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This article discusses the need for leaders to reframe the conversation around returning to the office. Many companies have faced backlash from employees and social media due to their messaging about returning to the office. The article emphasizes the importance of engaging in dialogue with employees and being explicit and honest about the most critical outcomes. It suggests three steps for leaders to reframe the conversation: acknowledging the trade-offs and being patient, focusing on mutual value rather than just organizational benefits, and approaching the process as a data-driven, co-created, iterative learning journey. The article also highlights the need for leaders to make the office an energizing environment that employees want to be in, rather than trying to push employees against their will. [Extracted from the article]

A lot of leaders believe that the formula for attracting and keeping talent is simple: Just ask people what they want and give it to them. The problem is, that approach tends to address only the material aspects of jobs that are top of employees’ minds at the moment, like pay or flexibility. And those offerings are easy for rivals to imitate and have the least enduring impact on retention. Companies instead should focus on what workers need to thrive over the long term, balancing material offerings with opportunities to grow, connection and community, and meaning and purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses psychological safety in a hybrid workplace with an emphasis on the manager’s role in achieving it. Detailed steps on discussion facilitation are presented, including managers sharing their own vulnerabilities with hybrid work challenges as well as positive examples of transparency, and the implementation of ongoing monitoring to ensure continued psychological safety of employees.

This article examines how hybrid workplaces can be made fair by overcoming power differentials in hybridity positioning and hybridity competence. Topics include how hybridity positioning and hybridity competence affect power and ways managers can track, communicate, and monitor imbalances in access to resources and visibility across their team.

By assigning people to multiple teams at once, organizations can make more-efficient use of time and brainpower and do a better job of solving complex problems and sharing knowledge across groups. But competing priorities and other conflicts can make it hard for teams with overlapping membership to stay on track. Group cohesion often suffers, and people serving on several teams concurrently may experience burnout. Through extensive research and consulting, the authors have identified several ways that both team and organizational leaders can reduce the costs of multiteaming and better capitalize on its advantages. Team leaders should launch the team well to establish trust and familiarity, map every member’s skills, carefully manage time across teams, and boost motivation by emphasizing opportunities to learn. Organizational leaders should focus on mapping and analyzing patterns of team overlap, promoting knowledge flows among teams, and buffering teams against shocks. All this represents a significant investment of time and effort. But organizations pay a much higher price when they neglect the costs of multiteaming in hot pursuit of its benefits. INSET: WHO'S FEELING THE PAIN?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, as teams have grown more diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic, collaboration has become more complex. But though teams face new challenges, their success still depends on a core set of fundamentals. As J. Richard Hackman, who began researching teams in the 1970s, discovered, what matters most isn’t the personalities or behavior of the team members; it’s whether a team has a compelling direction, a strong structure, and a supportive context. In their own research, Haas and Mortensen have found that teams need those three “enabling conditions” now more than ever. But their work also revealed that today’s teams are especially prone to two corrosive problems: “us versus them” thinking and incomplete information. Overcoming those pitfalls requires a new enabling condition: a shared mindset. This article details what team leaders should do to establish the four foundations for success. For instance, to promote a shared mindset, leaders should foster a common identity and common understanding among team members, with techniques such as “structured unstructured time.” The authors also describe how to evaluate a team’s effectiveness, providing an assessment leaders can take to see what’s working and where there’s room for improvement. INSET: Does Your Team Measure Up?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With dynamic network operations, carriers can get valuable information directly from the source--the network itself Network elements have found their way into telephone networks little by little. As such, a […]