Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #148
Post #ILTACON2024 Stuff
It’s been a week. I haven’t been to the annual ILTA Conference since 2018, I think. Now that I’m back working at a law firm I had the opportunity to not only attend, but to speak as part of a panel on the complexities of Microsoft Teams data.
In some ways the conference has grown and changed a bit over the years, and in other ways it was exactly the same.
As always, it’s a marathon of a week, and so this newsletter might seem a little thin on content.
Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, 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.
Most of all it was a great opportunity to learn from speakers, vendors, and peers, make new connections, spend time with old friends, and exist in the legal tech bubble for the week.
I’m sure I will have a blog post or two next week on some of the things that struck a chord with me. One thing that I wanted to share was my Weds. evening meetup with some former coworkers. Originally planned for a quick drink, we spent hours catching up and enjoying each others company.
The twist to this story? All four of us worked remotely, and I had never met them in person until this week. Yet, here we were, acting like long-lost friends.
Don’t tell me your team can’t connect and care about one another when they aren’t sitting in the office together everyday. I know you can.
Careers and the Workplace
I’m just going to link this without comment. I know y’all are probably tired of seeing me rant about this:
Return-to-office mandates hurt employee retention, productivity, survey says
I’ll give you a hint on this next question. The answer is probably not enough
Artificial Intelligence
Was the stock market drop the first sign of an AI market disappointment?
“If you’re going to invest now and get returns in 10 to 15 years, that’s a venture investment, that’s not a public company investment,” Luria said. “For public companies, we expect to get return on investment in much shorter time frames. So that’s causing discomfort, because we’re not seeing the types of applications and revenue from applications that we would need to justify anywhere near these investments right now.”
Craig Ball is using AI in connection with keyword searching - AI Prompt to Improve Keyword Search
We all saw this coming, didn’t we? - 5 Ways Generative AI Is Already Ruining Social Media
We all need more help with prompting - 5 Useful AI Prompting Techniques You Should Know
Training and Development
What to Do After Employee Training is Over - when training doesn’t stick, it can be the training, but more often than not, the failure is tied to not having a plan for what happens after training. We send folks to training because we “should,” but we don’t identify what behavior is supposed to change.
Mental Health in the Workplace
Linked - Workplace leaders must be 'given the right tools to manage mental health conditions'
One glaring example of this is mental health. How many of your managers have even the barest of training in how to deal with mental health issues on their team? How many have more than a cursory knowledge of what your employee assistance program offers and the requirements for accommodations for your area and industry?
We can always use more tips on this - Managing Stress And Burnout In High-Pressure Jobs: A Guide To Maintaining Your Well-Being
Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech
Cybersecurity for Lawyers: A Series - this might be worth checking out.
Ari Kaplan talking about the 10th annual eDiscovery Unfiltered report:
Linked - Microsoft is reportedly working to merge Teams text chat and channels with a new UI
In all the years of being waist-deep in the Teams universe, one common thread for getting users to use Teams channels has been the difference between how a new chat gets their attention right away and how a new post in a channel does not. Thus, people have become used to chatting and ignoring channels, making them less useful in collaboration.
After all, if no one notices information being shared in a channel, you're not collaborating.
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.