The Best of This Week
The week’s must-reads for managing in the digital age, curated by the MIT SMR editors.
Topics
Weekly Recap
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Easing the Invisible Burdens of Collaboration
It’s undeniable that collaboration is essential in today’s workplace, but a more deliberate approach can improve work practices while freeing up time. Discussing his new book, Beyond Collaboration Overload, Rob Cross explains the high costs of excessive collaboration and offers practical suggestions for making improvements across the organization.
10 Key Cultural Factors for Employee Retention
Culture 500 research finds that 10 specific elements of corporate life shape how employees rate company culture — and they may not be the ones you expect. With the labor market upended by the pandemic, corporate leaders may need to pay attention to some previously invisible issues if they wish to retain valued employees.
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The Upside of Ambivalence
Many of us crave certainty in at least some aspects of our lives, but our collective capability to simultaneously consider many sides to a decision has become weak. We need to embrace ambivalence a little more and a little longer — otherwise, we risk getting stuck in our opposing sides.
Can Virtual Meetings Be Fun?
After getting walloped with Zoom fatigue, organizations are desperate for ways to nurture collaboration and collegiality in a remote environment and to make virtual meetings less exhausting. Some companies are trying to make meetings more fun by either creating virtual worlds that resemble video game environments or using video games themselves as meeting settings.
Who’s Responsible for Recycling?
With two U.S. states (Maine and Oregon) having recently passed legislation to make producers pay fees for plastic packaging, there’s growing momentum behind the idea that companies, not taxpayers, should be held responsible for the waste they produce.
What Else We’re Reading This Week
- The pros and cons of a four-day workweek (Source: Fast Company)
- How organizations can harness professional envy to boost productivity (Source: Knowable Magazine)
- Are container shipping’s skyrocketing costs and delays just temporary blips, or signs that container shipping can’t keep up? (Source: BBC)
Quote of the Week:
“Whoever your top diversity, equity, and inclusion person is in your organization shouldn’t be tucked away in a basement office somewhere that no one can find. They should actually report very high in the organization.”
— Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker, chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer at McLean Hospital and assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, in “What ‘Racial Reckoning’ Looks Like for Organizations”