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.
I wrote a post this week about Facebook. In it, I remark that the new feature to allow people to create multiple profiles, targeted at freelancers, side-hustlers, and small business owners, seems like Meta just admitting that Facebook Pages died. The body’s been lying around stinking, but it’s dead.
Once upon a time, bloggers like me were encouraged to create Pages so that we could interact with readers and followers on Facebook apart from our personal profiles, which could only have our real names on them. So, for a site like Child Abuse Survivor, it made more sense to do that. Only, it’s been years since more than 1-5% of the people who follow that page on Facebook even saw any posts. There’s no value in putting in any effort there for me.
Do they think creating a second profile will somehow fix that now? I have my doubts, especially when I take a moment to actually count just how much of my newsfeed is ads and “suggested for you” as opposed to items from pages and people I chose to follow. It’s not pretty. This makes using Facebook less and less useful, which seems an awful lot like what a certain former bird site is now too.
It’s no wonder LinkedIn, for all of its faults, is looking more attractive to me and why Mastodon is more fun.
How much social media involvement do you have now? Where do you focus your efforts?
Careers and the Workplace
Unbundling The Office - This is an interesting take:
The idea of choosing your workplace to suit your task might seem new, but it’s really a very old one. As Marc Andreesen put it whilst appearing on Econtalk:
“There was no office of the Roman Empire. There was no office building. They didn't go to work. They ran the world. They did it from their homes, and they did it by walking around the street, and they did it by travelling, and they did it in the Senate; but there was no office and so forth and so on.”
The concept of an office is simply a function of the technology at the time.
Speaking of relationships:
No matter the location, this is key - What Better Leadership Looks Like
Training and Development
Good Way to Develop Those "Soft" Skills People Are Always on About - Train Others
If you want to challenge yourself to learn something deeply, start figuring out how you would train someone to do it. If your employer doesn't have an opening for a full-time trainer, create some opportunities to cross-train with your team, to reach out across teams and help teach them some of your skills, or to introduce them to some new technology that is coming. The skills you develop with come in handy, and you'll be showing off some serious leadership skills as well, something that is probably in short supply in your industry.
From last year - Linked – How Learning And Development Can Quell Quiet Quitting
Whether they stay but disengage, start looking for their next job while quietly quitting, or simply resign, they will look for better options, and increasingly those better options involve working for the place that will help them develop.
End of story.
Mental Health in the Workplace
How To Become A Mental Health Ally For Those You Lead - If you’re in a leadership position and claim to support the folks who work for you, this is part of it.
Managers, you might also need some advice for your own mental health, and the Offbeat newsletter had a suggestion:
An e-book answering why so many managers struggle with their mental well-being, what managers can do to support themselves, and what organizations can do to support their managers.
Linked - “Burnout is a relationship problem”: A conversation with Michael Leiter
Trust is going to have to be hard-earned in the tech industry after the last year. That's a shame because figuring out how to not burn out employees is going to take everyone working together.
Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech
Linked - With Increased Cybersecurity Awareness, Why Does Phishing Still Work?
You have to create a culture where everyone is expected to verify information before acting, even when it's coming from the CEO or Managing Partner.
This definitely seems like a bad idea - The Dangers of Agreeing to an ESI Protocol Before Knowing Your Sources of ESI
This is not a bad idea - Rules Change to Address AI Evidence Proposed by Grossman & Grimm
Revealed! The top 10 cybersecurity misconfigurations, as determined by CISA and the NSA
22 Democrats Sponsor a Bill That Could Censor Abortion Info From the Internet - A lesson in using "the kids" to hand AGs a tool to kill the 1st Amendment and privacy online.
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.