We’re living in the midst of a perfect storm. With the bank bailouts, focus on optimization and tech layoffs, job security has gone out the window. Organizations are pulling employees back into the office, hard won work life balance is being put to test and all of this while we’re still re-evaluating our relationship with … Continue reading Part 1: Why are we really going back to the office?
This is going to be a short one. When I first started my corporate career, I’d take extreme pains to ensure that my emails were their best possible version before I hit send. I would add the courteous ‘I hope this email finds you well’, ‘hope you had a good weekend’ and ‘happy Monday’ at … Continue reading Tiny curt emails
We all have the image of the modern-day woman depicted as juggling a laptop, diapers, a spatula, washing machine, pets and more, staunchly entrenched in our minds. The evolving role of a people manager evokes a very similar image. At first it looks easy. They have an entire team rallying to complete a series of … Continue reading Lowering the tax on the modern-day people manager
At the start of 2021, I decided that in the spirit of independence, I would scrap the cadence of posting every Tuesday and post ‘whenever something interesting happened’. What I didn’t realize is that this turned out to be code for never writing. The realization hit early 2022 and once the rhythm was broken, the … Continue reading Cadence & Culture
The last week something amazing happened. For maybe the 100th time ever, an employee gamed a very well-designed HR policy in place at my friend’s company. As I witnessed her navigate the tightrope between wanting to penalize the employee and thanking him for bringing the loophole to light, I recalled yet another of my favorite … Continue reading Chaos Monkey
We’ve been discussing the question of ‘where work gets done’ for over two years now. Over this period, I’ve come across at least a dozen brilliant answers, yet they’ve all come apart at the time of implementation. They either get critically examined and shut down early in the process or are so far diluted by … Continue reading Velocity via modularity
There are four months left in the year and, as incredulous as it feels, it is time to think of what work would look like in 2022. As organizations continue planning to ‘return to work’ for what’s likely the 13th month running, the evidence on burnout is overwhelming. A study by the University of Chicago … Continue reading The case for eliminating (most) meetings & how
TheSoul Publishing adopted a ‘no meeting’ policy at their company. They literally took the meme that said–this meeting could have been an email and turned it into reality; or attempted to. For an organization that has over 80% of its employees working remotely and across time-zones, this space was ripe for experimentation. Yet, it didn’t … Continue reading Don’t cancel that meeting
Last week, I wrote about discovering the word for how most of us have been feeling for a while now and accepting the fact that it may be the dominant feeling through the year. Yet, humans being humans are born to fight the status quo and hence the quest to ‘not languish’ continues. Adam Grant … Continue reading We’re languishing, now what?
At the start of the year, there was hope. Despite cynics claiming that it was foolish to believe that we’d seen the worst of the pandemic, 2021 brought with it a glimpse into fool’s paradise. It was in these five seconds of paradise that I coined my word of the year for 2021. Then six … Continue reading Word of the year: Languishing
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