Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #79

The True Benefit of Social Media

This past week was Mardi Gras, a big deal here in Louisiana. My wife and I spent much of the past couple of weeks taking in parades, music, food, etc. It’s just part of living here. On Tuesday, we avoid the large crowds of New Orleans in favor of traditional Cajun Mardi Gras celebrations. We usually spend part of the morning watching the Courir de Mardi Gras in Eunice, LA.

This Tuesday was no exception, and as a hobbyist photographer, these colorful and entertaining spectacles are a great chance to capture some interesting shots. I’ve now done this a few times and while the day is fun, the real reward for me comes later in the week. I make it a point to get an album of photos up on Facebook, tagging the event page and asking them to share with the folks who participated. It gives me great pleasure to see the folks of Eunice sharing those photos amongst themselves, tagging the people in the photos in the comments, laughing at each other, and generally enjoying Mardi Gras again online. I consider it my small way to give back to that community in exchange for letting us come up and enjoy the Cajun traditions with them.

To me, this is what social media should be. An opportunity to connect with people, have some fun, educate everyone about these traditions and share my hobby with people.

Sadly, that’s not what social media is now. With Twitter and Meta both going to subscription models where paying customers get more share of the attention, it might only be a matter of time before this is true:

Sarah Frier @sarahfrier

What does this mean for everyday people? Social media isn’t really for keeping up with your friends and family anymore. It’s for being entertained by professional content creators. Get your good friends a group chat if you haven’t already.

That will be a sad day, but we have plenty of technological tools even without the big social media platforms. It might just take a little more work. (And I’ll always be on my website and newsletter right here!)

With that said, what else is going on this week:

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Careers and the Workplace

Want a more inclusive workplace? Embrace an async-first approach - If you require all of your employees to work in your office every day, between 8-5, sitting at a desk in an open office environment, you can only hire people who are available to do that and who work best in that environment. We’ve learned that it excludes many people who would be valuable members of your organization.

Similarly - Who Can Work for You? The Answer to that Question Might Say Everything About Diversity.

It’s common to think about young people who want to work remote so they can sit on a beach instead of going to an office. They exist, but so do a bunch of people who aren’t able to come to an office every day. Those people deserve an opportunity too.

If your company doesn’t want to take on DE&I to this level, who will?

This is the kind of information that could help with that goal:

• Increasing supervisor savvy around culture, race, and identity

• We Asked, They Answered: What Women Leaders Really Want at Work

Trust is Easily Broken

Sharlyn does an excellent job of describing how leadership can break employees’ trust and linking to more reading on the subjects. (Do an employee engagement survey and don’t act on the results? That’ll do it. Make it unsafe for people to express ideas and ask questions? That too.)

This might interest those recently laid off - Linked - Companies Can’t Ask You to Shut up to Receive Severance, NLRB Rules. as well as this:

TIN #030 - What To Read To Be A Better Networker

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Legal, Privacy and Security

Dennis Kennedy offers a Free PDF of Successful Innovation Outcomes in Law Book.

It’s 2023, and eDiscovery Tools still have conflicting ways in which they determine duplicate emails, so this seems like a good idea. - Introducing the EDRM E-Mail Duplicate Identification Specification and Message Identification Hash (MIH)

For the work from home crowd and everyone else - NSA Releases Best Practices For Securing Your Home Network Security Service

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Mental Health in the Workplace

The Tyranny of Faux Self-Care

You can’t meditate your way out of a 40-hour work week with no childcare. Buying a new planner and signing up for a meditation class won’t change the fact that +30 million Americans are uninsured and that 25% of American’s don’t have paid sick days off work.

When you want to help ease stress in the workplace: 3 main areas of focus

Finally, we can talk about Sen. Fetterman being brave for publicly acknowledging and getting treatment for depression. We can also talk about the fact that not many other American’s can do the same thing.

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Until next week, let’s find ways to share some joy.