retales botijero/Getty Images Let’s face it: The open office can be a nightmare, especially when you’re working on something that requires your undivided attention. To make matters worse, your colleagues can be distracting — maybe they’re having loud conversations or their cell phones are constantly chirping. How can you make peace with your open office? How should you handle loud coworkers who are disturbing your focus? What’s the best way to cope with the noise and distractions in your office without coming across as antisocial or rude? What the Experts Say The [...]

Bjarte Rettedal/Getty Images America spends $3.3 trillion on health care, or more than $10,000 per person, which is twice as much as any other industrialized country. Yet nearly 30 million Americans, or 10% of the population, are uninsured. If the Affordable Care Act unravels in the near term, the number of insured could creep back up to 50 million, the level in 2009. These numbers exclude the millions more who are underinsured — people with high deductibles, high copays, and benefit caps that leave them very exposed if they fall seriously ill and are hospitalized. Washington, DC invari [...]

Education Images/Getty Images People are often highly motivated to avoid threats. If you are walking down a dark, isolated city street, you are vigilant for unexpected sights and sounds and probably pick up the pace to get back to a populated area as quickly as possible. If you step into the street and see a bus bearing down on you, you jump back. If a large unfamiliar dog is growling outside your front door, you stay inside. This week, we were updated on another serious threat. According to the recent United Nations report on climate change, if the nations of the world do not take drastic ac [...]

SolStock/Getty Images To create an analytical culture in your organization, you need to nurture the right mindset among your employees. And that starts with creating a culture of analytics in your HR department. How can senior leaders help HR develop a culture in which people think analytically? First, you need to understand the different levels of comfort with analytics in HR, and then you need to decide your approach to hiring and building expertise at each of the different levels. Understanding your current levels of HR analytics expertise Our research for the book The Power of People show [...]

Fernando Trabanco Fotografía/Getty Images Netflix’s global growth is a big factor in the company’s success. By 2017 it was operating in over 190 countries, and today close to 73 million of its some 130 million subscribers are outside the U.S. In the second quarter of 2018, its international streaming revenues exceeded domestic streaming revenues for the first time. This is a remarkable achievement for a company that was only in the U.S. before 2010, and in only 50 countries by 2015. Other U.S. internet companies have scaled internationally, of course (Facebook and Google are [...]

Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images A near-constant stream of business and scientific news reminds us that 50% of Americans are lonely. Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s powerful HBR article notes that half of CEOs suffer from loneliness. In addition to its personal toll, there is also an economic cost: workplace loneliness causes burnout, affects job satisfaction, and lowers both performance and retention. It also increases health care costs. The Causes of Loneliness at Work Loneliness is a subjective feeling of isolation. Number of coworker interactions and whether or not you work remote [...]

John Lund/Getty Images Leaders today increasingly turn to big data and advanced analytics in hopes of solving their most pressing problems, whether it’s a drop-off of repeat customers, a shift in consumption patterns, or an attempt to reach new markets. The prevailing thought is that more data is better, especially given advancements in tools and technologies such as artificial intelligence and predictive analytics. But when it comes to uncovering the motivations and rationale behind individual behaviors within a social system, data can only do so much. It can guide the discovery of a p [...]

Billy Currie Photography/Getty Images In the wake of the Theranos scandal, some commentators have asked whether entrepreneurial companies are particularly inclined to deception and downright fraud. Startups are often focused on disrupting existing markets, occasionally bending the rules while doing so. Their employees need to overcome demanding challenges, including the need to draft processes and responsibilities from scratch. In short, countless firms face strong pressures and tempting incentives to deceive. But are they also more likely to be deceived themselves? After all, they have to fo [...]

ICHIRO/Getty Images In my coaching work with leaders and teams, I often ask my clients whether they engage in workplace gossip. More often than not, they respond, “of course not!” with a look on their faces that indicates that they are insulted to have been asked such a question. But when I ask them whether they have ever participated in a “confirmation expedition” — whereby they 1) ask a colleague to confirm their own negative or challenging experience with a third colleague who is not present, or 2) welcome a similar line of confirmation inquiry from another co [...]

PhotoAlto/Michele Constantini/Getty Images To make progress against knotty problems, break them down — dissect the causes and analyze their impact on different groups. That analysis inevitably leads away from dubious “magic bullet” solutions and toward multiple, targeted interventions that are more likely to be effective. The measures and data to perform this type of analysis are now becoming available for burnout, a problem that is growing in all sectors, but is particularly challenging in health care. To better understand the sources of burnout and resilience against [...]

HIROKAZU JIKE/Getty Images Women’s conferences and employee resource groups (ERGs) are increasingly inviting men to attend. By creating events aimed at men, they hope to include men in discussions around gender equity in the workplace, and make organizational diversity efforts more successful. The evidence shows that when men are deliberately engaged in gender inclusion programs, 96% of organizations see progress — compared to only 30% of organizations where men are not engaged. But today, too many organizations still miss the mark on gender equity efforts by focusing gender [...]

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