Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #104
What's Your EVP?
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.
As a job seeker, I’m constantly looking at a company’s EVP - Employee Value Proposition. As the HR Bartender explained:
Basically, the EVP is what employees receive for working at the organization. Of course, it includes compensation and benefits, but it also includes more than that. Other common components of the EVP include training, quality of the management team, work / life balance, wellbeing, and even corporate social responsibility (CSR).
I’ve talked here over the last couple of weeks about how there’s a certain privilege in being able to evaluate whether a job meets your requirements for an EVP versus taking the job you need to take to keep a roof over your family’s head.
Setting that aside, if you’re not in that position, this is something we all do, even if we don’t have a name for it. I’ve taken less money for a job with less travel, I’ve accepted jobs based on the location when we were looking to relocate, and I’ve sought out positions working for and with people I know and respect. Those are all part of the EVP. I’ve used the phrase “finding a job that fits with the lifestyle you want” to describe my evaluations, I was calculating the EVP for myself.
The interesting thing is that a company may have one view of the value it offers, but that value won’t appeal to everyone. When I was traveling for work all the time, I was living the dream that some people have for their careers. When I started, it was a dream, but my lifestyle requirements changed as our parents got older and in ill health. The value proposition changed for me, even if what the company offered hadn’t.
The best you can do is offer the things that are attractive to the best people you can hire. If you don’t know what they are, ask your best employees what value they get.
As an employee, the best thing you can do is find the job that offers you value in the areas that matter to you.
If only job searching were that simple. ;-)
Careers and the Workplace
A Business Lesson From Reading Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away
Goals are nice. They can be used to help us track where we should be going and how we get there. The future, however, is not set in stone. Things change, and our goals should change along with the times. We should also not lose sight of the fact that sometimes goals are a guess. As Annie says in her book, the gap between doing no training at all and doing all the work to train for a marathon and running 8 miles before breaking your leg is a fantastic achievement, not a failure. By viewing it as one we set up a situation where the only sure-fire way to not fail was to never start.
Training and Development
"So maybe it’s time we all got back to the basics and curated our own news, instead of having it pushed to us by an algorithm." - Harold Jarche on why we should maybe reconsider RSS feeds for news and learning.
Linked - It’s Time to Face the Three Challenges of Learning
If the people who work for you aren't continuously learning your organization is going to fall behind competitors who are learning. The folks who want to learn will end up working for those competitors. You'll be left with a group of employees who are comfortable doing the same thing they've always done and aren't interested in learning anything new.
On a similar note - I suspect that many leaders are smart enough to never say that they view employees as a cost instead of an asset, but how they really feel could show up more in how they view training. - Why Training Is An Investment, Not An Expense
Mental Health in the Workplace
Does the Workplace Have a Role in Our Current Mental Health Crisis?
So, while I wouldn't place the blame for all of our anxiety coming from a pandemic, climate, racism, sexism, and violence, I do believe the workplace has a role to play when it comes to supporting the human beings who work for you in dealing with all of that, and a responsibility to not add to it. Unfortunately, I see a lot of leaders who don't seem to care about either of those things. IMHO, they don't deserve to have employees.
Organizational Developers: Becoming Trauma Informed Will Elevate How You Operate - We talk a lot about supporting employees, and the best way to support employees dealing with traumatic events is to understand how trauma might impact them and their work. Consider someone losing a parent, spouse, child, or other important person in their life. Do we give them “x” number of days off and then expect them to come back like nothing happened? Or do we understand what kind of long-term impacts that grief may have?
I'm Not a Doctor - How to Help My Team's Mental Health - I love the idea of modeling the behavior and making it "explicitly acceptable to take breaks."
Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech
AI Produced Images and Reality
Be skeptical. Learn how to identify AI-generated images, and look for inconsistencies. And, always identify who benefits from your attention on these posts.
Cellebrite asks cops to keep its phone hacking tech ‘hush hush’ - don't ask how cops get data or whether the data they present is accurate by having them explain it. "Trust us". Hmm.
Always worth checking out - Five Great Reads on Cyber, Data, and Legal Discovery for August 2023
The Secret Weapon Hackers Can Use to Dox Nearly Anyone in America for $15 - credit bureaus selling information to data brokers and it's out there.
Updating IT and Custodian Interviews for Today’s Data Sources - With Microsoft Teams we would see this often. Which Teams collaboration groups is a user a member of, versus which ones are relevant that they actually pay attention to?
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.