I’m sure these statistics will not surprise anyone: “American workers’ productivity has increased dramatically since 1973. What has also increased sharply during that same period is the pay gap between productivity and pay. While productivity between 1973 and 2016 has increased by 73.7 percent, hourly pay has increased by only 12.5 percent. In other words,…
Take time off, real time off, not “no meetings during the day but catching up on emails for 4 hours that evening” time off, actual disconnected, unreachable, time away from work. And, encourage the people who work for you to do exactly that too.
I hope employers, executives, and managers can remember that the people who work for them are people, human beings with lives outside of work, and not just an expense to match up against productivity.
I hope. But I’m realistic too.
“A full day of uninterrupted working time has been a tremendous productivity win.”
RSS is not gone, quite the opposite. Most people, however, don’t use RSS subscriptions like they did in the old Google Reader days, but RSS is running underneath a whole lot of stuff that we all use every day.
But, I also want to point out that there are a TON of good reasons to use an RSS reader now. Maybe more than there were when Google still had one. As it is, we’ve sort of grown into this habit of letting social media inform us. If there’s some topic we want to know about, we’ll follow some accounts and let the algorithm decide for us what we need to see.
Look how well that’s working out.
Why it’s almost as if we should ask individuals what would help them, and within reason, provide that. After all, even within each age group, parents might prioritize something different than single employees, or those sharing an internet connection and space with a spouse or roommates also working from home might prioritize something else. Some may want to adhere to strict 9-5 hours so that they can spend the rest of their time on childcare or side-businesses, while others may value the ability to take a couple of hours during the day for schoolwork and then pick up work again in the evening.
We would do well to listen to what people need, talk about what we expect, and also understand what we are doing with our own actions.