October 16, 2020
Team collaboration done right is a powerful force to align a group of individuals to accomplish a common goal in the most effective way possible. But even the best collaborations, filled with smart, capable, and experienced team members, can be a struggle.
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October 02, 2020
At home and at work, “busy” culture worsens the problems it promises to solve. It’s natural to assume that the busier we are, the bigger the impact we’ll be able to make — but in reality, studies have shown that busy culture destroys productivity and pulls us away from both our families and deeper relationships with our coworkers.
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September 18, 2020
Some companies are struggling to keep up with our new normal. Research from Asana reveals nearly half of employees surveyed globally said company-wide goals had been deprioritised since remote working began, with 47 per cent saying those goals have changed at least once during that time – and 60 per cent haven’t increased communication on such issues.
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September 11, 2020
The global pandemic has left newly remote workers swimming in confusion and struggling to keep up. To shift from today’s state of surviving to a future where teams are thriving, we need tools that make coordinating and collaborating on work effortless.
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September 09, 2020
Everyone from the CEO to the newest hire wants to be part of an effective team. But in unprecedented times, with an accelerated shift into the future of work, how can organizations achieve clarity on day-to-day tasks and achieve the company mission?
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September 04, 2020
The term “gig economy” was coined by the former New Yorker editor Tina Brown in 2009. It described how workers in the knowledge economy increasingly were pursuing “a bunch of free-floating projects, consultancies, and part-time bits and pieces while they transacted in a digital marketplace.
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August 28, 2020
The California bullet train between San Diego and San Francisco. Lockheed Martin’s Joint Strike Fighter program. Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport. Apple’s AirPower wireless charging pad. These are just a few examples of projects that suffered severe schedule delays and cost overruns, or that were unable to deliver on their promised scope.
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August 14, 2020
The productivity problem is especially challenging these days, when many of us are working from home, with less structure than usual. It’s easier than ever to be busy all day and still not make progress on critical work (where did that day go?).
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August 07, 2020
It was one of those kinds of relationships. I had the recurring event on my calendar to attend this group’s meetings. For my first year or two of involvement, I was passionate about it. Then my interest waned, and I was showing up because I felt like I should. Then...
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July 31, 2020
Covid-19 has thrust many leaders into remote management which requires a different skill set than face-to-face management. They have been forced to make this transition quickly, and for the most part, without training. While some jobs have proven adaptable, many sectors are not well-suited for the remote environment and many workers have home lives that present overwhelming challenges.
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July 24, 2020
Mark Zuckerberg recently shared his plans for the future of remote work at Facebook. By 2030, he promised, at least half of Facebook’s 50,000 employees would be working from home. “We are going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale,” he declared in a follow-up interview. A few days before...
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July 17, 2020
Has there ever been a time when customers were more demanding of the companies serving them? Industry 4.0 technologies—many barely imaginable only a decade ago—have already enabled genuine breakthroughs in cost, convenience, and customization, creating extraordinary value for buyers while raising the performance bar for producers ever higher.
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July 03, 2020
Interruptions have always been a reality of work, as meetings, text or chat messages, emails, and conversations with coworkers endlessly fragment our time and thus our attention. As the Covid-19 global pandemic forced many of us to work from home, the concurrent management of work/non-work responsibilities have added to this already fragmented time.
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June 26, 2020
In 1935, the life expectancy of an S&P 500 company was 90 years. By 2010, it was 14 years and studies show that it’s getting even shorter. No wonder more and more companies, who are tired of change fatigue and endless restructuring, are looking at how they can become a more agile organization and retain their competitive advantage.
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June 12, 2020
Imagine a crisis that forces your company’s employees to change the way they work almost overnight. Despite initial fears that the pressure would be too great, you discover that this new way of working could be a blueprint for the long term.
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May 22, 2020
We’ve been taught that if we want more — money, achievement, vitality, joy, peace of mind — we need to do more, to add more to our ever-growing to-do list. But what if we’ve been taught wrong? What if the answer to getting more of what we want isn’t addition at all, but subtraction?
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May 15, 2020
Remote work, especially in a world affected by Covid-19, naturally leads to “flex time.” Employees with small children might be getting the majority of their work done at night after the kids are in bed. Others are working early and hoping to quit early. Still, others are starting late and working late.
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May 01, 2020
If you’re finding that you’re more exhausted at the end of your workday than you used to be, you’re not alone. Over the past few weeks, mentions of “Zoom fatigue” have popped up more and more on social media, and Google searches for the same phrase have steadily increased since early March.
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April 17, 2020
We’re all busy — so busy. We have bills to pay, a mortgage to service, kids to take care of, and of course, work deadlines to meet. All of these commitments leave us with little meaningful time for ourselves, and for cultivating meaningful relationships with others. But the good news is...
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April 04, 2020
“I’ll Slack you.” In workplaces around the world, the name of the popular online messaging system has become a verb, just like Google. Slack has been enthusiastically integrated into the day-to-day functions of legacy corporations and burgeoning startups: The company claims that, in 2019, it hosted 10+ million daily users.
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March 27, 2020
Those of us who present, facilitate, and teach for a living understand the importance of developing a personal connection with an audience. It’s critical to be and feel natural; to make people laugh, feel at ease, and fully engage — and perhaps even lose themselves — in the content you’re delivering.
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March 20, 2020
In response to the uncertainties presented by Covid-19, many companies and universities have asked their employees to work remotely. While Millions of people report that they work remotely around the world, the new policies leave many employees — and their managers — working out of the office and separated from each other for the first time.
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March 13, 2020
Shaping the future of work is as much about studying the way real people connect and collaborate today as it is about imagining the new tools we’ll be using tomorrow, especially for those who are members of distributed teams.
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March 06, 2020
At the end of February, early March 2020, the coronavirus (or Covid-19) took a more serious turn in Korea, Italy, Spain, UK and the U.S. with warnings that it could very well impact how, when, and where we work.
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February 07, 2020
In the past fifteen years, I’ve tried scores of task managers like Todoist and Wunderlist, a couple dozen project management platforms like Asana and Basecamp, and hundreds of other productivity apps that promise to make better use of my time or enhance collaboration with my colleagues or my team.
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January 24, 2020
The core problem with working longer hours is that time is a finite resource. Energy is a different story. Defined in physics as the capacity to work, energy comes from four main wellsprings in human beings: the body, emotions, mind, and spirit. In each, energy can be systematically expanded and ...
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January 03, 2020
Breaking habits is hard. We all know this, whether we’ve failed our latest diet (again), or felt the pull to refresh our Instagram feed instead of making progress on a work project that is past due.
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December 20, 2019
The festive spirit is everywhere during the holiday season. For some, each day feels like waking up to a holiday song — “children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile.” But, for others, it can be the loneliest and most stressful time of the year.
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December 06, 2019
Why are so many meetings so unproductive?
Many professionals, fed up with calendars chock-full of long, disorganised, soul-bruising sessions, resort to uncharitable, even cynical explanations
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November 29, 2019
Social technologies are not just giant time sinks that keep your employees from getting their work done. On the contrary, they may become the most powerful tools yet developed to raise the productivity of high-skill knowledge workers.
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November 15, 2019
If you’re sometimes frustrated about how little you accomplish during your workday, you’re not alone. Research indicates that only 26% of people often leave the office having accomplished the tasks they set out to do.
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November 08, 2019
Although collaboration is at the heart of modern business processes, most companies are still in the dark about how to manage it. Linear, process-based tools such as activity-based costing, business process reengineering, and total quality management have long been effective at measuring and improving the efficiency of people and organisations in accomplishing individual tasks. But ...
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October 18, 2019
The biggest challenge to moving forward on anything is the transition to working on it. It almost always represents a shift from doing something comfortable to doing something uncomfortable.
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October 04, 2019
Although digital investment is almost unquestionably the right course of action for most firms, organisations still struggle to create the desired results. Estimates of digital transformation failures range from 66% to 84%. Such a high failure rate isn’t surprising, as leaders are trying to create entirely new competencies and wedge them into an organisation with strong legacy cultures and operating models.
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September 27, 2019
In today's dynamic markets, leaders need very different mindsets from those used to manage traditional organisations in less-demanding times. We find that three primary mindset shifts are required to lead agile organisations designed for innovation, collaboration and value creation.
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September 20, 2019
One of the best insights on what true productivity means in the 21st century dates back to 1890. In his book The Principles of Psychology, Vol.1, William James wrote a simple statement that’s packed with meaning: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
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