Mike McBride Online

Career

Linked – Return to Office, Return to Sexual Harassment?
ByMike McBride June 29, 2024July 4, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

The article offers some suggestions on educating your employees about harassment and what you should be doing with programs, but I want to get brutally honest here.

What workplace hasn’t already held a sexual harassment seminar? Is it making any difference? Not when you tell me that remote work was the most effective way to lower incidences of harassment. Essentially, keeping people away from each other was the only way we found to significantly dent the overall statistics.

Want to know what would make a dent? Fire people. On the spot. Publicly. The first time it happens.

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Career

Linked – Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else”
ByMike McBride June 25, 2024June 24, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

This should not surprise anyone.

I can think of a few reasons why this should not have surprised anyone at Dell.

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Mental Health

Linked – Mental Health Reminders in the Workplace.
ByMike McBride June 20, 2024June 19, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

Could you do something for me? The next time you try to schedule a thirty-minute meeting with someone and see a thirty-minute break between long stretches of committed time, leave that time for them. Find a different time, if possible. Or go even further and commit to finding a time not immediately before or after another meeting. Let people have a few minutes. It’s good for all of our mental health.

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Career | Training

Linked – It’s Not Nagging: Effective Communication is Deliberately Redundant
ByMike McBride June 19, 2024June 18, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

It’s not nagging to follow up a meeting with an email summarizing the discussion. It’s good meeting etiquette. It’s not nagging to drop a group chat in Slack or Teams for updates. That’s what those tools are for. It’s also not nagging to expect your team to report progress in many ways. That’s their responsibility.

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Tech

Linked – Have the Right Expectations Regarding Artificial Intelligence
ByMike McBride June 17, 2024June 20, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

Sharlyn chalks this up to AI still learning, but I don’t believe that’s correct. I don’t think Generative AI tools can come up with anything new. That’s not the way it works. Large language models are developed by ingesting and analyzing tons of existing data. Based on that data, they then mathematically conjure up the most likely response to your prompt. How could it come with a genuinely original icebreaker?

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Microsoft | Personal

It’s been a year of M365 Newsletters
ByMike McBride June 10, 2024June 9, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

The M365 newsletter is a year old, and while it’s not been a huge commercial success, it’s been fun to do, and it’s brought some value to folks, whether they are paid or free subscribers. The big thing I wanted to mention is how being a subscriber and referring your peers could help get you a limited paid subscription for free:

Read More It’s been a year of M365 Newsletters