Linked: Is Remote Work Good Or Bad For Employee Engagement? Your Leadership Holds The Answer

Linked: Is Remote Work Good Or Bad For Employee Engagement? Your Leadership Holds The Answer

I’ve worked for remote teams for a few years now, and I can honestly say that this is true. What’s more, every time I read someone complain about how remote working isn’t working for the organization, as you read the details it almost always is really a failure to do this: “A recent MIT survey…

What I’m Sharing (weekly) August 30, 2020
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What I’m Sharing (weekly) August 30, 2020

Legal Tech Trends to Watch Your office will never be normal again See What We Have Planned for Relativity Fest 2020 4 Tips for Counseling a Struggling Remote Employee ILTA>ON 2020 Delivers an Inspiring Conference, Emphasizing the Positive Want a Job in Legal Technology? Your Answer is Increasingly at ALSPs Meet the Star Witness: Your…

Over-Simplistic Scientific Intelligence
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Over-Simplistic Scientific Intelligence

And this really brings me back to my point, that we do a poor job of truly understanding science, statistics and cause and effect. We believe that algorithms have all been well-thought out, and produce a “true” result, even when they are trying to predict something as unpredictable as what traffic will look like 20 years from now. We assume social science studies are giving us the “right” answer for how to educate people, or train them for the best outcomes, without considering what we are teaching them about the larger world. We assume that we can tweak one belief, or one thing, without human beings reacting to those changes in unpredictable ways, all the while thinking our one change will cause the reaction we DO predict.

We assume a lot that should never be assumed. We over-simplify a world that actually has more influences than we can possibly account for, and assume that what is really a small statistical difference represents a universal truth.

It doesn’t. There are no simple answers. It takes hard work, hard discussions, and lots of listening to figure out the best way forward. Don’t wait for AI to tell you what to do, it may be missing quite a bit.

Linked: The Lonely, Pixelated Hell of Networking During the Pandemic
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Linked: The Lonely, Pixelated Hell of Networking During the Pandemic

Most of these sound awful, and the ones that are “not so voluntary” attempts to make sure workers are engaged sound even worse.

Actually, I suspect they are doing a lot more harm to engagement than good.

There are ways to network during this time. They’re different, they’re a little more work, and they take some getting used to. But they don’t need to be ridiculous, and they definitely don’t need to be forced.

In fact, this is a great time to simply send someone a note asking for 15-30 minutes of their time. Most of us are pretty open to doing exactly that with coworkers or peers in our industry. I’d be happy to find some time to have a conversation with you about my industry, or mental health, or blogging. Or even to just have a coffee or beer with virtually. We don’t even need to be on our webcams if you don’t want.

See, isn’t that better than having 50 people on mute while the CEO talks, or getting randomly matched with coworkers?

Ugh, the introvert in me shudders to think about some of these. Please, don’t. Just ask someone to get a coffee like we used to.

2020 Metaphor Alert – The Choluteca Bridge to Nowhere.

2020 Metaphor Alert – The Choluteca Bridge to Nowhere.

Thanks to a mention in a recent newsletter from Manager Tools, I found this story about the Choluteca bridge in Honduras, and even though this happened in 1998, it felt like a 2020 thing, right? The designers of the new Choluteca Bridge tried their best to build a state-of-the-art structure that withstood a category 5…

Linked: As workspace usage of Slack and Microsoft Teams soars, lawyers see an uptick in harassment claims
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Linked: As workspace usage of Slack and Microsoft Teams soars, lawyers see an uptick in harassment claims

I guess I could see this happening. Teams or Slack chats are real-time, people feeling angry might be tempted to voice their unfiltered opinions on them, much like we see on Twitter, etc. “If workers don’t feel they have a voice on serious issues, resentment can build, turning channels ugly. At the end of the…