Digital businesses are becoming a larger and larger part of every company's pie. Often, the planning and growth of digital businesses are the domain of chief digital officers or chief information officers. Yet upper management, especially chief executive officers, need to know how the digital business is developing and being implemented as part of their business leadership. How can [...]
The technology industry is very much associated with young people. Corporate wunderkinds Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg were quite young when they were working in the iconic garage where Apple was started and greeting Facebook investors in a hoodie. Many engaged in the tech industry are young, having grown up surrounded by technology. Many tech people exhibit a very strong personal bias preference [...]
Change is increasingly necessary as organizations must adapt to new market forces, globalization, and new processes, including those stemming from the digital, robotics, and artificial intelligence worlds. "Change management" refers to the overseeing of the transition from a company’s current organization and processes to the desired ones. While change is all around us, the majority of change efforts — [...]
For the last four decades, gender disparities have been a focus of the U.S. workplace. Pay and promotion of women often lag behind that of men. Salaries and child-care responsibilities are often cited as the most obvious reasons. The solution advanced is higher pay for women and more flexible child care arrangements. The digital workplace has only made these [...]
According to the Wall Street Journal, management is responsible for motivating, communicating with, and developing their employees, in addition to setting goals, organizing, and measuring progress. These tasks were delineated by management guru Peter Drucker many years ago. The first three can take some doing. Not all managers are clear on how to motivate, communicate, and develop. These three tasks [...]
Today’s workers carry smartphones, tablets and laptops that connect them with colleagues and job tasks wherever they go. Collaboration apps have exploded in recent years, and now even most basic business software — to make spreadsheets, documents and presentations — has become cloud-based and portable. The result is a truly mobile workforce that can accomplish virtually anything without setting [...]
How much time do you devote to onboarding your new employees? The duration of a couple of presentations? A day or two?The process for hiring new team members should not end with receiving a signed offer letter, nor should it be over after the Day-1 orientation. Management and organizational experts suggest that successful onboarding processes can last as long as [...]
Senior management in a digital workplace can become concerned about time management when important goals are not being met, yet their people are clearly working. Some employees are even working late, yet rollouts and shipments have both been delayed.A recent article in the Harvard Business Review explores whether this scenario might be a result of focus challenges among the staff, not time [...]
Whether you have to approach an employee about needed improvement in job performance or softer skills such as team play, it can be difficult to truly engage the person. No one likes to hear criticism. Even constructive criticism can cause an employee to tune out and not hear what's being said. They may focus more, in the conversation and [...]
Many managers and employees keep track of hours expended on the job as a guide to productivity and engagement. Hours expended rather than tasks done, or quality of tasks, become major metrics in business operations. Many observers believe, however, that managing energy is a better alternative. There are several reasons for this. First, clocking hours can become too much [...]