Mike McBride on Tech, eDiscovery and Mental Health - Issue #12
Workplace Culture and Careers
Linked: Forget Flexibility. Your Employees Want Autonomy. — www.mikemcbrideonline.com Autonomy is understanding what needs to be done and having the freedom to decide the best way to get it all done. Managers can still contribute, they still set the priorities, they assist with roadblocks, and they are the ones who communicate what needs to be done, but when they start to go much further than that, employees feel that loss of autonomy, and they don't like it. Over the last couple of years, managers have been forced to sit back and let employees have autonomy. Much like my own experience, you can't possibly expect employees who were successful and productive with that autonomy to just give it back for no reason.
5 Side Effects of Working Too Much – Cleveland Clinic — health.clevelandclinic.org Putting in long hours at work can have negative effects on your health and personal life.
Are Your Long and Late Hours Actually Making you Less Effective? — www.mikemcbrideonline.com Look at it this way, if you're a client of one of these companies, who do you want doing your work, the associate who hasn't slept more than 4 hours a night in weeks, or someone who's actually rested? Who is going to do a better job for you? Who is going to be most cognitively effective? Why do we keep grinding away at the expense of our own cognitive abilities then?
The IT Talent Crisis: 2 Ways to Hire and Retain — www.informationweek.com IT workers are in high demand, especially those in cybersecurity, DevOps, and analytics. Harvey Nash and CompTIA have recommendations on how to hire and retain talent in this tight labor market.
Quick Thought - Your Introverted Employees Probably Hate Team-Building — www.mikemcbrideonline.com Honestly, I do not know what HR expert ever came up with the idea of team-building, or culture-building, events for a workplace. As an introvert, I can
Legal Tech and eDiscovery
Use of Ephemeral Messaging Apps Can Make Your Document Retention Policy Disappear - Articles - IPRO — ipro.com Ephemeral apps like Snapchat, Signal, or DingTalk have several downsides for using them as a matter of course in their business practices
What Should You Collect for eDiscovery? Start with What Your Business Uses - Forensic Discovery — forensicdiscovery.expert Find out the best things to collect for eDiscovery with this helpful article including common sources of ESI in business today.
Is There Still a Place for Smaller eDiscovery Providers? — ediscoverytoday.com With all of the mergers, acquisitions & investments in eDiscovery today, is there still room for smaller eDiscovery providers?
Linked: Smartphone Phishing Attacks Increasing — www.mikemcbrideonline.com Hackers are moving to mobile because most of us are moving to mobile. That's not surprising, and given the fact that it's a little more difficult to spot on a mobile device, that's just a bonus.
The Booming Underground Market for Bots That Steal Your 2FA Codes — www.vice.com The bots convincingly and effortlessly help hackers break into Coinbase, Amazon, PayPal, and bank accounts.
Ransomware Gangs Are Mostly Just Following the Easy Money — www.mikemcbrideonline.com I saw a few references to this KELA study of ransomware based on doing some digging around the dark web to see what people were looking for. I wasn't necessarily surprised by what they found, because it seems relatively obvious, but I was a little surprised to see that it's pretty well-thought-out. I guess I had been working on an assumption that folks using ransomware were just throwing out a wide net and catching whatever they could, but it seems like maybe they are thinking a bit more about what they are doing.
Mental Health
Why You Should Never Hesitate to Take a Mental Health Day — www.healthline.com Feeling stressed? Follow these tips to ask for the day off and spend it nurturing your mental health.
Remote Work Anxiety is Real. Here's How to Help Employees Who Have It. — www.linkedin.com Remote work anxiety is on the rise as people spend more of the workday at their home office. Here's what you can do to help employees facing these mental health issues.
Linked: When Workplace Mindfulness Training Is Worse Than Nothing — www.mikemcbrideonline.com We've seen the memes. The ones about the law firm offering a lunch hour yoga class to overworked, stressed, associates who haven't had time to even take a lunch break in months. Or the "reward" for months of 70-80 hour work weeks is free pizza. It just makes people angry because it's a token that does nothing to actually recognize the work involved, or correct the problems that created this mess to start with. Workplace stress, anxiety, and other mental health issues are not just something a little mindfulness can fix. Workers are waking up to the fact that it's the company culture that is contributing to this. Offering a way for employees to help "fix" themselves might seem like a nice thing, and in many ways it is, but doing it while not making any effort to recognize the contributions managers and corporate culture make to the problem, along with a commitment to make changes, is the very definition of "too little".