I thought about these headlines yesterday. Maybe we shouldn’t consider X-Twitter’s market-value collapse a horrendous business decision. Perhaps this was always a $44 billion donation in kind to the Trump campaign in exchange for an oversized level of power and influence. Musk turned Twitter into X – a right-wing propaganda machine.
Well-being programs place the responsibility for managing employee mental health in the hands of the employees, who have no power to change the things causing the problem.
I’m sure there are some CEOs out there who read that and think we’re supposed to be drained and used up. That just shows how dedicated we are to our work. That ignores the fact that work is only part of our lives. They ignore the damage that does to society when we have adults who are uninvolved with their kids’ lives, disconnected from their community, uninformed about what is happening in the world, and lacking many meaningful friendships because work requires them to have nothing left to give to those endeavors.
That’s why having a workplace that accounts for those impacts on employees’ lives is so important.
Remote workforces require CEOs to develop measurements to tell who is getting work done and who isn’t. Apparently, for 89% of them, that’s too hard.
Reminder: They get paid, on average, 344 times the average worker but can’t be bothered to measure productivity meaningfully.
So, to the 11% who are not planning on this behavior, I hope you find the best talent on the market because you are not limited by who can be in the office and run circles around these dinosaurs.
How would you react to domestic violence if you were to view it as a company security issue instead of a personal problem? There is plenty of evidence that it is a workplace issue. Employers could play a role in keeping their people safe if they took it seriously as a workplace issue.
It’s easy to walk away from a conference like this one with the impression that it’s just a matter of time. On the other hand, we must also acknowledge that the AI technology we see in front of us is just OK. It’s not world-changing, and it’s sometimes downright awful. As I’ve said before, will the huge investments ever pay off? We are all waiting to see. How long will we continue to talk about the future of AI instead of how it’s changed our world?