobile phones. He has a new book out new month and his piece promoting it in The Atlantic is essential reading.

  ‘By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety… fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.’

  He observes not only that this is an international phenomenon, but it is starting to have consequences for the workforce:

  ‘As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with.’

• I’ve covered Mark Eddleston’s New Ways of Working Canvas before but he’s updated it and it deserves another parp of the trumpet. It’s a schematic to help lead a debate about creating a team level agreement about how you work together - with lots of prompts for discussion. The latest version includes lots of endorsements about how organisations are using it to run inclusive discussion and decision making:

  

• More about Boeing: a nice piece from Harvard Business Review accrediting aggressive cost cutting with the demise of the culture. This is clearly a really important reminder about the importance of values, of principles, of having a sense of some things being more important than short-term profits. Along the way the firm moved its corporate offices to Chicago, chasing tax credits to juice the financial bottom line. The article includes this immortal line: “Ironically, decisions made in the name of shareholder value over the past two decades have cost its investors $87 billion since 2018.”

  This second article gets a little bit more down and dirty with the most visible symptom of the cultural decline, which was the comically cheap invention of the Boeing 737 MAX and the obsession with outsourcing as a means of cutting costs:

• Feel like you could take on a (very small) second job for societal good? Volunteer at the Fish Doorbell. They’re expecting it to get busy this week and they need people around dusk and dawn

• Loss of sight, inability to eat, brain injury: this article about workaholism is shocking

• To therapy or not to therapy: I’ve always been fascinated with the differences between Western and non-Western approaches to trauma. This article explores the evidence challenging the established idea that talking about our thoughts is the best way to process them. In this piece of research they found that teaching people to bury their intrusive thoughts was actually significantly more effective:

• Interesting glimpse of the future: a reporter from Business Insider used a ‘job bot’ to apply for jobs for him with mixed results

• In the US Senator Bernie Sanders proposed a bill to limit the working week to 32 hours a week - it won’t succeed but the future always starts with an audacious dreamer