As pointed out in the link below, these types of behaviors break trust. I can’t trust leadership who doesn’t act in a way that matches the talk, and in too many cases the talk about well-being is just talk. You could say the same about diversity and inclusion and other efforts that exist mostly to appeal to customers and potential employees instead of demonstrating a true commitment to those things.
Eliminate all that time spent commuting, hassling with after-school, Summer Break, sick day childcare, and dealing with office politics, and you just became a massively more attractive place for moms, let alone all women and other people who would benefit from the job being something other than 8-5 in one, singular, location for everyone, every day.
Again, you broaden your labor pool, which broadens your diversity efforts. It’s not rocket science. The more “rules” you have in place, like a full-time return to office policy, the more people will find it difficult to work for you, and the smaller pool of candidates you’ll be choosing from.
This is very interesting.
“The new product — called “Microsoft Edge for Business” — natively separates work and personal browsing into dedicated browser windows with their own favorites, separate caches and storage locations.”
Check out the episode. There’s some interesting discussion. Sadly, even when asked for something positive to end on, the guest had nothing. That’s kind of what working in tech feels like, doesn’t it?
But in other areas of life, that’s not at all how the game works. War, business, education, etc. are not finite games. It’s not clear who all of the competitors are, the rules change and there’s no one “score” that everyone has agreed upon. Maybe most importantly, it doesn’t end at the allocated time, it goes on and on with some of the competitors giving up over time and dropping out of the game.
The problem Simon identifies is that when the game is infinite, but you play it as if it were finite, you end up in a quagmire.
She uses these stories as a jumping-off point to talk about goals and failure. When the goal is to finish the marathon, anything other than that is a failure. Despite the change in circumstances, the risk of doing more damage to themselves, and the fact that no one would find fault in them for stopping, they went on with this myopic focus on hitting their goal.
It got me thinking about OKRs. You know, those quarterly, semi-annual, or annual goals we set for employees during performance reviews, and then measure them solely on whether they hit those goals or not. As if the world doesn’t change in the middle of the time period and forces us to react in a way that might not be part of our stated goals.
It also got me thinking about company-wide goals like market share, revenue, etc.