I have to admit, this week at work felt kind of like it could have been an email.
I suspect next week might look similar for any of us not on PTO, but the slower work period is also a good chance to reflect and set our goals for 2023. With this being the first new year where I’m working in Training and Development, this has taken on a whole new meaning for me. My job, to some extent, is to help all the folks on our team reach the goals they are setting for themselves right now. Of course, that depends on them, and their managers, setting them in the first place.
I’m there to help you find the proper resources to get where you want to go. If you haven’t defined where you and your team are going, there’s not much we can do from here.
That being said, the most important thing you can do this weekend, is enjoy your time off. It’s good for all of us to disconnect and get away from work. So, no matter what your holiday might look like this year, I hope you take some time to rest, and give yourself a break.
When you come back in 2023 and want to make some changes to better match up with your goals, I hope you’ll remember something I shared on LinkedIn about the Winter Solstice. - The Day Everything Changes, but You Won’t Notice
Because you don’t notice that the days are getting longer on Dec. 22, but they are. Slowly and surely.
Careers and the Workplace
You Really Are Interviewing the Company Too
“I’ve watched more than one interviewer struggle to answer this question, I’ve heard stories of just some really poor answers, and I’ve had interviewers answer this in very clear detail. The ones who were prepared to answer that question were the ones who had already considered the metrics that would be involved in measuring employees and who, frankly, made a better fit. Knowing how you’re being measured allows you to start on the first day knowing what’s expected of you and what is important. How could you not want that? How could you hire someone and not know what success looks like for that hire? It’s not a good sign for you as a hiring manager or for the culture of your organization.”
Linked – The Perks of a High-Documentation, Low-Meeting Work Culture
“You schedule a meeting to discuss the project status. Half of the people at that meeting are squeezing it in between other meetings and thus are multi-tasking during the status meeting. You can watch them on camera answering emails while the discussion is going on, or they are wily enough to do it off-camera but aren’t engaged.
After the meeting, someone sends an email summarizing the conversation, which is responded to by one of the people who were multi-tasking with questions they didn’t ask during the meeting. This prompts another meeting to go over those questions.
Might it work better if the project status was done in writing, asynchronously, and the meeting never needed to happen?”
On a somewhat related note - Let’s Fire All The Micromanagers
Americans are terrible at taking vacations. Why are U.S. workers so bad at taking time off?
“U.S. companies are stingy with vacation time when compared with other countries. But U.S. workers can’t seem to leave work at work anyway.”
See also - on how much it can matter - Productivity increases with annual leave!
Linked – The Myth of the Brilliant, Charismatic Leader
“Good management is boring. (A point made in more detail in the link below) I say that because good management has no drama and no chaos. It’s pretty simple communication about expectations and follow-through. Unfortunately, those managers don’t get highlighted in magazine features because they aren’t interesting. But that’s the point. Good management isn’t there to be entertaining in a reality-TV kind of way; it is there so that the team can get the job done.
That’s it. When it’s dramatic and attention-seeking, bad things happen.”
eDiscovery and Technology
Jason makes a valid point about how new features get released in cloud environments, and most people aren’t following release notes that closely. For M365, it’s my job, so I saw the Shared Channel feature of Teams weeks ago. That aside, if it’s new to you, check out Jason’s opinion.
“With 2022 in the books, it is an opportune time to assess the trends in e-discovery during the year. Sanctions for preservation and production failures continue to feature prominently. Noteworthy in key 2022 sanctions cases, courts called out a lack of competence of attorneys in handling e-discovery matters. Failures to preserve and produce text messages from mobile devices continued to be an e-discovery sore point.”
Mental Health in the Workplace
Uncomfortable (but Necessary) Conversations About Burnout
“Picture this: You’ve just left a meeting where you and four of your team members spent time talking about upcoming projects and expectations.
Statistically speaking, three out of those four team members likely feel burned out on the job at least some of the time.
Gallup has discovered that 76% of employees experience workplace burnout at least sometimes. That’s a big number -- three out of four employees.”
Why a New Approach To Workplace Mental Health is Needed For 2023
“Ultimately, it is the responsibility of employers to support staff with action, rather than just with tick-box exercises. By leading by example to create a genuinely inclusive culture and training all their staff in mental health awareness, businesses across all sectors can help their workers to be accountable for their health, gain confidence to open up and show vulnerability, and ultimately feel better in themselves, while giving others the confidence to do the same.”
Security and Privacy
Work Distractions Lead to Serious Cybersecurity Implications
“More than 1 in 4 employees (26%) say that distractions from world events make it hard to care about their job. This has major repercussions for enterprise security, with distracted workers more than twice as likely as others to do only the bare minimum for security at work (24% vs. 10%).”
Cybersecurity in 2022: It’s Not Getting Easier
“When 2021 ended, it was pretty bad. We were still trying to navigate COVID-19 and plan for a return to in-person work. But the markets were decent, the investment dollars kept flowing and while effective cybersecurity was hard, there was some optimism that it would get better.
Well, it didn’t.”
Finally, this is interesting -