Work

Frederick Winslow Taylor, the American engineer who wrote The Principles of Scientific Management, believed that the most efficient approach to work was analysing each aspect of a worker’s role. Now, Atom Bank has put this concept to the test, introducing a four-day week after analysing 170 different metrics of productivity. It’s a good reminder that managers must focus on data and trust in order to track the productivity of workers, especially those working remotely. Read full article here

According to many junior staffers, the publishing industry is getting more and more inhospitable, with one of the biggest problems being the lack of upward mobility. Junior staffers do gruelling work for years and sometimes never get promoted into better positions—and if they do, it takes forever. Promotion requirements are seemingly obscure; some say that you’ll get promoted when the higher-ups feel that you’re “ready”, without providing criteria to prove readiness. Senior staff are also staying in their positions forever, so there’s little room for growth short of switching companies. Read full article here

Despite being wary of introducing religion to the workspace, Fortune 500 companies are embracing Buddhist meditation and mindfulness practices. Part of this is because of mindfulness’ recognised benefits, like compassion and social bonding, which lead to a sense of belonging. If their workers enact these practices in the workplace, the workers will likely learn to associate these good feelings with their workplaces, perhaps making them feel more connected to their companies. Read full article here

Ever since the pandemic, Microsoft stopped measuring employee engagement and pivoted towards measuring employee thriving instead. Whilst engagement seems satisfactory, analysing their employees’ survey answers revealed there were issues going on despite employee engagement metrics looking good. A thriving employee, in Microsoft’s eyes, is one that feels energised and empowered to do meaningful work. So, if an employee is engaged but doesn’t feel like they’re doing anything meaningful, Microsoft sees that the employee is probably unsatisfied with their job and needs to do something to correct it. Read full article here

“It wasn’t the environment itself that was stressful or distracting — it was the lack of control.” People work better when they have some control. Workers were observed to be more productive and feel more satisfied with their jobs when their employers gave them the freedom to decorate their workspaces as they wished. However, when managers shifted their decorations slightly, they felt their freedom was taken away and performed significantly worse and felt dissatisfied with their jobs. Read full article here

With AI getting smarter — being able to learn rules of games without human intervention — people are naturally anxious about losing their jobs to automation. Aaron Bastani suggests we embrace automation and adopt fully automated luxury communism (FALC). FALC proposes automation to take over all human work while people sit back and reap the fruits of their labour. Automation, in this case, would serve human needs, which would bring about a science fiction-esque “post-work, post-scarcity society” where we would hopefully live like modern-day billionaires.
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