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 [...]