Mike McBride Online

Career

Work Can Be Many Things But It Is Also Transactional
ByMike McBride November 21, 2023November 20, 2023 Reading Time: 3 minutes

When I hear people talking about how much more effective employees are when they make friends at work, it makes my hair stand on end a bit. Because the benefits of having good friendships don’t exist solely to make us better workers. We’re more than our work. Our work is a transaction that we take part in every day. We do work, our employer pays us. We shouldn’t let any kind of friendship or supposed loyalty blind us to that fact either. When our employers don’t consider the money they pay to be worth the work that we are doing, for whatever reason they have to think that, they have shown an uncanny willingness to let us go. There is no loyalty from that end of things and so no loyalty is deserved from the other end of the transaction either.

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LawFirms

Linked – For ‘Unhappy’ Law Firms, There’s Little Recourse From Fast Rising Legal Tech Prices
ByMike McBride November 16, 2023November 15, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

With all the announcements from Microsoft Ignite about Teams Premium, SharePoint Premium, CoPilot, etc. these subscription costs are about to get even higher if firms want to keep up with technological changes.

And this will remain a massive problem:

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Training

Linked – How Do You Encourage Your Team to Learn New Things
ByMike McBride November 15, 2023November 15, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

If you truly want to be an organization that supports learning, you need to put your money where your mouth is and figure out how to incentivize individual and team learning opportunities. Taking the time to learn and the time to train others, shouldn’t come at a cost to the performance review of the people who want to learn. They should be the people you want to reward and hang on to. They are the ones who will be pivotal in helping you navigate change, but they can only do that if they still work for you. Making them work double-time to make up for “lost productivity” when they try to be part of the learning culture you claim to want won’t encourage them to hang around.

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Career

Don’t Just Work – Get a Hobby
ByMike McBride November 14, 2023November 15, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

In other words, I’m more than simply a worker. I’m more than a cog in the capitalist system that pays me for my labor. We all are, but we don’t always act like it, and I suspect that Helen is correct in her assumption that part of the reason is that we have prioritized work so far above and beyond the rest of our lives that we don’t have anything else to do.

That’s not a recipe for a healthy and balanced life.

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Career

We Can’t Win With Employers – Now Too Many People are Staying?
ByMike McBride November 7, 2023November 6, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

The thing is, there are still so many people who look at a resume with a few different jobs in the early years and see someone who is unstable, all the while employers are designing these jobs to turn over, and then laying people off when they don’t turn over as much as they expected them to. So maybe stop worrying so much about whether changing jobs is going to look bad and focus on finding a place where you can do the work that you want to do.

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Mental Health

Building a Culture that Supports Mental Health By Creating Opportunities to be Kind
ByMike McBride November 6, 2023November 9, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

As I said, I’ve seen this same research. More than once. I’ve talked about it here and here, and probably a few other times as well. On the individual level, acts of kindness toward others are beneficial for not only the receiver but the giver. As a peer, I can do what I can to give to my coworkers, but what does it look like to have a culture that encourages, rewards, and maybe even expects that kind of behavior?

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