Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #106
Back to Working Again
Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. I write this weekly newsletter so subscribers can see some of the things I’m writing and sharing without depending on social media algorithms to show them to you. Each week I’ll share information about careers and workplace culture, mental health in the workplace, talent development, and important information about privacy, security, and legal tech.
You can find out all about me here - Mike McBride Online.
If you follow me on social media you may have seen the news that I started a new position this week, returning to working in a law firm, the same one I left 12 years ago, but in a whole different role, and mostly working remotely, so it’s quite different.
As you might expect, I had some thoughts about the whole process of job seeking, which generally sucks in so many ways.
The Obligatory Lessons Learned After Four Months Unemployed
Go read the whole thing but the three lessons from my story are these:
Your network really matters
Plan to get laid off at some point
Keep learning and developing new skills.
There’s also a tangent about how we create a diverse workplace if we know there will always be a bias toward hiring people you’re familiar with. Hint - Get familiar with a more diverse group of people!
What lesson would you offer to someone dealing with layoffs or worried about layoffs?
Careers and the Workplace
Diverse Workplaces are Flexible Workplaces
Again, you broaden your labor pool, which broadens your diversity efforts. It's not rocket science. The more "rules" you have in place, like a full-time return to office policy, the more people will find it difficult to work for you, and the smaller pool of candidates you'll be choosing from.
Remote Work Isn’t Going Away — and Executives Know It - Smart executives are figuring out how to make remote work benefit them, by attracting and retaining the best talent.
Training and Development
Have you considered what kind of career development plan you want to put in place for yourself before your next annual review? - How To Prepare For a Performance Review: Case by Case
Although star performers can contribute greatly to any company, there are not enough to go around. Today’s companies need effective leaders at every level and in every location.
And you need to develop those leaders.
Mental Health in the Workplace
The Business Case for Protecting Mental Health in the Workplace: Lessons from Simone Biles - In the comments, the point about how sports have started to understand the importance of mental health in getting top performances, but businesses lagging behind that idea is 100% correct.
Linked - How to spot wellbeing washing at work
I'd also point out that it's 2023. Talking one way about well-being and not following through on that talk with action will get talked about in public spaces, and you might find yourself wishing you had simply stayed silent. As I've said before, once you break trust it is hard to earn it back. If you want to talk about how much you care about the mental health of your employees you need to actually care about the mental health of your employees.
Linked: Making Work Safe for Mental Illness
We’ve been talking about making the workplace “safe” for a number of years now. First, there were the obvious, physical safety issues, and then the focus on sexual harassment, then on to bullying, and diversity. It’s important. You simply don’t get the best results from employees who don’t feel safe.
And yet, in a time when there is an increasing number of employees dealing with mental health issues, we also need to consider what we do to make sure they feel safe as well, for the same reasons. People who don’t feel safe, will not speak up, will not bring their best work to the table, and might just be looking for a safer work environment.
Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech
Greg Buckles has some doubts about the new Reveal/Brainspace/Logikull/iPro mega corp - Reveal: Super Platform or Billion Dollar Franken-ware? It would concern me too. I remember all too well the promise of end-to-end eDiscovery platforms that grew too large to keep up with. I used to do training for one of them, a platform that no longer exists for a company that was later swallowed up by another one as well. It was an 800-pound gorilla. So many moving parts and so many other tools the company was trying to keep up with, and it just didn’t work out. It’s not easy to go from the best-in-class Analytics experts to the expert in everything. Eventually, something gives. We’ll see if that repeats itself.
Brian Krebs also asks a good question - Why is .US Being Used to Phish So Many of Us?
I’m not the one saying it this time - Why Are Lawyers So Terrible At Cybersecurity?
The US was throwing out the fines just a few weeks ago, but it wasn’t just happening in the US - U.K. regulator fines Morgan Stanley $6.8M for off-channel comms.
One more ILTACON post - Decoding ILTACON 2023: Key Takeaways on AI's Impact on the Legal Profession
That’s all folks. If you found something interesting in this week’s newsletter, please share it with your friends. It’s the best way to help support the effort I put in each week to share this with you.