Introverts are often observant and insightful, but extroverts tend to shine more radiantly because of their tendency to engage directly with people. If you’re chairing a meeting or involved in an intense team discussion, you’re more likely to hear from extroverts, who talk easily and gregariously. Introverts, who are quiet and tend to feel uncomfortable in large groups, may shrink from comment [...]

Remote work has become more and more common in U.S. businesses. Currently, 25% of all U.S. employees work remotely, and it is routinely cited as a perk more employees would like, at least some of the time. Recently, however, IBM moved to decrease its remote workforce. The announcement applied to its nearly 3,000-member marketing department, who were told to re-deploy to [...]

Are meetings where ideas go to die? If your meetings have let you down, you're not alone. Employees often resent meetings: a study by the American Psychological Association showed that people "who tend to be highly task and goal oriented were most negatively affected by meetings." It is true that sometimes we need to meet: not all decisions are easy to [...]

Managers need to be perceived as not having favorites in the workplace. It’s a key part of business leadership. If your methods are viewed as favoritism, that perception can erode morale and trust on your team and negatively impact productivity.Of course, the more crucial part is not having favorites among your team. Frankly, that can be difficult to pull off entirely. Whether it’s [...]

You’ve stacked your virtual team with competent, reliable individuals. You’ve designed your team’s core values. The machine has been built, now how do we get it to start churning? Equipping your team with the proper technology and collaborative platforms could make or break your virtual team. Slow or distracting systems mean workflow and productivity will suffer. At the same time, [...]

A growing number of articles are addressing the downsides of today’s culture of collaboration. Common symptoms are unproductive meetings and individual work groups driving a proliferation of apps as some of the main causes of the “collaboration overload.” Knowledge workers are being hit especially hard. A recent piece from the Harvard Business Review proposes that this phenomenon, making collaboration [...]

CEOs, company managers, and directors can often feel they’ve lost control or insight into their employees work habits and preferences. If the company is instituting new policies or trying out new company culture-building techniques but cannot see the real-time advantages of these investments, it could be a waste of time and money. To make up for the human contact [...]

Collaboration is good business. Wired quotes a study by Aberdeen Next-Generation Communications observing that companies who prioritize collaboration increased their performance substantially over companies that did not. Moreover, Wired argues that collaboration, in addition to being a good team performance strategy, makes good practices visible, further driving performance. It is, therefore, an optimal business strategy. Trends in Collaboration So collaboration as a method [...]

“At the core of most successful organizations are people who work well together,” Adrienne Sanders writes in Stanford Business. “Happy collaborators are typically more productive and are less apt to look elsewhere for employment. But what are the circumstances that lead people to want to team up over and over again?” New research by Stanford’s Daniel McFarland suggests that the reasons [...]

Despite some resistance from middle management and the occasional exception like Yahoo, remote work is becoming the norm — and for good reason. A 2014 study conducted by researchers at Stanford University found that remote employees experienced greater contentment, increased productivity and were less likely to quit. The author of the study, Nicholas Bloom, states, “The more robotic the work, the greater the [...]

The average full-time American employee spends one third of their day working, five days a week, according to the Center for Disease Control. That means your coworkers, your daily tasks, and the work culture you surround yourself with can be just as important as the relationship, activity, and environmental decisions you make with the other two thirds of your [...]

Collaboration drives so much in a workplace. Collaborative teams have a deeper sense of trust, are more willing to take risks, and are supportive of each other more consistently. It’s a powerful trait to infuse into any work team. How best to collaborate depends on many factors: the teams, the work, the need and the project. Yet there are common [...]

E-mail is a dominant mode of information dissemination in many corporations. It’s just as dominant overall, of course. But increasingly, communications from upper management to the company at large, from supervisors to their reports, among team members, and between departments are all shared via e-mail. E-mail is often the default mode of communication. The adoption of e-mail [...]

We all know that communication in meetings -- especially virtual meetings -- is often less than optimal. The number of questions, differing perspectives, repetition, and multiple points of view often creates a kind of static where it’s difficult to say what goals were furthered during the meeting time. Meeting goers don’t always remember what was said. The Wall Street Journal indicates [...]

WeWork’s coworking spaces offer fruit-infused water, lively designs, and an open community. As Andrew Rice described it in Bloomberg, “WeWork has cast itself as a new kind of workplace for the post-recession labor force and a generation that has never known a cubicle. It aspires to make your job a place you never want to quit.” There’s no office politics [...]

It is universally acknowledged that good data can help company performance. In the human resources field, for example, data can help identify why top performers leave, what might be done to retain them, and how to make more employees satisfied going forward. In operations, it can help identify what processes are more productive. Across the board, data can be used to pinpoint [...]

One of the key factors that can enhance collaboration in a workplace is to identify the work styles of each member of a team. Each member of a team may have different work styles, which involve personality, focus, and even the way in which information is processed. Although the word “diversity” in corporate life is often used to refer [...]

With the rise of social media, business strategy in marketing departments followed the "like." Endorsements on social media channels like Facebook was thought, axiomatically, to lead to increased sales. That's one of the reasons that so many organizations have social media pages.Social media engagement, so the theory goes, leads to more sales, both to "likers" and their social networks.What Is [...]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is frequently the focus of technology news. There is a marked tendency, however, to treat AI as if it were a singular thing. The Varieties of AI It isn't. A recent article in Wired points out that there are many varieties of artificial intelligence. If you hear of deep neural networks, for example, you are reading about a [...]

In a post-mobile world, we will be connected via devices with billions of other objects, from refrigerators to cars.In a post-mobile world, the lines will blur. An interconnected network of devices and objects will offer better connectivity and functionality. In the early 2000s, mobile devices like the Palm and Blackberry were revolutionary, but could not match the computing power of [...]

The Harvard Business Review points out an even more intriguing statistic about co-working spaces: Workers in them thrive much more than workers in conventional offices.Autonomy and Flexibility ValuedThe HBR wanted to know why employees were far more likely to thrive.A big reason was the autonomy and flexibility co-working spaces offer. Jobs can be done at any time. Most co-working spaces are open to members [...]

IS THERE A RIGHT TO DISCONNECT: OR, SHOULD E-MAIL BE OFF LIMITS OFF HOURS? Work It! Staff February 1, 2017  Collaberation French workers seemingly have it made: 35-hour work weeks and a large amount of vacation each year. As of January 1, 2017, a law went into effect covering employees in companies with more than 50 employees. The "right to disconnect" law requires [...]

THE EMERGENCE OF GENERATION X CHANGES DIGITAL WORK Work It! Staff January 13, 2017 Collaberation While Baby Boomers and Millennials get a lot of press, Generation X is moving to the fore in terms of exerting influence in corporations, politicals, and digital start-ups. Baby Boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, originally got attention because of their critical mass. Born in [...]