We cover a lot of ground again this month: Extroverts listening ❋ Family vacations ❋ Long hours, too long ❋ Opinions you can argue for ❋ Pre-quitting behaviors you can observe ❋ Pitting employees against each other ❋ People don’t work for pay only but we might make them ❋ Questions managers should ask themselves ❋ R-E-S-P-E-C-T as work ❋ Work emails after work hours
- This study introduces the concept of pre-quitting behaviors, which employees in the process of leaving an organization may unknowingly “leak” and others can observe and use to identify those at risk of turnover. It suggests that the psychological and behavioral processes that activate and facilitate voluntary turnover are manifest in 58 observable behaviors.
- Pitting employees against one another is a miserable, costly, and often ineffective way of motivating people. Brilliantly portrayed in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross (dir. James Foley, 1992): a brutal parables “of business as a dog-eat-dog competition driven by desperation, grounded in fraud, and carried out by men whose masculinity is bound up in their work”. A discussion.
- Lots of insights in this interview with Barry Schwartz discussing incorrect ideas about ‘why we work’ and our views of human nature:
This notion that people work for pay, period, is false. But, perhaps more importantly, it could become true if you create workplaces that essentially deprive people of any other satisfaction that might come from work.
- No, you are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for.
- The First Round community asked their members (working managers and leaders) to identify: What questions managers should ask themselves on a regular basis.
- Extroverts may be the life of the party, but at work, they’re often viewed as phony and self-centered. A paper on how extroverts can show others that they’re listening, without muting themselves.
- Survey: 55% of parents haven’t taken their family on vacation in 3 years.
- Survey: 7 in 10 say they’re open to answering work emails after hours.
- The research is clear: long hours backfire for both people and companies. The story of overwork is literally a story of diminishing returns: keep overworking, and you’ll progressively work more stupidly on tasks that are increasingly meaningless.
- The feeling of being respected at work is 17.9 times more powerful a predictor of culture score than the typical topics.
As you ponder why October is the tenth month of the year and not the eighth (from the Latin octo), here is the first stanza a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar:
October is the treasurer of the year,
And all the months pay bounty to her store;
The fields and orchards still their tribute bear,
And fill her brimming coffers more and more.
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