Linked: Work addiction is real – here’s how to kick the habit
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Linked: Work addiction is real – here’s how to kick the habit

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

I think this article, while helpful, also hints at a larger societal problem that many of us have been thinking about and that is what role our work plays in our overall lives and our sense of work. Working all the time isn’t just something we sometimes do. It’s part and parcel of being “important” in our society. Let’s face it, when someone tells us they disconnect in the evenings and weekends, our first thought is not “Oh how healthy”, it is much more to be “Oh you must not be very important then”.

Until that perception changes, I don’t know that we’ll make much progress, but it does need to change. Our work plays far too much of a role in our self-worth and therefore is it is far too easy to take advantage of employees.

Linked: NBA star Kevin Love on mental health struggles, success, getting Covid
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Linked: NBA star Kevin Love on mental health struggles, success, getting Covid

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

This quote from Kevin Love is something that just stood out to me because it’s something that I think is so important to understand. Not just for a professional athlete, but for any of us to remember about our own line of work, or to remember when it comes to young people in school:

“You can’t achieve yourself out of depression,” Love says. “You can’t achieve yourself out of that high-level of anxiety.”

Linked: Women in the Workplace
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Linked: Women in the Workplace

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

This is an acute problem for many of us, who want to participate in doing the work of promoting diversity and inclusion but are still getting measured by everything other than that. And, as the survey points out, it is oftentimes women who take on this work, in an effort to help other women and minorities achieve.

But, as much as the C-Level folks talk about the importance of this work, it is not a part of the job performance, nor is time and effort really allocated for it.

How many of you volunteer to take on this work, running an employee resource group, putting together presentations, leading group discussions, often at the behest of top management, and then when it comes times for performance reviews, the only thing that matters is time spent on bringing in revenue?

The message seems to really be, “It’s great that you want to do this work for us, but make sure you do it on your time because your productivity will be measured against the people who don’t spend any time at all doing this work”

Linked: These 7 productivity “rules” are harmful, anti-scientific myths
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Linked: These 7 productivity “rules” are harmful, anti-scientific myths

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

But notice what is missing from all of this advice? Any actual science. Or, for that matter, any interviews with the thousands of people who actually do the same thing, and aren’t nearly as successful. Sure, maybe Jeff Bezos gets up every day at 5 AM, goes for a run, then schedules some deep-think time, all before he even checks email. Do you really think it you or I did that, that would make us as successful as Jeff Bezos? I guarantee you, his sleep schedule and morning routine is similar to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people around the world, who do not have lives that we would want to emulate. But we don’t read those stories, because no one cares.

On the other hand, in order for a lot of these productivity hacks to have ant scientific fact behind them, we would have to look at those people and see how maybe it’s not the morning routine that makes Bezos worth a gazillion dollars, it was something else entirely.

But then, those articles are much harder to write and would involve a lot more work, and even admit that you can’t hack your way to a billion dollars in success. We wouldn’t want to do anything like that, would we?

Linked: Intentional connection in the digital office
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Linked: Intentional connection in the digital office

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

The only thing preventing most offices from being fully remote is simply a lack of know-how, or an unwillingness to commit to that change and design the workplace around it. Once you do that, what you’ll find is that rather than hoping for some magic collaboration, you decide who to invite to the table, and ask for their input, on purpose. Intentionally.

Linked: Companies hope new benefits will solve your mental health issues. Don’t fall for it.
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Linked: Companies hope new benefits will solve your mental health issues. Don’t fall for it.

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

It’s cool if your company wants to provide an assistance program or pay for access to an app that will help with meditation, etc. Good for them. But, if the source of your mental health issues is the day-to-day stress of working in an understaffed, toxic, environment, for far less money than you’re worth, and they won’t address that? How much do they really care?

Fixing that is going to require a lot more, as the article below points out. How many organizations are willing to make those kinds of changes?