Tag: Leadership Trending Tips

As COVID-19 continues to spread around the globe, more and more of us are starting to make changes to the way we work. Google, Microsoft, Trader Joe’s, Gap, and United Airlines are among a growing number of U.S. companies that have already acted to address their workers’ most immediate employment concerns stemming from the pandemic, including recommending or requiring employees to work from home, offering more paid sick leave, or maintaining wages in spite of reduced hours.

We’ve spent the past four years studying the science of emotions and their intersection with our lives at work. In our research, we’ve spoken to thousands of remote workers around the world, and from these conversations — and our own personal remote work experiences — we can attest that feeling isolated is common when working from home. Living with uncertainty in the face of a pandemic makes the current situation even more stressful. Here, we’ve pulled together our top tips for both tackling the challenges of remote work and managing stress and difficult emotions.

1. Emotionally proofread your messages. As we move away from face-to-face interactions with coworkers, it’s important to reread your messages for clarity and emotional tone before hitting send. Sending a direct message or email that says “Let’s talk” when you actually mean “These are good suggestions; let’s discuss how to work them into the draft” might bring up unnecessary anxiety for the recipient. If you’re worried about how your tone will come across, pick up the phone or offer to jump on a video chat. Your colleague (who is probably also working from home) might be glad for the chance to talk.

2. Be mindful of time zones. To help people in all time zones feel included, strive to delay decision-making until you’ve heard from everyone who should be involved. This is an especially good time to hone your documentation skills so everyone stays in the loop, and to see if your team could cover some meeting content over email, Slack, or another messaging platform instead. After switching to remote work, Humu, where Liz works, set up a 15-minute companywide meeting every day at 11:45 a.m. PT (which allows for team members on the East Coast and in Europe to join as well), during which the team can fill one another in on important announcements. Everything discussed during the meeting is also sent out afterward in a companywide email.

3. Schedule time for serendipitous collaboration. When we work remotely, we miss out on all the impromptu moments with our colleagues that lead to good ideas: chatting before and after meetings, catching up in the kitchen or hallway, and stopping by each other’s desks. When meeting via phone or videoconference, schedule time for informal conversation at the beginning and end of meetings.

4. Make room for minibreaks. Stepping away from your desk for even five minutes helps you relax — and stay focused. Danish students who were given a short break before taking a test got significantly higher scores than their peers who didn’t get any time to relax. Mollie has been using the app Time Out (for Macs), which reminds her to take periodic breaks to stretch, walk around, or change position at her desk.

5. Set up an after-work ritual. It’s easy to overwork when you don’t leave a physical office at a specific time each day, so it’s extra important to keep healthy boundaries. Your brain will benefit from a signal that tells it, “Work is over!” Some ideas: Meditate, listen to music, read a magazine, or lift weights. (Some studies show that weight training boosts your mood more than cardio.) Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, ends each day by transcribing any loose notes into a master task list, shutting down his computer, and then saying the phrase, “Schedule shutdown, complete.” “Here’s my rule,” he writes. “After I’ve uttered the magic phrase, if a work-related worry pops to mind, I always answer it with the following thought process: I said the termination phrase.”

6. Put time on your calendar to exercise. Commit to getting some physical activity by blocking off time to work out on your calendar. Need some working-out-from-home ideas? Try a seven-minute workout, or a variety of desk stretches that might (almost) replace going to the gym, or just put on your favorite song and dance it out. Even better, make it a virtual group activity: Jump on a video call with a friend, pick a YouTube fitness video, and get your sweat on together.

7. Check in on each other. This can be done by setting up virtual lunches, teatimes, or what social media management platform company Buffer terms pair calls. For pair calls, Buffer employees opt in to be randomly paired with someone else at the company once a week. Calls have no set agenda; coworkers get to know each other in pairs by talking about their families, hobbies, and favorite shows. If your organization uses Slack, one easy way to set this up is through Donut, a Slack bot that pairs people automatically.

8. Be thoughtful when you do head out. Not all of us have the ability to do our jobs from home. For the sake of those who still have to be physically present on the job (think doctors, cashiers, and pharmacists), be sure to wash your hands regularly and carefully when you go out, practice social distancing, and thank those who can’t stay home.

In these uncertain times, many companies are striving for business continuity and supporting employees as best they can in a variety of ways. Flexible, virtual work arrangements help employees continue to do their jobs, but these unprecedented circumstances require adjustments that for many come with significant challenges. It’s important now more than ever to support one another as we navigate the days ahead.

If you went back to London in the 1600s, you would find a coal-fired metropolis, where heavy smoke from the city’s burning hearths and furnaces damaged buildings. Only during the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800s, when respiratory diseases became the leading cause of death in the city, did people finally recognize how air pollution was affecting their quality of life. It took even longer to galvanize people into action, with laws finally enacted in the 20th century to improve air quality in London.

We know how fossil fuels and other byproducts of the industrial age have affected people’s health and contributed to the climate crisis. In the digital era, a new kind of pollution, fueled by technology growth and dependence, has had an unintended yet profound impact on society. As business leaders, we urgently need to understand these effects so we can build our businesses and develop our products more responsibly.

We’ve started to see the consequences of unregulated digital growth in the tech sector but until now haven’t recognized these consequences as pollution. As with any new form of pollution, recognizing it takes time. Digital-era pollution can be categorized into the following three types.

Eroding Trust In Information Ecosystems

During a cab ride recently, the conversation with my driver turned to politics. He shared the news that he had read about various politicians, but each time he added a disclaimer: “This is what I read, but who knows if it’s true.” His most sobering comment spoke to the erosion of our information ecosystem and the alarming spread of disinformation: “Years ago, I would open a newspaper and feel like I got the facts. Today, I have access to all the information I want, but I just don’t know what is real.”

The early days of the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s offered promise and hope for democratizing knowledge across the globe — anyone looking for information could have it at their fingertips. But in recent decades, as social media and platforms have transformed how we share and distribute information, we’re seeing how truth itself can be disrupted through a digital lens. Apart from the spread of false news across social networks, the web also enables users to curate their online presence and personas in a way that adds to a sense of distorted reality and distrust.

Education and information access are pillars of society — but some of the most prominent, widely used products in the digital era have eroded our access to knowledge and facts.

Polarization Effect

While there are several underlying reasons for political polarization, including the rise of partisan cable news, changing party composition, and racial divisions, our digital products also contribute to the polarization effect. In a new study, researchers were able to demonstrate for the first time that Facebook’s algorithms for ad targeting contribute to political polarization.

Social media also increases polarization by giving airtime to more extreme views. Wide reporting has revealed how prior versions of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm favored extreme content and contributed to the radicalization of users’ preferences. Studies show that the addiction to validation (through things like “follows,” “likes,” and “faves”) leads people to post increasingly polarizing content and to express moral outrage.

The digital economy has also contributed to polarization by increasing the divide between the rich and poor. Wealth inequality has risen to levels not seen since the Great Depression. The risks of an economic downturn or a decrease in demand, previously assumed by companies, are often now borne by workers amid the widespread deunionization and outsourcing that are part of the gig economy, leaving many workers trapped in a cycle of insecurity (made even more precarious during a pandemic).

Increasing wealth inequality and polarized views create a more divisive society that makes people more disillusioned with majority rule. By creating an increasingly divisive society, we are, in fact, eroding democracy.

Social Media Pollution

While air or water pollution affects physical well-being, social media can pollute the mental health of individuals and damage our well-being as a society. Recent research has shown a correlation between social media use and mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. Another study found that people who stopped using Facebook for a week were happier than those who continued using it.

Even more dramatically, in 2014 Facebook demonstrated through an experiment on over 1 million users that it was able to make individuals feel positive or negative emotions by curating the content in their newsfeeds. The experiment showed how social media platforms make it easier to manipulate people. The power of using Facebook for manipulation was known at least as early as 2010 but more fully entered public awareness after the Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted in 2018.

Together, these forms of pollution fray the fabric of a democratic society. People are more divided and easily manipulated and have a harder time accessing facts. There have been calls for more digital regulation as people recognize the need for change, but history shows that regulations will always play catch-up. While we wait for meaningful regulatory action, digital pollution threatens our society, and many of the unintended effects of our digital products are hard to reverse.

Toward a Cleaner Digital Footprint

Tackling digital pollution is a shared responsibility. While recognizing that the oil and gas industry is a heavy environmental polluter, we also know that as individuals, we each have a part to play in reducing our carbon footprint regardless of our industry. As business leaders, we need to recognize our responsibility in creating a clean digital footprint and building products that reduce digital pollution. Whether you’re a technology leader directly involved in engineering new products or a business leader who affects product decisions, there are many ways to get involved.

Leaders can do these three things to engineer positive change while avoiding digital-era pollution:

1. Determine your vision. To recognize when a product or business is polluting the world, we must start with a clear picture of the change we intend to create. Define your vision by answering questions about whose experience you’re setting out to change, why it needs changing, and how it will look once you’ve accomplished your goal. This detailed vision serves as a signpost for what the world will look like when you’ve achieved your vision. Your product is only a mechanism to create the change you envision — it’s not the end goal in itself. Clear signposts are needed to judge a product’s success — that is, whether it’s creating the change you set out to achieve in the first place.
2. Recognize when you’re compromising on your vision. Building a product often requires a balance between making progress toward your vision and the realities of running a business, such as meeting revenue goals and investor expectations. These trade-offs permeate everyday business decisions. For example, the iconic “like” button increases user engagement (and therefore ad revenues), but it’s been shown to decrease user well-being. Vision debt accumulates by trading off progress toward the vision against pleasing stakeholders and investors. A visual approach to prioritization can help you identify when you’re compromising on your vision (and societal well-being) to achieve business objectives or profitability. By making more deliberate and thoughtful compromises as we build our products and scale our businesses, we can work toward a cleaner digital footprint.
3. Take responsibility on the path to creating change. Until the digital era, most businesses had a local reach. In contrast, even relatively niche products today can affect millions of users. It’s important that we recognize our responsibility for the impact our products have on society. As recent employee protests at Amazon and Google show, you can hold your organization accountable for the change it’s creating. You can choose to take the Hippocratic oath of product leadership and recognize that you’re responsible for the product decisions you make and the resulting change your product creates in the world.

By taking a deliberate approach to building products, we can achieve business objectives with a cleaner digital footprint to change the world for the better.