If you’ve been paying attention around the ol’ Internet lately, I’m sure you’ve seen someone talk about an NFT, or at least how much money is being spent on buying up various NFT items at auctions.
But what, exactly, is an NFT? (Non-fungible Token)
The first thing that jumped out at me is that I am very glad to see people taking learning into their own hands instead of waiting for their company to train them. I have always been a big fan of that. Your career, is your career, and you should act that way when it comes to learning new skills.
The second thing I thought was, if 77% of people are ready to learn new skills, as a company, you need to step up and offer opportunities for people to do just that. Very few people are going to be happy sitting and doing the same job for the next 20 years, and rightfully so, since we know that there’s almost no chance the jobs we do now, will still exist in the same way in as little as 5 years.
And, the last thing that jumped out at me? Nearly half are interested in running their own businesses? Are you prepared for that? For half of your employees to maybe become your competitors? It wouldn’t shock me. There’s a lot to be said for the flexibility of working for yourself. Choosing your projects, choosing your location, and your hours. Really, the one thing I keep seeing, over and over again, in interviews with experts and economists, is that health insurance is the one thing standing in the way. If we untied employment and health coverage, there might just be a massive overall in the U.S. labor market.
Now, I’ve left a few jobs over the years, including some that were remote, which I think is a new challenge for a lot of places right now. Most of the time, the departing employee is not exactly top of mind for the organization. You’ve got work to do, and they are no longer part of the plan. I get that, but somebody probably wants to at least pay attention to what the employee is doing on the way out.
Luckily, with everything having remote options now, it’s actually pretty easy to pop in and simply listen without really being noticed, or at least, feeling a bit better about not being noticed.
And, really, you should. Everyone should. Not because you necessarily have anything to add, but because you have an opportunity to listen.
Listening to different groups of people talk about their issues will open your eyes to the things that we, as white men, don’t notice. It gives us the opportunity to hear about racism and sexism that still happens to real people that we know and interact with every day. The stories about things like street harassment aren’t happening to random women complaining online, they are happening to the same women I just spent hours working through a project with, the people who’ve been victims of racist violence aren’t random names in the news, they are the folks we were just chatting about the weather with before a conference call, and collaborating with on documentation for the last week. The things we might read about adding pronouns to an email signature make it sound like a decent thing to do, but hearing someone you work with talk about how life-affirming it is to not be the “one” person at the company doing it? Yeah, it hits different when you hear that from someone you know.
So, as much as I have gone about my professional life glad that there were resource groups available but not really paying much attention to them, I’ve recently made a change and tried to drop in and listen where I could. It’s been a challenge. These are not fun, light, conversations. They shouldn’t be.
This NPR podcast offers some good tips for us as individuals, but I was glad to see that they also recognized that if work is causing us burnout, there’s another entity involved who needs to do something about it.
See, the question that should be asked is how AT&T can afford to give users all the video streaming they want over their network for HBO Max, but forces caps on all of its users for their internet usage.
Clearly, their network can handle the traffic of unlimited video streaming, so why do we let them use these excuses to limit access to the internet?