August 2021 – Hospitality Inc

The Endless Digital Workday

The shift to remote work ended the traditional 9–5 workday: employees work in bursts, at night, between care-giving tasks, and whenever they can find time between the endless distractions of messages, calls, and emails.

New research, however, shows that for many teams, this means people are quite literally working at all hours of the day, which also means that they’re almost never all working at the same time.

Is this bad though? Researchers found that it depends on the task.

For some tasks, being on at the same time improved productivity; for others, the distractions created by co-workers made it harder to finish the tasks, and productivity went up in what used to be considered off hours.

Importantly, employees proved to be good judges of how to manage their time to be most productive.

There are still lessons for managers…

As a first step, write a team charter to establish norms and expectations, which should include specific times when much of the team is on together.

That said, don’t force overlap or micromanage people.

Finally, make it okay for people to be offline.

BLOGS

The great Wendy’s burger flip-out

The Benefits of “Minimalist” Leadership

When Charismatic CEOs Are an Asset — and When They’re a Liability

Let Your Top Performers Move Around the Company

As a manager, it’s human nature to want to hang on to the superstars in your group, department, or division. But ultimately, that’s detrimental to the organisation and to the individuals involved.

Multiple studies on talent mobility show that actively moving employees into different roles is one of the most underutilised, yet most effective, development and cultural enhancement techniques in companies today.

In fact, research has shown that high-performance organisations are twice as likely to emphasise talent mobility versus low-performance companies.

Building a culture of mobility is a trait of very healthy organisations, and the benefits are clear.

Cross-functional collaboration increases, departmental cooperation is enhanced, innovation improves, and companies begin working more as one cohesive team instead of separate fiefdoms.

BLOGS

The great Wendy’s burger flip-out

The Benefits of “Minimalist” Leadership

When Charismatic CEOs Are an Asset — and When They’re a Liability

Inside Twitter’s Employee Groups

For the first time, Twitter is publicly revealing how its business resource groups — employee-run networks organised by interests and affinities — are supported and run.

All Twitter employees can incorporate their BRG work as part of annual performance reviews, and all managers are required to attend at least four BRG events a year, according to a blog post from Dalana Brand, the company’s VP of people experience and head of diversity and inclusion.

Twitter has a full-time dedicated manager who oversees the company’s BRGs.

By the numbers: Twitter had more than 6,100 employees as of the end of the first quarter up 20% year-over-year.

There are a total of more than 60 heads of its 11 groups, who began to be compensated in 2020 and serve limited terms.
The company has 11 employee resource groups, including groups for employees with disabilities and allies, who are parents and veterans and one organised around faith. The largest group is Twitter Women, for people who want to support female leadership.

Why it matters: Typically, the work these groups perform is divorced from larger company goals, making that work feel insignificant when in fact it’s often key to shaping company culture and employee satisfaction.

Food for thought: Internal procedures about employee affinity groups would not have been newsworthy a decade or less ago.

But amid a broader culture shift among Consumers and employees demanding corporate transparency, it can now be in a company’s best interest — from a talent recruitment and retention standpoint and brand perception perspective — to share how it values its people.