Career

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    Linked: Is the 4-day workweek a ‘perfect recipe for burnout’?

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Pre-2020 we spent 8+ hours in the office, plus maybe an hour or more commuting, turning our workday into about 10-11 hours of our day, on average. But, as I mentioned, part of that was just commuting, and part of that in-office time was spent interacting socially with coworkers, going to get lunch, etc. Now? We wake up and start working. (If you’re lucky and plan you might even get a chance to shower before work.) You eat at your desk. You work right up until 5-6PM and you simply shut down. Again, you’re lucky if someone doesn’t still email or “ping” you after that. So, for many of us, our workday might still be 10-11 hours, or it might even be a bit shorter, but it’s ALL work, and as we just saw, the reality is that around the 6-hour mark our productivity started to dip. The key then, to not burning out, is to make that day flexible. Instead of demanding you put in “x” hours each day/week/month, we should simply lay out what work needs to be completed, what the deadlines are, and give workers the freedom to find the best way to accomplish that. Maybe, for some, they will want to really focus for 4 days per week and have the extra day to live their lives. For others, it might look like working some in the morning, some in the afternoon, and then again in the evening. Not everyone is going to fit into the same bucket when it comes to finding the balance that allows them to do their best work, and also have a life. Don’t force them to fit into the bucket you like. That’s how you burn them out.

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    Linked: LinkedIn Wants to Normalize Career Breaks With New Feature

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Of course, the real question is will hiring managers also shift their perspectives and hiring practices? All the LinkedIn details for a gap in the world won’t change the culture if hiring managers immediately toss any resumes with one before even trying to understand why it’s there.

    Hopefully, that is coming. There are a whole lot of really talented folks who’ve been forced to take a gap in their employment in the last couple of years. Good organizations have the opportunity to scoop them up while all those bad managers are turning up their noses at “employment gaps”.

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    Linked: The Great Resignation generation: Gen Z wants to job hop

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    This is something that many of us older folks don’t get, but we should be thinking about much more. I think many of us who work in the technology, legal, or eDiscovery sectors can lose sight of how demanding careers in these industries are. We are quick to scoff at the idea that we should maybe figure out how to make them a little less demanding, or at least more friendly for diverse candidates who can’t simply work all night, or be on call 24 hours a day for our clients because that’s just the way it’s done in our industry. We tend to think that because all of the jobs in the industry are like that, we don’t have to worry about competitors offering something else to our employees.

    We are not considering how many people we drive out of the industry completely, especially young people. There is a staffing shortage in these industries, and the companies struggling to find enough talent are not losing out to some other mysterious company in the industry who can pick and choose, we’re all in the same boat because the boat is leaking people every single day. People are making the choice to do something else because what we offer isn’t cutting it.

  • Linked: How to Toot Your Own Horn At Work

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    have often been on record as saying that leading a remote team requires over-communication. You simply cannot assume information is being shared or understood if you don’t actively communicate it yourself.

    The same goes for tooting your own horn. You simply cannot assume that people you haven’t communicated with directly about your contributions are going to know about them. We like to think that compliments and acknowledgments go beyond the immediate conversations we are having but we can’t assume that.

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    Linked: Remote working jobs: 5 problems we need to solve in 2022

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Sadly, most managers just don’t know how to do this. We’ve lived in a world where hard work = hours worked for so long that we don’t know how to do anything else, even though it was also never really true. There have always been people who “work” long hours just to look good without ever really getting anything done, and others who get work done very efficiently and see no reason to sit at their desk longer and play that game. (And everything in between these two extremes!)

    What we haven’t done in many cases is figure out better ways to measure who is getting actual work done, because sometimes that’s hard to do.