Mike McBride on Tech, eDiscovery and Mental Health - Issue #9
Careers and the Workplace
Quick Thought - Should we Expect Employees to Always be All-Stars? — www.mikemcbrideonline.com Over the weekend, the wife and I had BBC World News on the TV while we both were catching up with the virtual world in our living room, and they were doing an investigation into maternity and paternity leave in European countries as opposed to the US. I'm not getting into that debate, but there was a point where they were interviewing a Dutch mother about her career, and the leave she took both pre and post-birth. What made my wife and I both stop what we were doing was her admission that she didn't see why it was necessary to always "excel" at her career, but that just being OK was enough. She didn't consider being outstanding at her job to be anything that was all that important in the grand scheme of things.
Linked: Work burnout rises despite company investments in mental health — www.mikemcbrideonline.com As I've said before, many employers did the easy stuff. They invested in some mental health tools, promoted using employee assistance programs, talked more about mental health, heck they even gave people more time off or at least pushed people to actually use the time off they hadn't been. And yet, here we are. Why? Because they haven't yet done the hard work of making the workplace not the place that hurts mental health to start with. There's no easy fix for that. It won't happen in a few weeks, but if you don't start looking at it, you're going to find yourself without many employees to keep going. Because in 2021, people have options, and those options are only going to keep growing as younger generations make very different decisions about their careers than those of us in older generations are used to. The workplace will change one way or another. If your's doesn't want to, it will be killed.
Learning Is A Sure Path To Happiness: Science Proves It — www.forbes.com A lesser-known pathway toward happiness is learning, growing and challenging ourselves in new ways.
eDiscovery and LegalTech
What Attorneys Should Know About Advanced AI in eDiscovery: A Brief Discussion — content.lighthouseglobal.com Advanced AI in ediscovery can help attorneys facing modern data challenges. Legal technology partners can provide access to AI technology, expert services, and analytics to tackle those challenges
eDiscovery Lessons From 2020 That Your Law Firm Shouldn't Ignore - GoldFynch Blog The pandemic taught us that our eDiscovery software must (1) Have a remote data collection tool, (2) Support a range of file types, (3) Be low maintenance, (4) Offer built-in data security, (5) Work on slow internet connections, (6) Provide helpful collaboration tools.
Internet
Linked: CNN Shutting Down Its Facebook In Australia Shows How Removing 230 Will Silence Speech — www.mikemcbrideonline.com And this same song and dance will repeat for every single site on the internet until there's very little left. The only companies with enough resources to actually do all the things that would be required to monitor all content, ironically, would be Google, Facebook, etc. Gee, it's almost like giving them a gift, eliminating ALL of the competition. It's no wonder Facebook has been asking for regulation. They know the rest of us won't be able to keep up.
Linked: We're still making terrible choices with passwords, even though we know better — www.mikemcbrideonline.com Most people do the right thing with passwords for financial accounts, but all the websites that make them create an account just to read an article? Who really cares if that account gets hacked? Why not just use the same password for all of them? What's the hacker going to do, read USA Today as them? Who cares? That is all just normal, human, behavior. The thing that should scare the hell out of security professionals is how many people view their work access the same way. They don't care. It's not their data, it's just the place where they happen to work, for now. This shows in the low number of people creating a strong password for their work accounts. (It also shows how making them change it every few months really just backfires.)
Glenn Greenwald on Why Privacy Matters — www.mikemcbrideonline.com http://youtu.be/pcSlowAhvUk&w=500px I love his response to anyone who suggests that we don't need privacy if we aren't doing anything wrong. OK, go ahead
Mental Health
Linked: Will mental health resources evaporate post-pandemic? — www.mikemcbrideonline.com It just goes to show what I've always said, your company is not your family, it's not even a friend, and it will always do what is good for itself first, second, and always. If something also happens to be good for you, great, but that's never been the goal, so you have to make decisions based on what is good for you, not the company. If you think that's an overly negative thing to say about CEOs and upper management, go read those percentages again, and consider how many of those same people expect your loyalty, and your dedication during difficult times, without offering the same in return. Also, consider how many HR people have proclaimed themselves as being there for employees, and yet also think employees expect too much. It's not overly negative when it's true.
Creating Safe Spaces in Cybersecurity — ebooks.cisco.com Creating Safe Spaces in Cybersecurity