The Best of This Week

5 Ways to Support Better Remote Onboarding

Early-career talent needs onboarding and development opportunities, even in a fully remote work environment. Based on their study of 500 internships and graduate programs worldwide, the authors suggest five ways that organizations can effectively support new contributors — virtually.

How to Make Your Next Zoom Meeting Less Exhausting

Many employees find virtual meetings draining, but each person’s scheduling and structure preferences vary widely. Leaders can help address this by soliciting feedback, varying those elements based on employee input, and following best practices for making virtual meetings more effective.

The Benefits of a Three-Second Pause

Recent research conducted by MIT Sloan professor Jared R. Curhan finds that a short, silent pause during negotiation can spark a more deliberative mindset and deliver better outcomes. According to Curhan, “There are creative ways to address conflicts, and there is more room for agreement than people assume. Our study shows that one way to find that room and spark that resourcefulness is through silence.”

Community Partners Can Help Bridge Skill Gaps

The persistent skill gaps across U.S. industries won’t be bridged until companies rethink how they train workers. Workforce intermediaries — such as community-based nonprofits, labor union affiliates, industry associations, and community college systems — are helping companies create enduring skill strategies and training systems.

Three Lessons From Cities’ Ride-Sharing Mistakes

The disproven theory of ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft was that they’d be more similar to carpooling than to traditional taxis. Gregory Erhardt, a professor at the University of Kentucky who analyzes transportation modeling systems, offers The New York Times three lessons from this misjudgment: Ride-hailing companies must share their data with cities; public officials need to shift transportation policy; and technology needs established guardrails before their negative impacts become obvious.

What Else We’re Reading This Week

• Change your email signature to protect your time (Source: Debugger)
• New research on how subtle bias can limit women’s leadership opportunities (Source: MIT SMR)
• The six-day saga of the Ever Given in the Suez Canal is nothing compared with the time 14 ships were trapped there for eight years — it became a strange extended holiday for shipmates that included international soccer matches, barbecues, holidays, and even their own Olympics (Source: Mental Floss)
• Where did the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) industry come from, who runs DEI initiatives, and why does DEI so often inhibit real change? (Source: Harper’s Bazaar)

Quote of the Week:

“Maybe one of the biggest opportunities for most organizations today will be machine learning, but maybe today it’s actually in how they leverage data — how they share, how they collaborate around data, how they enrich it.”

— Will Grannis, founder and leader of the office of the CTO at Google Cloud, in “Games, Teams, and Moonshots,” the latest episode of MIT SMR’s Me, Myself, and AI podcast