Happy people do better work
ALSO: Peloton mess up job cuts / Rising bills might encourage an office return for younger workers
A global panel of esteemed economists were asked the impact of hybrid working on employees, while they were reluctant to say that remote working would be more productive in the long-term they did believe it would lead to improved employee satisfaction (and maybe would improve women’s career opportunities).
Sigal Barside was a brilliant social scientist. She was one of the people who taught us that loneliness at work reduces our productivity - and that good moods (or bad moods) at work are contagious. She passed away last week at just 56.
On the subject of that this brand new research is worth looking at, happy people do better work: happiness (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, optimism) were better predictors of achievement than any other factor examined
Everything in relationships is about achieving synchrony - when we’re with someone we like our heartbeat synchronises with theirs
Lessons for every firm here, Peloton employees found out they were being fired because they couldn’t login to some of their network apps - a mistake made cringingly worse because the same colleagues were accidentally permitted to enter a video call introduction for the new CEO intended only for those who were staying (I’m squirming just thinking about it).
Interesting New York Times piece about how hard the job of recruiter is in a world where you’re just firing LinkedIn Inmail messages out into the void. The challenge is that skilled workers (specifically in tech, but also elsewhere) are in very short supply
Could rising costs of living force younger workers back to the office? Until now 46% of people have said working from home has saved them money, but gas and electricity bills are set to rise by 54% from April.
In a poll for The Economist two-thirds of managers reported that their work-life balance improved in the pandemic, but at least two-fifths of workers reporting to them said it had got worse.
- Unintentionally expecting employees to be available all of the time
- Clarifying what is possible and what is preferred
The Times reports that one in ten jobs is being advertised as working from home
The latest chatter amongst the crypto/NFT bros is about Distributed Autonomous Organisations (‘DAOs’) - companies expressed as loosely affiliated clusters of collaborators all charged with performing specific tasks. The Brave New Work podcast has done a mini-series explaining what it all means. I listened to one episode and I had an overwhelming feeling adjacent to my thoughts about NFTs. I’ll leave you to make your own mind up
Professor Lynda Gratton is one of the leading experts on business and the future of work. She's on speed dial with the world’s top CEOs and is a regular at Davos and the World Economic Forum. Her HBR cover article about 'doing hybrid right' has been the covid navigation guide for many firms, and she's turned her thinking into a brand new book, Redesigning Work.
She shares with me the questions she's asking of leaders in her MBA course and where she thinks work will go next. Along the way she also gives a shout out to her article about management in the remote era.