A few weeks back, we wrote about how showing your pets on Zoom meetings, or at least not hiding them like guilty secrets, can help the team bond and get to know each other. But can it go too far? Here’s the other side of that conversation. Apparently, some people make their pets too central

Read More

Have you been on a Zoom meeting with Bob in Accounting, and it looks like he’s sitting in a luxurious office with a view of Manhattan? He’s not, of course. He’s using a virtual background to hide the fact he’s actually working from the north end of his dining room table. Someone recently asked a question

Read More

It’s NCAA Tournament time again, which means nothing to 90% of the civilized world. But here in the US it means three weeks of drama, gambling, and well-intentioned foolishness.  It’s also a good time to examine the role of creatively “wasting” time with social activities at work. First, we’ll start with the supposedly bad news.

Read More

Everyone knows that if you work from home once everyone else returns to the office, you’ve obviously decided your career doesn’t matter. Right? A recent article in Bloomburg quotes Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, who has some strong thoughts on remote work and why we need to go back to the office as soon as

Read More

Remember back before we got sent home for having cooties? Two or three years ago, when the workplace was as it had always been, we hated meetings. We complained constantly about them:  A waste of time. Productivity killer. Boring. Remember? Now, when we ask people what the biggest reason for returning to the office is,

Read More

Working from home sounds like a pretty good deal. And it is (mostly). No commute. You can work in your pajamas.  You can communicate with the world from the palm of your hand. So why are so many people literally losing sleep? Study after study shows that people who work from home are increasingly suffering

Read More

Are your people chomping at the bit to get back to work? Are people so terrified of a few germs they refuse to return? Are they so happy working from home they’ll take any excuse to continue avoiding the office? Or is it something else? Here’s the tricky part: how do you know? A recent

Read More

Can a cat walking across a keyboard really help your team build working relationships on a remote or hybrid team? I have been thinking about this for a while, and as silly as it sounds, one of the signs of a healthy working relationship might be the team’s reaction to Mister Fluffybutt getting webcam time

Read More

Over the past two years, we’ve all learned to work remotely. That’s been a great development for organizational productivity, but as Wayne explains, it’s not always a good thing.

Read More

We are in an odd time when it comes to discussing work culture. Like being in the eye of a hurricane, we are stuck between the initial panicky onslaught of COVID: “Go work from home and we’ll figure it out,” and looking toward the future: “Okay, we have to figure out what we do next.”

Read More