Work Futures Update | Retrospective Futures
| Innovation and Inclusion | On-sites are the new Off-sites | Women Dropping Out |
Beacon NY 2020–10–17 | I’ve been exploring the new Medium but I’ve seen nothing that has made any changes to this newsletter. No new styles, no email import, and none of the other planned changes have been released. I am hoping that the Greg Satelle quote below, comes true.
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Quote of the Moment
The future, in retrospect, always seems inevitable.
| Greg Satelle, How The Future Is Really Built
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The cyclical relationship between innovation and inclusion in the workplace | Paris Will explores a critically important linkage between two threads in the workplace that aren’t braided together in many people’s heads:
[…] more inclusive companies were 1.7 times more likely to be innovative leaders in their field. This suggests that in addition to the benefits of a fair workplace, inclusion may also serve as a way to benefit and ultimately improve innovation performance. Although additional findings have also suggested this relationship between inclusion and innovation (here, here, here, and here), the underlying reason for this link may not be immediately clear.
One of the major outcomes of increasing workplace inclusion is that more people are involved in workplace processes, such as the innovation process. An inclusive innovation process is often referred to as co-creation, which stresses the importance of collaboration among all members of an organisation. And when more people participate in projects involving innovation, success increases. Why does this occur?
This inclusive shift towards co-creation increases innovation success, firstly, because it changes behavioural attitudes towards communication, most notably feelings of trust and acceptance among employees (here and here). When members of an organisation trust each other and feel valued, they are more likely to take risks and share ideas, which is essential to the innovation process.
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Are Work “On-Sites” The Future Of Your Job? | Ryan Holmes explores a new twist in the minimum office discussion (aka WFH aka hybrid work aka …):
Earlier this month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai indicated that the company was reconfiguring its office spaces to accommodate what he called on-sites, i.e. days when work-from-home employees would gather together in the office. These gatherings might be for quarterly planning or an annual kick-off or to launch a new product line. The idea is they’re not an everyday thing; they’re special occasions where being together in a physical office makes strategic sense.
In other words, on-sites are the new off-sites.
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Why Did Hundreds of Thousands of Women Drop Out of the Workforce?| Alisha Haridasani Gupta on a devastating finding about the disproportionate impact of the pandemic recession on women:
The September jobs numbers, released by the Labor Department on Friday, confirmed what economists and experts had feared: The recession unleashed by the pandemic is sidelining hundreds of thousands of women and wiping out the hard-fought gains they made in the workplace over the past few years.
While the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 7.9 percent in September, far below the record high of nearly 15 percent in April, a large part of that drop was driven not so much by economic growth — though there were some job gains — but by hundreds of thousands of people leaving the job market altogether.
A majority of those dropping out were women. Of the 1.1 million people ages 20 and over who left the work force (neither working nor looking for work) between August and September, over 800,000 were women, according to an analysis by the National Women’s Law Center. That figure includes 324,000 Latinas and 58,000 Black women. For comparison, 216,000 men left the job market in the same time period.
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“The bigger the wage gap across spouses, the smaller the labor supply of the secondary earner, which is typically the wife.” — Stefania Albanesi, an economics professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
This could take decades to turn around.
