Work Futures Update | Every Fear
David Mamet, Michael Wilson, Anne Helen Petersen, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Ian Bailie, Jacob Gershman, Ashley Fetters
Beacon NY 2020–10–28 | I’m lightening the format a bit, making the newsletter easier to read (I hope).
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If you’d like to learn a bit about Beacon NY, where I reside, here’s a piece from the NY Times which reads a bit like a real estate flyer, but has some nice photos, too.
Beacon, N.Y.: An Arts Hub Turned Refuge for the Pandemic-Weary| C J Hughes
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Every fear hides a wish.
| David Mamet, Edmond
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It Might Become the Scariest Part of Your Commute: The Elevator | Michael Wilson lists a handful of ways elevator companies are contriving to allow us to not touch the buttons.
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how email became work | Anne Helen Petersen focuses on the myriad ways email has seeped into our pores and toxified work and life, acting as a proxy for overwork in all its insidious manifestations. She’s been influenced by Melissa Gregg, whose Work’s Intimacy I clearly need to read:
In her study of office workers, she hears a similar explanation over and over again for why employees spend their Sunday nights and weekday evenings attending to their inboxes: it would be wasteful to spend the workday emailing, and clearing an inbox ahead of time means the workday itself is less stressful.
Attending to email during off-hours, in other words, makes you more productive during the actual workday. But productive for what? More meetings, more work, that will then generate more emails. “A platform that was first designed to overcome the asynchronous schedules of co-workers has been transformed into its opposite,” Gregg writes. “It is now a means to demonstrate co-presence with colleagues and enhance the pace and immediacy of busy office schedules.”
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Tech Is Transforming People Analytics. Is That a Good Thing? | After a brief history of the impact of Taylorism and the rise of data-centric HR, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Ian Bailie get down to the key question about people analytics: where is the line between ethical and unethical practices?
It’s not enough to hope that ethics are at the forefront when companies are considering new technology or people analytics projects. In our view, companies need to adopt an ethics charter for people analytics that helps them to clearly govern what they should or shouldn’t do, in the same way that they have guidelines for the usage of customer or financial data. In order to build and maintain employee trust in the use of people data, organizations need to tackle the ethics and privacy topic head on, being open and transparent with employees in how they are using their data.
There is no question that technology, coupled with the near-ubiquitous digitization of work and work-related behaviors, has the potential to help organizations monitor, predict, and understand employee behaviors (and thoughts) at scale, like it has never been done before. At the same time, these same technologies, deployed in an unethical or illegal way, also permit employers to control and manipulate employees, violating trust and threatening not just their freedom and morale, but also their privacy. The only way to keep this from happening is through strict enforcement of adequate laws and regulations that ensure employees remain in the driver’s seat, able to authorize employers to use their data (or not), and benefiting from whatever insights and knowledge are derived from it. To be sure, there is no logical tension between what is good for the employer, and what is good for the employee. But the temptation to force people into certain behaviors, or to use their personal data against them, is more real than one would think.
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Can an Employer Require You to Get a Covid-19 Vaccine? | Jacob Gershman looks at the legal questions surrounding coronavirus vaccination for employees and employers. The bottom line?
A vaccine requirement may be lawful but impractical, especially for larger companies.
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Your Work Friends Knew Exactly What Kind of Week You’d Had | Ashley Fetters has nostalgia for the collegiality of the pre-pandemic workplace. She’s one of the few who accurately zoomed in on ‘weak ties’ as what sustains work relationships, but fails to mention Mark Granovetter who was first to capture the idea in The Strength of Weak Ties.
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Elsewhere
Medium Needs Better Stats, Stat | I can’t figure out what is responsible for a recent surge in views because of limitations in Medium’s stats.
