No Mistakes, No Poetry
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No Mistakes, No Poetry
Joy Harjo | American Airlines’ Sick Days Mess | Bottom Line Management Sucks | When Pioneers Give Up | Engaging Freelancers | Feeling At Home, At Home?
source: Trust “Tru” Katsande
Quote of the Moment
There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.
| Joy Harjo
American Airlines
American Airlines violated NYC law by disciplining workers for taking sick days, city says | In case you wondered, yes, many companies really don’t want workers to take sick leave, even to the point of breaking labor laws:
The New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) has filed a lawsuit against American Airlines for allegedly retaliating against ground crew workers who used sick leave by assigning disciplinary points for each sick day taken. DCWP also alleged that American failed to pay sick leave at the required rate, failed to allow employees to use accrued sick leave, illegally required advance notice and medical documentation for leaves shorter than three days and failed to provide the required Notice of Employee Rights, violating the NYC Paid Safe and Sick Leave Law.
The NYC law requires employers with five or more employees who work more than 80 hours per calendar year in the city to provide paid safe and sick leave to employees. Employers with fewer than five employees must provide unpaid safe and sick leave.
DCWP is seeking approximately $375,000 in restitution for more than 750 ground crew workers (including agents, representatives, fleet service and mechanical employees), along with civil penalties.
Bottom Line Management Sucks
Supervisors Driven By Bottom Line Fail To Get Top Performance From Employees, Baylor Study Says | A new study by Matthew Quade, Benjamin McLarty and Julena Bonner, found bottom-line management is a bad idea:
Supervisors who focus only on profits to the exclusion of caring about other important outcomes, such as employee well-being or environmental or ethical concerns, turn out to be detrimental to employees. This results in relationships that are marked by distrust, dissatisfaction and lack of affection for the supervisor. And ultimately, that leads to employees who are less likely to complete tasks at a high level and less likely to go above and beyond the call of duty. | Matthew Quade
The researchers wrote,
Supervisors undoubtedly face heavy scrutiny for the performance levels of their employees, and as such they may tend to emphasize the need for employees to pursue bottom-line outcomes at the exclusion of other competing priorities, such as ethical practices, personal development or building social connections in the workplace. However, in doing so they may have to suffer the consequence of reduced employee respect, loyalty and even liking.
When Pioneers Give Up
When Pioneering Companies Fail | The Corporate Rebels created a list of companies that pioneered innovative organizational models but ultimately returned to conventional management. A common theme is the departure of a CEO who animated the innovation. This is a topic I touched upon recently in What We Can Learn From Bill Gore about Emergent Leadership. James O’Toole looked into a great many of these companies and found the experiments seldom last very long:
Yet these virtuous practices seldom survived through one, or at most two, successions of company leadership. At some point — often just after a socially pioneering CEO retired, died, or was forced out of office, or the company was acquired — the CEO’s successors abandoned the very practices that had made the company both financially successful and publicly admired. In particular, investors at publicly traded companies have looked askance at such practices whenever earnings have dipped.
Getting full value from external talent | Theodore Kinni reports on new research from PwC, that 92% of companies are not managing contingent workers — freelancers, independent contractors, gig workers, and crowd workers — as effectively as they might. What are some of the barriers?
Making contingent workers feel welcome is a particular challenge in environments where they are literally sitting in cubicles adjacent to full-time employees — yet wear badges that signify outsider status. “People look down on you, even though you’re doing the same work,” one former Google contractor told Bloomberg. Another said, “You’re there, but you’re not there.” If you felt that way, what are the chances you’d be performing at your best?
Sometimes the systems in a company reinforce those feelings of otherness and isolation. Contingent workers are not eligible for the same benefits that accrue to full-time employees. They are not usually invited to all-hands meetings or off-sites aimed at building camaraderie. And they may not be given access to the same communications and data tools — Slack, proprietary databases, content management systems — that employees use. I often work collaboratively with employee teams in client companies, but I’m locked out of the systems and platforms, like Google Docs, on which they work together.
Stupidity.
Elsewhere
Ikea surveyed thousands of people to design 6 homes of the future | Elizabeth Segran is awfully blasé about the factoids in this piece on Ikea:
What Ikea found was that our fundamental notions of home and family are experiencing a transformation. Plenty of demographic research suggests that major changes in where and how we live could be afoot: For instance, people who marry later may spend more years living with roommates. If couples delay having children — or choose to remain child-free — they may choose to live longer in smaller apartments. As people live longer, we might find more multigenerational homes, as parents, children, and grandchildren all cohabit under one roof.
In addition to those demographic shifts, Ikea’s research uncovered something else: Many of the people in its large study were not particularly satisfied with their domestic life. For one thing, they’re increasingly struggling to feel a sense of home in the places they live; 29% of people surveyed around the world felt more at home in other places than the space where they live every day. A full 35% of people in cities felt this way.
35% of people living in cities don’t feel ‘at home’ there?
I did some digging and found this piece, IKEA’s 2018 Life At Home Report Shows People Don’t Really Feel At Home In Their Homes, with more background:
The study revealed that almost 40 percent of Americans currently don’t feel a sense of belonging in their homes. And according to Ditta M. Oliker Ph.D. on Psychology Today, feeling like an outsider can lead to loneliness and isolation.
When it comes to having a home that gives you all the warm-and-fuzzy feels, IKEA noted that there are five emotional needs that contribute to the feeling of home: security — feeling safe and grounded; belonging — feeling like you’re welcome and accepted in your community; comfort — being content and at ease in your surroundings; privacy — feeling in control of how you disconnect and reflect; and ownership, which isn’t necessarily about owning your home but rather having a sense of control over your living space.
“For a large number of people, home just doesn’t feel like home any more. We discovered a new behavior, where people use a network of spaces and places, both within and beyond the four walls, as part of their homemaking experience,” Macro Insights Leader at IKEA Group Maria Jonsson said in a press release. “We believe that this expanded notion of life at home gives people more opportunities to create the feeling of home, no matter where or how they live.”
Just strikes me as odd, but I have spent most of the past 30 years living in just two houses, and in both cases, I was an owner.
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