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Supporting the Mental Health of Employees of Color
Mental health isn’t the same for everyone; disparities exist between people of color and their white counterparts in the prevalence, incidence, symptoms, and treatment of mental health conditions. You can take steps to acknowledge and address these disparities in the workplace. If you’re a person of color, you can address the mental health struggles you face at work by understanding racism and its impact and assessing the state of your mental health, even deciding whether your company is a place you can thrive. If you’re a leader, make it a priority to find out more about how your employees of color really feel at work and how you can better support them. Doing so is a win for the employees and the business alike.
AI’s Trust Problem
As AI becomes more powerful, it faces a major trust problem. Consider 12 leading concerns: disinformation, safety and security, the black box problem, ethical concerns, bias, instability, hallucinations in LLMs, unknown unknowns, potential job losses and social inequalities, environmental impact, industry concentration, and state overreach. Each of these issues is complex — and not easy to solve. But there is one consistent approach to addressing the trust gap: training, empowering, and including humans to manage AI tools.
Research: When Employees Identify with Their Company, They’re Less Likely to Recognize Gender Discrimination
Identifying as an organizational member — or feeling a strong sense of attachment to the organization — is generally a positive thing for employees and employers. But our research on workplace incivility and mistreatment shows that it can also shape when — and if — employees recognize and respond to subtle forms of discrimination against women at work. Evidence shows that leaders, as well as employees, play a key role in identifying and remedying gender discrimination in all its forms. If the goal is to proactively address gender discrimination in the workplace and encourage leaders and workers to remove their rose-colored glasses, this article offers a few suggestions.
Before You Start Collaborating with Someone, Talk About Your Work Styles
When you’re working with new people, spending time upfront to have an explicit and open conversation about each other’s work styles and preferences can prove to be one of the best time investments. This “style alignment” conversation can lay a foundation for trust and understanding and help you set agreements for how to successfully work together. Yet, many people shy away from having these conversations for two reasons. First, they worry that it will take up too much time. Second, they fear that it might make style differences more obvious and aren’t sure how to bridge those. By having open and deep conversations about style and preferences, something powerful happens. If you better understand where someone is coming from, you don’t just react to their behavior and feel annoyed by making potentially false assumptions about why someone is behaving a certain way. Instead, you can bring more compassion and less reactivity into your work relationships and maybe even preempt work conflict.
Coping with the Stress of Retirement
Retirement can seem like a dream. Will we ever be able to stop working? Will we want to? Will we be able to afford it? For those of us who have built our lives around work, the transition to not working can be stressful. Whether your worry about retirement is grounded in financial questions, health concerns, or filling your time in meaningful ways, identifying your sources of stress can help you take proactive steps to prepare for this significant life transition from an emotional and psychological standpoint, helping you reduce and manage your stress and enjoy a more positive retirement. The sources of stress will differ for individuals depending on your personal context and where in the seven phases of retirement you are. Provides definitions and coping mechanisms for six of the seven phases to help you identify them and manage your response during them. Regardless of the specific circumstances of your retirement, preparing for it emotionally and psychologically will help ameliorate the stresses that it can bring so that you can focus on enjoying the life you planned for with a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and connection that lasts.
Preventing the Next Big Cyberattack on U.S. Health Care
The cyberattack on Change Healthcare that devastated the U.S. health care sector made painfully clear that much more needs to be done to address vulnerabilities that exist throughout the ecosystem. This article offers five actions that can go a long way to improving cybersecurity throughout the sector and make it much more resilient.
Make Your Workday Work for Your Mental Health
When you’re struggling with your mental health, getting through your workday can feel a lot harder than usual. It’s not always the quantity or type of work that is making your anxiety, depression, or other mental health difficulties worse — sometimes it’s that your workday is structured in a way that’s at odds with your natural rhythms or your mental health challenges. You can take steps to structure your workday, using your self-knowledge, doing some experiments, and balancing your needs with your job responsibilities. By building strong habits around when you do focused, deep work; creating routines to make progress on tasks with vague or long-term deadlines; and building in times to let your mind wander to take advantage of unfocused recovery time you’ll boost your mental health — and your productivity.
Your Teams Should Drive AI Adoption — Not Senior Leadership
Whenever a new technology comes along, large companies think you need to appoint a designated senior leader — a “czar,” in popular parlance — and it will get taken care of. This, however, is a mistake. The process usually starts when teams are pitching leadership on wildly optimistic and conflicting use cases, and the board, excited but unsure how to proceed, puts some poor, unsuspecting soul in charge of the whole thing. It very rarely works out. Instead of a centralized top-down structure, AI implementation is owned by teams close to the work, which can mean a broad set of stakeholders providing real-time feedback. The piece details how Verizon has tried to implement this approach of letting innovation happen at the frontlines and supporting it at the core.
How to Gracefully Decline a Promotion
How can you decline a promotion without making things awkward? In this article, the author shares advice from two experts on how to navigate this complicated situation. First, explore the underlying reasons behind your hesitation. If you are 100% sure you don’t want the promotion, decline as swiftly as possible. Be tactful and tactical. While there’s no need to provide an exhaustive account of your decision, framing it strategically is important. You could also consider taking the promotion, but with clearly defined boundaries. You could ask about adjustments like managing fewer direct reports or increased flexibility if the promotion requires a greater in-office presence. Or you could propose something new altogether. Climbing the corporate ladder may be the conventional route, but it’s not necessarily the best choice for every situation — especially if the promotion on the table doesn’t match with where you want your career to go or isn’t right for your current circumstances.
Will Your Nudge Have a Lasting Impact?
Organizations in both the public and private sector have embraced nudges — small interventions designed to subtly steer individuals towards desired behaviors. But while nudges have a track record in getting people to choose the targeted options, will they stick with them? New research found they don’t — they use that option less often and for less time compared to people who made the choice without a nudge. This finding has implications for programs employing nudges.
GenAI Can Help Companies Do More with Customer Feedback
Companies that are struggling to find the right place to deploy new AI tech should consider use cases involving “voice of the customer” applications — parsing, interpreting, and responding to customer input from all different channels. They are typically easier to implement than employee productivity use cases because they don’t require as much behavior change, and easier to measure improvements in economic value because improving customer satisfaction often has a financial payoff. Generative AI is well suited to tasks such as transcription, summarization, sentiment analysis, and other key parts of listening and responding to customers.
How to Answer an Open-Ended Question from a Job Candidate
Interviewers should prepare for interviews just as thoroughly as candidates do. Being equipped with compelling stories and setting aside dedicated preparation time, such as 30 minutes beforehand, allows interviewers to mentally prepare and be fully present during the interview. Like with candidates, it’s not only the content of what is said that matters, but also the manner in which it’s conveyed. Demonstrating enthusiasm for the company and the position can leave a lasting impression on candidates, instilling confidence and enthusiasm in their decision-making process.
More Women Work in Nonprofits. So Why Do Men End Up Leading Them?
The term “glass escalator” refers to the finding that men in female-dominated occupations often experience a faster and smoother rise to the upper levels of leadership than women. Why does the male advantage persist? Systemic power dynamics and gender stereotypes are pervasive across industries. Because of these stereotypes and incorrect assumptions, even in fields where there is an abundance of qualified women for leadership roles, men continue to be singled out and fast-tracked. The author offers several best practices that have been shown to tamp down the escalator effect and promote gender equality.
The Myths and Realities of Being a Product Manager
Product management has become an aspirational career. A group of popular social media influencers regularly offers advice on what it takes to attain a job and succeed in this field. But their content tends to glamorize the profession, gloss over the day-to-day-realities, and dispense wisdom that isn’t always on point.
A Proven Model to Combat U.S. Drug Shortages
Drug shortages continue to plague the United States. In many ways, the problem is the result of deficiencies in the current pharma market. But a model for addressing this problem is showing that it isn’t intractable. The company employing this model is Civica Rx, which was established in 2018 by health systems and philanthropies to address shortages of generic sterile injectable drug. This article discusses the elements of its model and its achievements.
Research: Why People Really Buy Upcycled Products
Researchers who analyzed consumer feedback from Etsy discovered that what consumers value most about upcycled products is not their sustainability but their creativity. Their findings offer some guidelines for companies who hope to design and successfully market upcycled products: 1) Designers should consider using components from other industries to enhance the appeal of their products and encourage cross-industry collaboration; 2) Product designers and managers should identify new uses for product components; 3) Marketers should emphasize creativity, as well as sustainability, in their messaging about upcycled products; and 4) Companies can boost the appeal of new products by emphasizing design elements that remind consumers of upcycled products.
Working Parents, Plan for the Week with This Simple Exercise
As work travel and hours in the office mount, work parents are feeling the logistical challenges of making every week happen — from kid pickup and dropoff and sports practice to meal planning and doctor’s appointments. The main difficulties lie in managing the firehose of information, coping with decision fatigue, and dealing with surprises like an illness or a forgotten event. The best approach for avoiding — or mitigating — these obstacles is the weekly preview: A planning session between the core adults in the family each week to go over what’s coming. The week’s plan is documented and discussed, highlighting variances from typical weeks and indicating back-up plans for particularly tricky spots.
How Burnout Became Normal — and How to Push Back Against It
Slowly but steadily, while we’ve been preoccupied with trying to meet demands that outstrip our resources, grappling with unfair treatment, or watching our working hours encroach upon our downtime, burnout has become the new baseline in many work environments. From the 40% of Gen Z workers who believe burnout is an inevitable part of success, to executives who believe high-pressure, “trial-by-fire” assignments are a required rite of passage, to toxic hustle culture that pushes busyness as a badge of honor, too many of us now expect to feel overwhelmed, over-stressed, and eventually burned out at work. When pressures are mounting and your work environment continues to be stressful, it’s all the more important to take proactive steps to return to your personal sweet spot of stress and remain there as long as you can. The author presents several strategies.
Preventing Ransomware Attacks at Scale
Ransomware attacks — like the one on Change Healthcare — continue to cause major turmoil. But they are not inevitable. Software manufacturers can build products that are resilient against the most common classes of cyberattacks leveraged by ransomware gangs. This article describes what can be done and calls on customers to demand that software companies take action.
Research: More People Use Mental Health Benefits When They Hear That Colleagues Use Them Too
Novartis has trained more than 1,000 employees as Mental Health First Aiders to offer peer-to-peer support for their colleagues. While employees were eager for the training, uptake of the program remains low. To understand why, a team of researchers conducted a randomized controlled trial with 2,400 Novartis employees who worked in the UK, Ireland, India, and Malaysia. Employees were shown one of six framings that were designed to overcome two key barriers: privacy concerns and usage concerns. They found that employees who read a story about their colleague using the service were more likely to sign up to learn more about the program, and that emphasizing the anonymity of the program did not seem to have an impact. Their findings suggest that one way to encourage employees to make use of existing mental health resources is by creating a supportive culture that embraces sharing about mental health challenges at work.
Lessons from Beyoncé on Navigating Exclusion
In 2016, Beyoncé’s performance at the CMA Awards sparked backlash from fans complaining about everything from her attire to her lack of connection to the genre. This year, she released her first country album, which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. Her actions over the past eight years have been a case study in how to navigate workplace exclusion. As a first step, it often makes sense to exit the conversation and wait for a better moment to respond. Then, work behind the scenes, ideally with collaborators, to push for change. Finally, consider focusing on your own authenticity and strengths to create your own lane within your organization or outside it.
The 3-Stage Process That Makes Universities Prime Innovators
While calls for cross-sector collaborations to tackle complex societal issues abound, in practice, only few succeed. Those that do often have a collaboration intermediary, which can bring together different actors, develop relationships among collaborators, and create an ecosystem to support ideas over time. With their strengths in knowledge creation and their role as community anchors, universities are ideally equipped to create and orchestrate support for the kind of innovation that the sustainability imperative requires. However, to be able to take on this role they need to develop a culture of open innovation, experimentation and iteration, and value, which requires supporting teams that will champion the change and facilitate collaborations among the diverse actors of the innovation ecosystem.
Should You Quit Your “Meh” Job? Or Is It Salvageable?
Bad days at work are inevitable, just as some degree of frustration and ennui is bound to be a part of almost any job. In this article, the author shares advice from two experts on what to do if you’re stuck in the gray area of deciding whether your job is merely mediocre (and could potentially improve) or downright soul-crushing (and might require a change). They offer seven questions to ask yourself to help you sort it out: 1) Is the workplace toxic? 2) Do you feel depleted? 3) Are you miserable or are you bored? 4) Is there anything about the job you enjoy? 5) Are you really giving it your best effort? 6) Do you need different friends? 7) Is there anything about the job you enjoy?
Research: Boards Still Have an ESG Expertise Gap — But They’re Improving
The role of U.S. public boards in managing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues has significantly evolved over the past five years. Initially, boards were largely unprepared to handle materially financial ESG topics, lacking the necessary background and credentials. However, recent developments show a positive shift, with the percentage of Fortune 100 board members possessing relevant ESG credentials rising from 29% to 43%. This increase is primarily in environmental and governance credentials, while social credentials have seen less growth. Despite this progress, major gaps remain, particularly in climate change and worker welfare expertise. Notably, the creation of dedicated ESG/sustainability committees has surged, promoting better oversight of sustainability issues. This shift is crucial as companies increasingly face both regulatory pressures and strategic opportunities in transitioning to a low carbon economy.
5 Strategies for Improving Mental Health at Work
Companies are investing in — and talking about — mental health more often these days. But employees aren’t reporting a corresponding rise in well-being. Why? The author, who wrote a book on mental health and work last year, explores several key ways organizations haven’t gone far enough in implementing a culture of well-being. She also makes five key suggestions on what they can do to improve the mental health of their employees.
When Your Colleagues Have an Outdated Perception of You
As we grow or change, our identity transitions are often invisible — unless we do the work to help others see our changes. This can be particularly true for people who have worked at a company for a long time. If you’re feeling like your colleagues aren’t recognizing your growth, the authors recommend three strategies: 1) Get clear on the differences between how you are perceived and how you want to be perceived; 2) Let go of work you may still be doing that was associated with your previous role; and 3) Don’t be shy about persuading stakeholders that you’ve changed.