Something to check out. Mental Health America’s new Mind the Workplace 2022 Report: An Employer’s Responsibility to Employee Mental Health seeks to answer the latest question on business leaders’ minds: “How can employers meaningfully support employee mental health in 2022?” Data in the report comes from the Work Health Survey, which measured the perceptions of…
We all started somewhere. We all started in some entry-level jobs. We all learned and grew. Good workplaces develop their entry-level people, turning them into experts. It would be a shame to spend all that time developing people and then losing them because you never gave them the same respect they would immediately get by going somewhere else. Somewhere that never knew them when they were in an entry-level position.
The people who worked to learn and build their knowledge and skills deserve better.
I’m not sure that these companies have done the math. If enough experienced workers in an industry do more than switch between competing offers but step away from the industry into a different career path, there will not be enough experienced workers to go around.
What are you going to do about that? Sit around with unfilled positions and cry about it, or get serious about raising up the next generation of cybersecurity talent?
One of the bigger management issues surrounding the remote work model is how and when to communicate. I’m an advocate of more communication, always. I’m a huge advocate of a lot more communication with a remote team.
But, we also have to think about the best way to work together. There are lots, and lots, of meetings that are designed to create better communication but aren’t necessary. Most of them are recurring meetings that no one ever cancels, even when there’s nothing urgent to discuss. Just because we’ve always had this meeting, and we always will.
That’s not a good reason to meet. At the end of the day, if your check-ins or project status meetings are nothing more than a “here’s where we are this week,” we might consider whether it makes more sense for people to send an email instead. Or even a Teams/Slack chat? It’s the same information, but no one has to plan their day around it.
On the one hand, I have argued before that we need to hold people accountable because, without a stick, our people will not have as much of a reason to care in the first place. On the other hand, a couple of the stats from the report that Doug pulled out tell me something different:
It’s from Australia, but the part that I have looked at so far could be useful for everyone trying to figure out how to build and maintain a workplace that supports mental health. (Check your local laws, though, as the legal references are obviously related to Australian workplace safety rules)