A new survey reveals a crucial gap in men's and women's perceptions of gender equality in their own workplaces.

Here's what we know: Our workplaces have a long way to go to achieve gender parity in everything from leadership positions to pay, despite the fact that women and men are nearly equally represented in the workforce.

To get a better understanding of the gender divide at work, Kununu, an employer review platform, partnered with InHerSight, on the "Gender Equality" survey. The survey asked 5,000 working professionals to rate their current and former employers across 16 different factors including salary, telecommuting, learning opportunities, coworkers, paid time off, mentorship, and management opportunities, among others.

The gender split of respondents was 38% men and 62% women. InHerSight's founder and CEO Ursula Mead says that even though the split was uneven, it was substantial enough to support the comparisons and analysis behind their findings.

Here is what they found:

Overall, men are more satisfied with their jobs than women on 15 of the 16 factors. The only one they rated lower was paid time off. The survey also revealed that there are six areas that men rate significantly higher than women do.

• 46% of men felt that there were enough management opportunities for women, but only 33% of women did.
• 44% of men believed that their companies had enough women in top leadership positions compared 33% of women who were satisfied with the number of women in leadership.
• 39% of men believed that the women they work with have equal access to opportunities, but only 33% of women agree.
• 38% of men thought their company's maternity leave policy was sufficient, while 31% women felt the same.
• 31% of men believed that their companies offered support for working parents but just 24% of women agreed.
• 21% of men were satisfied with the mentorship programs at their companies but only 16% of women were.

Mead says these disparities are likely due to many factors. "I'm sure the long history of traditionally male-oriented and dominated workplaces has led to a situation where men think a boardroom full of other men is normal, and minimal parental leave and family growth support is enough," she points out.

She also believes that part of the problem is that men are rarely asked to try to see things from women's perspectives or assess support for women in their organization. "When companies dig into what women are experiencing at work, they often focus on collecting that data from women specifically," she notes, "It's a new experience for many men."

A recent Rockefeller Foundation report "Women in Leadership: Why It Matters" suggests that these blind spots are more widespread. Their online poll revealed that 9 in 10 U.S. adults surveyed think there are more women leading major companies than the 20 who actually do.

One of these blind spots does improve with age. Men grow more dissatisfied with women's representation in senior leadership as they advance in their careers, the Gender Equality survey found.

Mead chalks this up in part to "healthy optimism" at the outset of a career and in part to assumptions "that we have the right people in the right roles and are operating in an unbiased environment."  She asserts that women leaders have made tremendous progress in the last 100 years. "So it can be difficult, especially when we're young and just entering the workforce, to entertain the idea that something like a "glass ceiling" still exists," she explains.

But as careers progress, for both men and women, Mead says it becomes harder to ignore the trends. "I know very few men who aren't aware of at least a few examples of women being overlooked or undervalued professionally," she argues, "and the more examples of this that someone sees—male or female—the more they realize the problems they dismissed when they were younger are still affecting people."

There's also a possibility that while careers are progressing, so are personal lives, which can have an impact on someone's perceptions of the world, says Mead. She notes that men in long-term relationships with women or fathers with young daughters are more "switched on" to the problems women face in the workforce.

That said, she does point out that men's perception of equal opportunities doesn't fall nearly as much over time as their perception of female representation in leadership or management opportunities for women. "The latter two are easy to see evidence of—are there women in leadership or management positions or not—while it's much harder to see whether opportunities are equal or not," Mead explains.

She also thinks that it may not occur to men that some of their success came as a result of unconscious bias and sexism (overt or not) in an organization rather than being simply based on personal accomplishments.

That's why, Mead says, it's important for companies to set goals and initiatives around increasing the number of women in leadership, or that have executives like Mark Zuckerberg to lead by example and make use of parental leave benefits. "It challenges the old status quo of male-focused workplaces and reminds us that these issues do exist and are important," she says.

As Moritz Kothe, CEO of Kununu notes, "While the conversation around gender equality is louder today than ever before, we clearly still have a long way to go in order for true gender equality to exist, women need to feel like they are on equal footing, and our findings indicate that we're not there yet."

It started as a thrift store gag gift and exploded into a big business with celebrity endorsements, heavy competition, and millions in sales.

It's been nearly a decade since Ragstock's Chicago-based store manager and buyer asked the company to send over any holiday sweaters they came across.

After all, it wasn't uncommon to find the sometimes comically ugly apparel—typically hand-knit by relatives, decorated with holiday paraphernalia, and given as gifts—passing through the new and vintage clothing chain's sorting facilities.

"He had some customers asking for them, so we put a rack in his store, which sold out almost immediately," says Libby Finn, president of the Minneapolis-based company. "From there we started saving all of those holiday sweaters year-round."

Today, Ragstock sells holiday sweaters at all 34 of its locations across the Midwest, and through its online store dedicated entirely to the holiday sweaters, thesweaterstore.com.

"It just continued to grow and grow and grow, and eventually we got to where we are now, which is completely mainstream. You can get these sweaters everywhere," she says, adding that traffic to the website directly from searches for or related to "ugly sweaters" grew by 200% between 2012 and 2015.

Once a seasonal, handmade product that was either found wrapped under a Christmas tree or at the bottom of a vintage clothing bin, today ugly holiday sweaters have morphed from cottage industry to seasonal industry to a year-round enterprise potentially worth millions of dollars.

Online retailers now spend 10 months of the year gearing up for ugly holiday sweater season, while major retailers across the country, such as Macy's, Target, and Walmart, dedicate large portions of prime rack space to the annual holiday trend. Competition has even begun spurning innovation, with 2016 seeing the creation of a number of new tech tools dedicated to ugly holiday sweaters.

Ragstock, for their part, has been hard at work since last holiday season developing a Tinder-like app to help customer's swipe through thesweaterstore.com's more than 25,000 unique designs. "We really started working on The Swipe-a-Sweater app after Christmas last year when we realized this business is huge and everyone is in on it, and we had to find a way to stand out from the crowd," says Finn. "It takes a lot of preparation and planning year-round, even for what seems like a small window of a season."

And competition has only gotten more intense in recent years.

"We knew this year would be a huge transition," says Fred Hajjar, who cofounded UglyChristmasSweater.com with his brother Mark in 2012. "We found out that Target and Walmart were doubling to tripling their seasonal ugly Christmas sweater inventory, and then you've got Kohl's, Macy's, Sears, and JCPenny all jumping on the bandwagon too."

The Hajjars have been gearing up for holiday sweater season since February of last year in hopes of standing out among a growing field of competitors. While their business has traditionally relied on strong search engine optimization, which lands the site among the top two positions for Google searches related to "ugly Christmas sweaters," they now pursue a more robust marketing strategy.

"We're doing search engine optimization all year round, we're always getting new products, checking out what our competitors are doing, creating social media buzz, and based on that figuring out a plan to put in place," says Hajjar. "The biggest thing we did this year was the customizer, which is basically software that allows you to make your own fully custom fully knit sweater within a week's time."

Though it may seem outlandish to dedicate 10 months and 45 staff members to such a seasonal industry, that brief selling window represents a major financial opportunity for the company, which was launched in a college dorm room.

In 2014 Hajjar told Fast Company that UglyChristmasSweater.com had raked in $3.5 million that year. He now adds that the site's earnings grew to $4.8 million in 2015. "This year we're projecting five to five and a half [million dollars in sales]," he says.

Perhaps the greatest testament to how big the ugly holiday sweater market has become are the number of celebrities and entertainment brands selling their own designs.

Icons like Britney Spears and Beyoncé now sell their own holiday-themed apparel, while Star Wars, Marvel, Disney, and other characters have been licensed for use on holiday sweaters. You can even find official team logos, athlete names, and numbers knitted onto "ugly sweaters" designed by all four major American sports franchises—the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB.

Whether you're a fan of The Big Lebowski, Looney Toons, or Guns N' Roses, there is a licensed holiday sweater for every taste.

"At Lord & Taylor, we've embraced the ugly sweater trend and expanded our assortment this holiday season by partnering with Whoopi Goldberg on an exclusive limited-edition capsule collection," says Stephanie Solomon, vice president and fashion director of Lord & Taylor. "There are so many ways you can incorporate these whimsical designs into your wardrobe, and we certainly feel this ugly sweater trend will continue to be popular for holiday seasons to come."

Solomon isn't the only one that believes the annual tradition has evolved from a temporary fad to a fashion staple. Hajjar admits that if you had asked him 12 months ago how many more years he would continue to make millions selling ugly holiday sweaters, "I would have said this is only going to last three to five more years," he admits, adding that his answer has since changed. "It's just getting so much traction with corporations and ugly Christmas sweater parties all over the place, I don't see it ever stopping."

Move over, flying drones. SpotMini, by Google-owned Boston Dynamics, is a miniature, dog-shaped robot that could someday deliver packages.

In the race for Google's strangest project, there are lots of contenders. Life-extension projects. Giant helium balloons that relay internet connections. A new version of Google Glass. But among them, dog-like robots that deliver parcels may be one of the most eye-popping.

Attendees at last month's NIPS, a machine learning conference in Spain, got a surprise peek at the dogbot when Marc Raibert, CEO of Google-owned Boston Dynamics, unveiled his company's latest projects. Among them is SpotMini, a four-legged robot that resembles a small dog and can perform tasks like opening heavy doors and climbing stairs to deliver packages to the front door of a home.

In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Raibert said that "Many people are talking about drone delivery. So why not just plain legged robots?"

The 55-pound robot, which debuted in June, has a variety of gaits including a very horse-like trotting gait, and can move sideways as well. In an onstage demo, the robot delivered a soda can into Raibert's hands using an extendable arm and showed a variety of speeds and functions.

While Boston Dynamics hopes to add autonomous functionality to SpotMini in the future, the robot was controlled by a remote operator at the demo. Once coupled with sophisticated machine learning techniques, SpotMini could get continuously better at its various feats.

The NIPS appearance was part of a mini-tour of sorts for Boston Dynamics that also included TechCrunch's Disrupt London conference earlier this month. At that conference, Raibert also discussed delivery courier use cases for the SpotMini—as well as using it as an in-home aide for the elderly.

Several companies beyond Boston Dynamics and Google are also playing with the idea of using ground-based robots for delivery services. In August of 2016, Uber acquired Otto, a company that is working on autonomous trucks for shipping. Starship Technologies, a British-Estonian firm whose four-wheeled robot can ferry 20 pounds up to two miles, received approval from Washington, D.C.'s city government to begin testing robot delivery.

Robots are also used, in some circumstances, to ferry objects back and forth in closed environments such as warehouses, power plants, and building sites. Amazon's army of 30,000 warehouse robots—the result of its acquisition of robotics maker Kiva for $775 million in 2012—has reportedly increased the efficiency of its warehouse operations and sliced the company's operating costs by 20%—or nearly $22 million—per warehouse.

Amazon has also been at the forefront of efforts to deliver packages by aerial drone. Last week, CEO Jeff Bezos reported on Twitter, the company completed its first trial delivery in Cambridge, England: 13 minutes of flight without a human pilot involved. Still, given the regulatory challenges and safety concerns that come with flying drones ground-based drone delivery could start to look more appealing.

There's just one other big challenge: Getting to the point where robot delivery couriers make economic sense. Although they look amazing in demonstrations—and give companies a chance to test out all sorts of new technologies—robots are both more expensive and time consuming than the use of human couriers for delivery in almost all circumstances. Still, they give an idea of where the technology is going.

Google/Alphabet acquired Boston Dynamics in late 2013 for $500 million, but the company has been a bit of an odd fit for the search giant. Amid eye-popping initiatives such as a 350-pound humanoid robot called Atlas, and a tiny robot called the Minitaur—developed with assistance from DARPA for military purposes—Alphabet has expressed interested in selling Boston Dynamics, but has been unable to find a buyer. The company remains separate from X (Formerly Google X), which has robotics projects of its own. It's still not clear how these robots will be used in everyday life, but the SpotMini prototype points toward at least one useful trick.

There's more than one path into a successful data job than through the university system's "talent pipeline."

In the U.S., women earn about 40% of undergraduate degrees in STEM fields overall, according to a recent study, yet receive less than 20% each of the degrees awarded in computer science, engineering, and physics. That leaves a pretty serious gender gap in one of the most in-demand fields around: data science.

But while widening the so-called "talent pipeline" is one important way to narrow that gap, it's not the only solution. If girls can be exposed to STEM programs early on in their educational careers, there's no reason why adult women can't make the leap into a data-based role later on in their professional ones. In fact, that's exactly what these three women did—and not from adjacent roles that were heavy on computational skills, but by pivoting out of creative jobs. Here's how.

Making Numbers Tell A Story

Rebekah Iliff, who's 38, spent the first half of her career exploring her knack for the humanities. She graduated from college with an undergraduate degree in philosophy and went on to acquire a double master's degree in organizational management and applied community psychology. For the first half of her career, she worked in PR, including running her own agency for tech clients.

In her PR work, Iliff says saw herself as a storyteller—being able to think creatively by putting disparate pieces together. A in her world could just as well be connected to D as to B. The only hitch, she felt, was that results of those connections were more a matter of faith than calculable ROI; it was more art than science.

Frustrated by the lack of accountability that created, Iliff was introduced to the founder of AirPR, a company that had just launched in order to solve that problem. Having launched nearly 100 startups in the U.S. market, Iliff knew the high value that founders placed on getting predicable outcomes from their PR investments, which were too often elusive—leaving Iliff and her business partner to have to constantly justify their budgets on what scant data they actually had.

Iliff signed on in 2012 as AirPR's chief strategy officer and "went from one side of the equation to the other almost overnight," she recalls—"from writing and creating stories to taking all the information PR generates and putting a value around it using technology, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data."

Initially the company's only female employee (it's now about 22% women), Iliff reflects that growing up with three brothers helped make her entry into a male-dominated field a little bit easier. "Working with engineers has forced me to learn a completely new language of communication," she says. "Engineers think linearly."

But Iliff found that storytelling skills she'd spent the first part of her career developing still came in handy, too. "You have to learn to ask the right questions and make things more concrete. You need the patience to understand where someone is coming from."

Using Data To Design A Career—And Beat Gender Bias

Like Iliff, Sce Pike never imagined working in data. In college, she'd dreamed of being an artist or singer, majoring in fine arts and anthropology. Her career path from that point forward was anything but direct. Pike, now 41, segued from art to web design to "human factors design," which studies human-machine interactions, for the telecommunications giant Qualcomm.

Then in 2010, Pike left to start her own agency in Portland, Oregon, called Citizen, which initially focused on improving the user experience for smartphone companies. Having mastered the career pivot, Pike ultimately decided to shift Citizen's focus toward the quantified-self movement, or as she calls it, the "Internet of You"—basically, the tech ecosystem that allows individuals to track their own biometric data.

Pike started right in her own backyard. First, she had some of her own employees voluntarily track their own sleeping, eating, and workout patterns. The idea, initially, was to create a healthier company, an experiment that caught Wired's notice in 2013. The article led to new clients and soon enough let Pike push the company headfirst into data—from connected health to cars and finance—using analytics technology to solve a wide array of self-management challenges.

She didn't stop there. In addition to Citizen, Pike spun out a separate company, IOTAS, to provide smart-home services to renters, not just homeowners.

"Looking back, I'm amazed where I am now," Pike says, noting that she's had to modify her professional style and attitude in order to succeed. "Men can tout their personal brand. If women do it, it comes off as bragging. If a male counterpart does it, he's so cool." That's where Pike says data came in handy.

"I have had to approach my work with logic, research, and great design," she says, "rather than to tell you it's cool." Indeed, Pike's experience is born out by the research. Studies have indicated that women who promote themselves in the workplace face disproportionate risks of doing so relative to men, who are more often rewarded for touting their skills and experience.

In other words, Pike pulled off her numerous self-transformations thanks in no small part to her quantitative chops. Each time she found her career or business heading in an unexpected direction, she calculated her next move and made sure the numbers backed it up.

From Software Marketer To The Fed's First Data Chief

Micheline Casey had a more straightforward trajectory, starting in marketing for software companies before getting an MBA in information systems. "I fell in love with technology from my very first job," she says. "I really like the possibilities of tech to enable and expand business, society, people."

Casey did some consulting work for small companies, along with a brief stint at IBM Global Services and a stab at creating her own internet startup, which became a casualty of the 2000–2002 stock market crash, along with so many other dotcom businesses. But the bursting of that bubble prodded Casey toward a data role. She took a job in customer sales and product development with a company then called ChoicePoint (now LexisNexis Risk Solutions), which had been spun off from Equifax.

"We were at the forefront of the data industry" at the time, Casey says. "I fell in love with data. It's rich enough to drive business decisions and innovation in ways that technology alone can't deliver." After five years at ChoicePoint where she served as identity management director, Casey was appointed Colorado's first chief data officer, tasked with improving the use of data and technology in the state, a position she held for four years.

At the end of her tenure, Casey moved east to start a consulting practice on data strategy, helping companies leverage data for their business. Before long, she was recruited by the Federal Reserve Board to serve as its first chief data officer. Casey says she enjoyed her work there but found the Fed's environment challenging. In fact, she says she had three strikes against her there: First, she wasn't an economist, which made her a second-class citizen at the Fed. Second, as a woman she was a minority in a male-dominant world.

And third, Casey was trying to innovate in a risk-adverse culture. "I'm not a wallflower," she says (pointing, like Iliff, to her upbringing as a source of her resilience: Casey grew up with no fewer than seven brothers). "I'm willing to challenge the status quo." Since leaving the Fed in 2015, Casey has consulted to help organizations do more with their data, served on the board of an energy organization, and mentored girls in a STEM program.

To be sure, these women are exceptional talents—including statistically. But each of their career paths shows that the path into highly successful data jobs doesn't just come through the university system's talent pipeline alone.

Donald Trump accused the magazine of "poor numbers" after it published an unflattering online review of Trump Grill.

With print advertising revenue in decline and newsstand sales in a seemingly endless downward spiral, the magazine industry is an easy target for cheap shots these days, but that shouldn't excuse the president-elect from making unsubstantiated swipes at individual publications.

Yesterday, Donald Trump tweeted that numbers for Vanity Fair magazine are "way down," and that the Condé Nast-owned lifestyle publication is in "big trouble." The tweet—apparently a response to VF'sskewering of Trump Grill on Wednesday—is part of a pattern for Trump, who has a history of taking to Twitter to attack media brands that write unflattering things about him.

According to Trump, Vanity Fair's numbers are "really poor," but what numbers is he talking about? Audience data for the magazine shows it had a pretty good year both in print and online. In fact, it's having a pretty good decade. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, VF's verified and paid circulation averaged 1.2 million for the first six months of 2016. That's slightly above where it was five years ago and not too shabby for a print magazine these days.

Meanwhile, data from comScore shows an even rosier picture for VanityFair.com. The website attracted 14.3 million unique visitors in October, a 26% increase over October of last year, and more than twice the traffic it got in October 2014. In fact, it was the best month for Vanity Fair since June 2015, when the Caitlyn Jenner cover story went viral.

Of course, Trump has a right to defend himself if he feels he received an unfair review, but a president who tweets without regard to facts is troubling, and he continues to do that. The sad part is, his labels often stick, whether it's "crooked" Hillary or the "failing" New York Times.

Fortunately, for Vanity Fair, Trump's criticism seems to have had the opposite of its intended effect. The Trump Grill review, written by Tina Nguyen, has received nearly 1 million unique visitors, according to Beth Kseniak, a spokeswoman for the magazine. Subscriptions, she says, increased 100-fold over an average day.

"This was the highest number of subscriptions sold in a single day ever at Condé Nast," Kseniak tells Fast Company.

The bump is also part of a pattern. Subscriptions to the New York Times, a regular Trump target, have increased tenfold since the election. It's no secret that the media business has had a tough year. Maybe we now have a winning strategy for 2017—just get under the notoriously thin skin of the next president of the United States.

Chris O'Neill says: "Human beings don't read notes without people's permission."

Evernote is reversing its decision to implement a controversial privacy policy change on January 23rd because it "screwed up" its explanation of the change, says CEO Chris O'Neill. Originally announced Wednesday, the policy appeared to imply that Evernote employees would have unfettered access to user's private notes on the service, something the company claims was never actually the case.

"We screwed up, and I want to be really clear about that," Evernote CEO Chris O'Neill told Fast Company seconds after getting on the phone for an interview late Thursday afternoon. "We let our users down, and we let our company down."

O'Neill says that the company screwed up when it came to the way it communicated and explained the new policy, and that the headlines being written about the change were "just not true."

"Human beings don't read notes without people's permission. Full stop. We just don't do that," says O'Neill, noting that there's an exception for court-mandated requests. "Where we were ham-fisted in communicating is this notion of taking advantage of machine learning and other technologies, which frankly are commonplace anywhere in the valley or anywhere you look in any tech company today."

He says that what was interpreted as a policy that would give Evernote employees the opportunity to read users' notes, was actually a reference to using user data, with their permission, to help improve new features.

For instance, a user might opt into a new feature that reads a document and creates an action-item list based on that document. Out of the gate, your document would never be read by a human; however, if you ran into issues with the feature and asked for help, then you could grant access to that specific note to a support employee to help you troubleshoot the issue.

"There are some things we don't know that relates to what the privacy policy will look like," O'Neill says. "We have to figure some stuff out, but I can assure you it's going to be more in the opt-in side of the equation."

That distinction, opting in to sharing your notes rather than being forced to opt out of sharing them with Evernote employees, fueled much of the outrage about the new policy from users, many of whom thought Evernote might be trying to "pull a fast one" over on them.

"We could not have communicated more poorly, if what we were trying to do was nefarious," says Andrew Malcolm, SVP of Marketing for the company. "What we were trying to do is say that we're always looking for ways to make people more productive, and to be as transparent about how we do that as possible."

He says that for now, the company isn't going to implement the policies it announced were going into effect early next year.

"We're going to take a step back, and not just think about machine learning and what that means for us but also to think about how we can express our approach to privacy in the most clear way possible so users can not only have confidence that we're as committed to privacy as we've ever been, but also understand how we do that."

The company may also may introduce new security features soon. When I asked about enhanced encryption, something many suggested as a solution for keeping notes truly private during yesterday's uproar, O'Neill said new features were on the way.

"One of the things that we're doing is migrating to a public cloud to dramatically increase the robustness and frankly the variety and depth of our security features and encryptions," he says. While he declined to say specifically what any of those improvements would be, he said that the company is prioritizing new features based on the requests and concerns that have been submitted by users.

"It's fair to say that people will see a significant amount of features related to security that really address fundamental needs that people have expressed for a long time," O'Neill says.

For now, however, Evernote remains committed to privacy and assures me (and you) that's it's not looking at any of your notes.

Performance reviews shouldn't be one awkward conversation every December. Here are the common missteps to avoid.

Companies like Accenture, Microsoft, and General Electric are ditching annual performance reviews for more frequent feedback sessions, but for many others the practice is a way to end the year with a keen plan for the future.

The key to doing it successfully is not confusing performance evaluation with performance management, says Christine M. Riordan, president of Adelphi University and leadership development expert.

"Typically, organizations ask that performance be formally evaluated once a year," she says. "A performance evaluation form commonly assesses the accomplishments, strengths, weaknesses, and development needs of an employee."

Performance management, on the other hand, is a continuous process of assessing and developing the performance of an individual to align with the strategic goals of an organization, Riordan continues. "It is a constant process of discussion on progress towards goals and how the employee is performing," she says.

A year-end review, then, should be different than periodic check-ins. Sit down with your employees, and make the most of the meeting by avoiding these five common mistakes:

Mistake #1: Evaluating Traits Instead of Behaviors and Results

One of the most common mistakes is evaluating personal traits, such as leadership, motivation, conscientiousness, and attitude, according to the American Management Association (AMA).

The problem with traits is that they are internal and subjective— almost impossible to evaluate on a fair basis, according to the AMA.

Instead, year-end reviews should focus on behaviors and results. Behaviors are actions that you can observe directly, such as completing tasks. Results are also observable, such as achieving a sales quota or increasing revenue by a certain percentage.

Mistake #2: Being Too Lenient With Your Feedback

Performance evaluation can be uncomfortable for most people -– both for those giving it and those receiving it, says Riordan. "Because of the discomfort, when there is a performance problem, managers will often avoid difficult conversations or be too vague in the evaluation," she says. "Because managers often don't want people to feel bad, they may rate everyone the same or just use the more favorable ratings on the scale."

Giving everyone the same score or only favorable scores can become a norm and create problems for the organization in terms of differentiating among employees for raises or dealing with performance problems particularly when an employee has been rated average or higher, says Riordan. Avoid this mistake by being firm on your ratings, understanding that the foundation of your company depends on it.

Mistake #3: Waiting Until the End of the Year To Give Any Feedback

The secret to effective year-end reviews is laying the groundwork throughout the year, says Elissa Tucker, principal human capital management research lead at American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), a nonprofit human resources research organization.

This includes clearly defining performance goals, measures, and rating criteria; scheduling frequent check-in meetings to update performance goals, discuss progress, and address challenges; collecting feedback and performance examples on an ongoing basis; and having informal conversations with employees daily or as often as possible to recognize small accomplishments and open the door for low-stakes questions and coaching.

APQC's 2016 People Challenges at Work Poll found that the top-two challenges people have with their managers are:

1. Does not share enough information
2. Does not provide enough direction

"These findings show that managers would benefit from making communication a New Year's resolution," says Tucker. "The end-of-year performance review is the perfect time for managers to get a jump start. Then, they can follow through by having regular – weekly, monthly, or quarterly – meetings with each employee."

The annual review should not be a shock, adds Bonnie Hagemann, CEO of Executive Development Associates, a talent management and research firm. "It should be a documentation of an ongoing conversation that has been happening between the manager and the employee all year. If the time ever comes that a manager needs to fire an employee, the employee should not be surprised because he or she had many opportunities and support to get the situation turned around."

Mistake #4: Acting Like a Judge Instead of a Coach

When providing feedback, it is helpful for a manager to think and act like a coach, says MaryAnne Hyland, professor of human resource management at the Robert B. Willumstad School of Business in Long Island, N.Y.
"The ultimate goal of the performance review is to improve employee performance, and managers are more likely to get the results they are hoping for by focusing on how to improve, rather than being punitive," she says. "While many employees do not like constructive feedback, giving specific recommendations on how they could improve their performance is likely to be better received than more general comments about needing to improve."

Focus on the behavior, not the person, adds Hyland adds. "For example, it is better to say, 'The accuracy of the line items on your budget proposals needs improvement,' rather than, 'You are bad at budget proposals,'" she says.

If employee have performed poorly, good managers investigate. People don't perform poorly without a reason, according to the AMA. There are always causes, and it's a manager's job to make finding those reasons part of the review process.

Mistake #5: Not Being Able to Explain Your Rating Process

The performance review process should be transparent and well documented. A study done at the London School of Economics and Political Science published in the Spring 2016 issue of Academy of Management Discoveries found a good degree of consistency in the weight individual judges assigned to different factors from one appraisal to another. When asked to rank factors by importance, however, answers often varied, with most mangers having difficulty explaining their approach to others.

"Although participants adopted a consistent judgment policy across different performance-appraisal situations, they showed little insight into their own judgment policy," write study coauthors Hayley German of the London School of Economics and Political Science, Marion Fortin of the University of Toulouse and Daniel Read of Warwick Business School. "The fact that experienced administrators differ sharply in how they evaluate the fairness of the same appraisal suggests why this can be a potential minefield for employers. On the basis of our findings, it comes as no great surprise that annual performance appraisals have been losing favor."

The remarkable success of Emu's 2014 trend strategy, says one futurist, is also the reason you've never heard of it.

To this day, my favorite mobile app is one that very few people ever used, and it was only on the market for a short time. Called Emu, it exited beta testing in 2014 and was a mobile messaging platform that looked very similar to any phone's text-messaging system, only it happened to include an artificial intelligence (AI) engine.

The pretty good likelihood that you've never heard of Emu is in fact a measure of its success, and it helps explain why so many other new products, services, and technologies either go viral or fizzle out at the moments that they do. Here's a look at why.

Me, You, And Emu, 2014

At the time of Emu's launch, you still had to look at dates on a calendar to find a good time to meet. To make plans, you first had to read and respond to emails or text messages. Emu's premise was simple yet powerful: When texting with a friend or coworker, a smart bot would jump into the conversation and automatically retrieve information while you typed. As a result, those who used the app would all find their lives a little easier to manage.

Here's how it worked: I sent my sister a text message within the app asking her if she wanted to get together for dinner.

Me: Hey, do you want to get dinner this week?

The app automatically looked at our calendars and suggested mutual dates and times that we were free. Within the same window, a little calendar appeared with some suggestions. She chose one of the times and texted it back to me:

My sister: Sure, Saturday night?

Since we had mentioned dinner, the app geo-located us on that date and suggested a handful of restaurants that would be nearby. It also displayed Yelp reviews and reservation times on OpenTable—all within the app. No having to look up restaurants or call around to see who had open reservations. I simply texted her back:

Me: How about Café Dupont?

With that, I could click on a single button to confirm our reservation for 7 p.m. on Saturday. We sent a total of three text messages between the two of us, and with the assistance of a very clever bot, we no longer had to suffer through the process of messaging back and forth endlessly trying to find a date, time, and restaurant. Emu automated all this work for us.

And it was equally helpful if we wanted to see a movie: It would automatically find a theater that was equidistant on the date we were available, then show us movie trailers and allow us to buy tickets—again, all within the app. It had a "Marco Polo" feature, too, which allowed us to find our friends on a map as they were headed our way.

The Real Point Of Pre-Launch Pressure-Testing

Emu's founders didn't race to market with their strategy. Instead, they committed to planning—and, as a result, ample testing. If we've learned anything from all the technological innovations launched over the past decade, it's that new kinds of technologies break in weird and sometimes unexpected ways. That's why Emu's developers trained it with thousands of test messages before it was released, so they could tweak its interpretation and analysis.

This thorough testing allowed developers to challenge their assumptions about how users—not just the developers and their small group of beta testers, but average people, too—would potentially interact with the app. One thing they realized was that Emu needed to learn how to make nuanced inferences. It considered the whole message before attempting to assist, so that it was more likely to correctly identify each word's individual context.

This is more than just a lesson about the relative perils of iterative design, or a corrective to the checkered performance history of bots in the years since Emu's release. It's much more fundamental than that. Rather than simply identifying a trend and developing a strategy—in this case, a mobile app—Emu's team pressure-tested its assumptions first.

Looking back now, it's clear how that helped Emu preemptively answer some of the key questions about its likely fate. There are a handful of those that every would-be innovator needs to answer, but these are just three that helped Emu successfully align its strategy with the future it foresaw.

1. Is It Unique?

Does the action you're planning offer a unique value proposition, and is it clear to your customers? (And "customers" can be defined broadly: individual consumers, customer segments, business partners, agencies you're collaborating with, constituent bases, etc.) Is your strategy difficult to replicate? As competitors emerge, how will you help others continue to understand what differentiates you?

In 2014, Emu was unlike anything that had entered the market. There were elements of Emu in other applications, of course—Microsoft's Outlook would automatically add new meeting invitations sent by email to your calendar—but a bot that could manage so many processes, all within one text-messaging app, was unique.

It didn't take long for users to recognize that. Case in point: My sister is an opera singer, not a techie. Although Emu was intended to cut down on the usual back-and-forth emails and phone calls, she couldn't help but to call me after we'd scheduled our dinner date. She was completely blown away by Emu.

After thanking me for sharing it with her, she immediately recruited dozens of her friends to download it. It didn't take long for potential partners to realize Emu's value proposition to them: Local businesses, public transit, concerts, and other events could all be tied into the platform.

2. Is It Urgent?

Your product also needs to be timely: Does your trend strategy communicate a sense of urgency, both to your staff and to your intended audience? Will there be continued demand in the marketplace? Can you create demand within your customer base? Will customers see your project as indispensable, even as the market evolves and competitors emerge?

Emu arrived just early enough to solve a problem for many early tech adopters, those people who were now tethered to their smartphones. In 2014, the myriad, daily micro-transactions heaped upon us by our devices only seemed to be increasing, and those of us who used Emu found relief from some of the new stresses they brought.

Emu was quickly becoming an indispensable app, and many of us became overnight evangelists, imploring others to download it so we could break free of email and standard texting.

3. Can You Recalibrate When It No Longer Is?

Your strategy will likely need to evolve. How will you invest time and money to tracking the trend you're riding as it changes and adjust your course? Can you stick to a reasonable development cycle as you do? Can your product's evolution follow its intended customers as they upgrade their other technologies? Are you and your staff motivated to keep working on your trend strategy once your product has launched?

As the bot trend would evolve, so could the AI-powered engine within Emu. AI would inevitably evolve, too, competitors would of course enter the marketplace. Emu's makers expected all this, knowing their product could be made smarter and more capable of assisting users with everyday tasks. With a small team, reasonable overhead, and a modest amount of investment, the Emu team was free to recalibrate and to continue working on its strategy after it exited private beta-testing.

How does Emu's story end? And why haven't you heard about it? The answer is simple: Around 100 days after Emu officially launched, Google quietly swooped in and acquired it. Given what we know to be true about how 2014, 2015, and 2016 played out, it's not hard now to divine Google's interest in retrospect. The same technology that allowed busy people to schedule meetings, dinner, and movies necessarily monitored our conversations. It analyzed our chats and made inferences about what we were discussing.

It was therefore a perfect opportunity for advertising—one too good for Google to pass up.

This article is adapted from The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream by Amy Webb. Copyright 2016 by PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. It is reprinted with permission.

If hiring managers really want to be fairer and less biased, says one psychologist, they'll need to cut the chitchat.

This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.

However the hiring process may be changing, there's no sign job interviews are going away from it. It's still almost unthinkable to land a job offer without going through some form of interview, whether in person or remotely. But anybody who's been on a handful of them knows how much one job interview can differ from the next—despite the plethora of advice about the best questionsfor hiring managers to ask and which cues to look for.

As a result, some job interviews are much more effective than others at sorting out whether a given candidate is the right fit. After all, while humans in general are fairly good judges of one another's character, plenty aren't but still think that they are.

There are ways to control for this variability, but that means turning the interview process into more of a science than an art. Still, there may be some serious upsides to doing that. Here are a few of them, and what it might take to do it.

Giving The Job Interview A Clinical Makeover

What would a more scientifically rigorous interview process look like? Researchers have devised psychometric tests that aim to standardize and measure the types personality features that many of us—including interviewers—just try to guess at subjectively.

A more "accurate" interview might be less pleasant to experience, but it would likely need to be more structured—even to the point of resembling a multiple-choice questionnaire. It would also need to be longer than most sit-downs with job candidates tend to be, progressing through a sequence of carefully selected questions that are coherently linked to the role in question, and previously shown to evoke answers that actually reveal candidates' potential.

And as in any good psychological study, there would always need to be multiple interviewers present. The same interviewers would need to assess all candidates, though, and use standardized scorecards to evaluate them afterward. Very few interviewers in the real world probably set up these sorts of parameters, and it's understandable why—imagine the resources and training it would take to turn an entire HR department into a team of clinical researchers.

But the alternative means regularly making deeply subjective, inherently biased, and often painfully misjudged hiring decisions, no doubt contributing to turnover rates that are truly staggering.

At a minimum, it doesn't hurt to start small and weed out some of the most glaringly ineffective interviewing practices. Designing more scientifically accurate interviews would require technical expertise and clinical experience, but curbing these three common mistakes definitely doesn't.

1. Cut The Chitchat

Although it's useful to break the ice and build some rapport with the candidate, small talk should really be kept to a minimum, ideally to two minutes or less. That may sound stern, dispassionate, and inhuman to some; companies often like to use the interview experience to let loose, show off their culture, and see what kind of chemistry emerges organically. And that's fine, but it almost certainly won't lead to making consistently high-quality hiring choices.

Small talk invariably evokes a range of biases, focusing interviewers' attention on totally irrelevant behaviors. If interviewers want to indulge in it, they'll need to treat that banter the way reporters treat off-the-record conversations—something that's completely irrelevant and not to be included in the analysis of the candidate.

What's more, chitchat can actually give the wrong impression to the candidate, who regards it as part of their performance and over-interprets a hiring manager's behavior while chatting as either positive or negative feedback—even if the interview hasn't even commenced. To be sure, it's is impossible to control the impressions candidates make on interviewers and vice versa. But establishing a clear starting point to the interview and focusing only on the actual interview questions is every capable interviewer's main task.

2. Stop Improvising

When job candidates and interviewers actually enjoy the interview experience, it's usually because of the (relatively) natural personal interaction—at least compared with tests, simulations, or application forms that the hiring process often involves. But make no mistake: There's nothing natural or authentic about a job interview.

Candidates who approach them as a spontaneous and natural encounter, thinking they can "just be themselves" (common career advice), are likely to fail. It's of course important to appear authentic, but the most successful candidates, researchers have found, tend to put on a carefully rehearsed performance and prepare as much as a classical pianist.

Why not expect the same level of preparation from interviewers themselves? No matter how much they enjoy the sociable component of the interview, this is an exam for them, too. It may sound harsh, but if hiring managers are really committed to combatting their own biases and making fairer, more accurate judgments about candidates' characters and competencies, they need to stop improvising. Every psychological researcher knows how important it is to follow a carefully designed script control their own emotional affect as much as possible. Without deliberately providing a standardized environment to all candidates, you're already being unfair.

3. Don't Attempt Psychoanalysis

We all make automatic inferences about others' personalities even after a few seconds of interacting with them, but most of these inferences are wrong. To make matters worse, people are generally unable to evaluate the accuracy of their inferences, so we often end up feeling sure about what someone is like even when we're totally off base.

Some simple tricks, like aggregating impressions from multiple evaluators (five or more) can no doubt enhance the accuracy of our inferences, but even that would be less valid and more time-consuming than scientific personality assessments (unless the raters already know the person they're describing well).

At any rate, rather than trying to psychoanalyze candidates, you should focus on a factual and data-driven evaluation of their skills, knowledge, and experience. While the job interview can be used to complement other insights gathered through personality assessments, it's best approached as a means for obtaining job-related information, rather than vetting character. Keep in mind that narcissists and psychopaths tend to perform very well during interviews (and first dates), but scientific psychometric tests can spot these individuals.

Some of this also helps explain why computer-driven evaluations of candidates, as extracted from digital interviews, show such promise. Machines can inject as much structure as needed into unstructured data (like a 45-minute conversation) and capture millions of data points, which can then be analyzed—not by intuition, stereotypes, or prejudices, but actual evidence.

While it's impossible even for the most open-minded human beings to ignore (or avoid making assumptions about) signs of candidates' socio-demographic categories (age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, social class, etc.), computers can be trained to disregard these and any other data. And while algorithms are only as unbiased as the people who write them, they could—at least in theory—prove far more consistently objective than human beings.

There will be some major hurdles for technology to overleap before that happens, of course, which means the typical job interview isn't likely to change dramatically anytime soon. But that's all the more reason why a few of the most ineffective human habits really need to go—sooner rather than later.

The bad news is that you're probably breaking bad news the wrong way. The good news: These four steps can fix that.

Here's some bad news: You're probably delivering bad news the wrong way. Every company, team, and manager hits setbacks, and it's always somebody's job to break the unpleasant news to others. But the way to talk about even the toughest turns for the worse isn't simply to put a falsely positive spin on what went wrong and what it means.

Sharing upbeat stories is easy, after all. We like giving and receiving praise. So it makes sense why some leaders tend to downplay the consequences of bad news or withhold it altogether until it's too late. Instead, there are ways to have difficult conversations with your team that leave them with an accurate grip on the facts while still motivating everyone to take the initiative and bounce back. Here are a few tips.

1. Limit Your Negative Language

When you're discussing setbacks with your team, be careful not to use negative expressions—like "can't" or "won't"—that sound too categorical. For instance, instead of announcing, "I can't get the budget for this project," try, "Our current funding levels mean that we'll all have to be more resourceful, starting with the project we're working on right now." Both convey the predicament accurately, but one frames it like a dead end, while the other points the way forward.

This goes for news concerning individuals, too. Rather than saying, "I won't be promoting you into this new position," you can simply say, "I've thought about it, and keeping you in your present role makes more sense to me right now." Between the lines, it's the difference between, "Sorry, deal with it!" and "This is where things stand for the moment, but they can change."

Another word to watch for is "no"—as in "no way," "no problem," "no good," "that's a 'no'," or "I have no idea." Instead, use "yes" and other positives like, "yes, there's a way to do it" and "I do have an idea about how to work through this." Instead of talking about "problems," talk about "challenges"; instead of "obstacles," "opportunities."

Again, this doesn't mean cloaking bad news in euphemisms—it means focusing on their consequences and your collective response to them.

2. Make Sure It Isn't Personal

Always avoid personal barbs. Most managers know it's totally unprofessional to tell a direct report, "That was stupid of you," but many express their displeasure with phrases like, "you disappointed me" or "you let me down." Fair enough—you're only being honest.

But don't forget that these expressions can still hurt people and make it harder for them to do better. They subtly brand people as untrustworthy and tear down the very self-confidence they'll need in order to do better next time. Personal insults, however watered down, are counterproductive. You'll more often than not end up with angry team members who function well below their potential.

Don't throw darts at other people who aren't in the room, either. It may be tempting to find a target to criticize when things go wrong (and sometimes it really is your client's fault), but if you offload the blame to others, you immediately undercut your own team's ability to take ownership and fix the problem. Saying that a customer who didn't accept your team's proposal is a "jerk" or "power hungry" sets a bad example in organizations where cooperation is paramount.

3. Spend More Time On The High Ground

Think of every conversation as covering a certain amount of "terrain." It's okay to spend some time wandering around on the low ground, but you'll want to scramble up to the heights eventually—and loiter there longer. During tough times, the negative tends to dominate, getting bigger and bigger as it all rolls downhill.

That's all the more reason why leaders need to keep the negatives to a minimum and keep the conversation firmly rooted to the higher ground. Naturally, you want to be open and transparent if there's been a problem. State the situation as clearly as you can (without being accusatory), but once you've identified the issue, focus on the solutions, teamwork, collaboration, and what the future can look like if you pull together.

Here's a good rule of thumb: Keep the negatives to a quarter or, at most, a third of the conversation. And don't let others draw you back into the weeds. Your team members may need to express their frustration and pessimism at first, but it's your job as their boss to help everyone pull themselves up by their bootstraps. By the end of the conversation, all parties should be looking ahead.

4. End On An Upside

When crafting your message, start with the negative and end with the positive. You might say, "Last year was tough —with our sales numbers were below what we'd expected—but I'm confident we can make up that loss and reach our goals for this year." Similarly, if you're heading into a client pitch, you'd be foolish to say to your boss, "That's one tough customer. He's never open to any of our new products." It's better to say, "This will be pretty challenging, but I'll give it my all."

Never forget to make this transition. If you're announcing layoffs, don't hit your listeners with, "This is a really hard day for all of us—for you, for me, and for our company." Indeed it is! But statements like that may only make a bad situation worse; after all, is it really equally bad for the people who are keeping their jobs as it is for those who are losing them?

Instead, realistically present the situation, and then move toward a solution, ending on a positive. For example, "I have some sobering news to share that will affect all of you. But I want to share it with you myself so we can work through it together as a team." The difference here isn't dramatic—bad news is bad news—but it helps to lay the groundwork of encouragement and openness to talk honestly about what's happening and why.

That's something the best leaders always do—in good times and bad.

Our favorite brand-new apps of the year—plus a few radical upgrades—for your phone, tablet, and computer.

To say that 2016 was a good year for helpful apps would be a colossal understatement. A perfect storm of artificial intelligence, big data, excellent interface design, and fresh takes on otherwise stale categories left this year chock full of potential candidates. Some existing apps even added so many great and meaningful new features that they earned a spot on the list this year as well. And everything on this list is either free or sports a free version with enough features to keep your wallet safe for a while. You've got big shoes to fill, 2017!

Fine-Tune Your Finances

Aside from a wonderful family, my health, a beautiful home, a solid job, and general happiness, I am not a wealthy man. Poor me! I do know, however, that I have several credit cards of varying balances, a handful of bank accounts, and a glut of bills to pay each month. Somehow it all works out, but my head is halfway in the financial sand. Thankfully, Albert (iOS, Android coming soon) keeps an eye on all my accounts, tells me when my various bills are due, suggests ways to cut costs, and even features a built-in savings account. Everything's in plain English, too.

Work Way, Way, Way, Way Smarter

Look, Asana (iOS, Android, web) isn't new, but—BUT!—it's gotten infused with so many new features this year that it's finally hit its stride and is ready to replace whatever you're currently using to track your tasks and projects. Thanks to a major interface overhaul late last year, the recent addition of boards, custom fields, offline mobile access, team management for administrators, and a ton of new third-party integrations this year, it's like a completely new app. If you're doing any sort of trackable, task-able work, Asana should be on your short list of offerings to check out.

Take a Vacation From Planning Your Trips

Heads up, TripIt! Google's bringing the heat with Google Trips (Android, iOS). The app combs through your Gmail account to automatically corral your flights, hotels, car rentals, and restaurant reservations into coherent trip itineraries. You'll also get at-a-glance info about local attractions, including entire day-long activity suggestions plotted on a map that you can finesse based on the types of things you're into and how much time you have. It's like having Google as a real-life travel companion.

No-fluff News In A Flash

Hardbound (iOS) can be kinda tricky to explain but it's nothing if not unique. Imagine getting a daily roundup of news wherein each story is broken up into a five-minute series of flashcards: mostly images, with a little text here and there. It's easily digestible, easily swipe-able, and… fun? Hardbound somehow makes news fun. Once you're up to speed on the day's events, the app offers up additional fun-fact stories hell-bent on making you smarter in general: how the moon was formed, how high schools got started, how fire works; that sort of stuff.

VPN Me ASAP (And Make It Free)

Virtual private network connections: cumbersome to set up and expensive, yes? No. The ever-underrated Opera (Windows, Mac, Linux)—again, not new but exceedingly rejuvenated in 2016—did the unthinkable this year and piped a free, unlimited VPN right into its web browser. Whether you're across the pond and want to be able to stream stuff you're only able to stream at home, you want to severely limit your exposure on the web, or you want to try to dodge litigious content providers, Opera turns setting up a secure, globe-hopping connection into a quick trip to the settings menu.

Make Old Photos Feel New Again

With its new PhotoScan (Android, iOS) app, Google basically donned a leather motorcycle jacket, strutted into a party full of regular photo-scanning apps, knocked everyone's drinks out of their hands, kissed the prettiest one straight on the mouth, and told the DJ to take a hike. If you've got old photos to digitize, this should be your first stop. The app is fast, accurate, and best of all, free. And it's a complete no-brainer if you already store your snaps on Google Photos, as it'll zing all your scans there automatically.

Edit Video On The Go Like A Pro

The aptly named Quik (Android, iOS), from tiny-camera behemoth GoPro, helps you edit your clunky video footage into something that's actually watchable. And by "helps you edit," I mean that it does just about all the work for you. You don't need a GoPro camera to use it, either: It'll ingest video clips from your camera roll and popular social media sites and then intelligently suss out the interesting bits, line them up, let you add music, and output it all to a high-definition video file on your phone.

Build an Email Newsletter That People Will Actually Read

If you're spending more than five minutes each week on your email newsletter, you're doing it wrong. Revue (web) lets you opine on interesting articles with the click of a browser bookmarklet, pull in content you save to other services (or create yourself) automatically, and drag and drop images with ease. It's free while you build yourself up to 200 subscribers, then $5 per month thereafter.

Comparison Shop For Shipping Rates

If you need to ship something—anything—save big bucks by doing a little competitive analysis with Shyp (Android, iOS, web). Though it's been a full service pack-and-ship courier solution in a tiny handful of markets for the past few years, its free, available-to-all comparison shopping tool rolled out this year and makes Shyp worth the download even if you never actually use its pickup-and-pack offering. Once you've found the best deal, you can print labels in a few clicks as well.

Enjoy Elegant, Efficient Email

Spark (iOS, Mac) spread its wings on the iPhone back in 2015, gained steam with an iPad version earlier this year, then completed the trifecta by rolling out for Macs in late November. If you're in the Apple camp and you have an email address, this app should be on all your devices. When it comes to email clients, Spark arguably strikes the most delicate, thoughtful balance between presentation, ease of use, and granularity: You'll mow through your inbox—whether one account or many—in no time, but you'll enjoy doing it.

A startup founder shares tips for staying connected while traveling. ( Hint: Keep a crappy old smartphone in the bottom of your suitcase.)

A couple of years ago, my wife and I finally did something we'd dreamed about for years; we ditched our house and cars, put the rest of our stuff in storage, took our 10- and 13-year-old boys out of school, and hit the road with only one bag each.

We'd figured it was a "now or never" type of thing. At the time, I was winding down with one startup I'd cofounded that had recently been acquired, but I'd held onto a few board of director positions, including one with a small telecom company. Over the course of our travels, that business got acquired, too, and since I chaired its board, I needed to stay in touch with colleagues during that crucial time more than I'd expected to.

That meant developing a few productivity strategies on the fly—approaches that would let me stay focused when I needed to but still disconnect to spend time with my family just as I'd planned. Most of all, my working methods would need to be flexible enough to weather all kinds of situations our travels would find us in. Here's what proved most effective.

Make Time To Be "At Work"—And To Go Offline

One of the advantages to being in another time zone is that you can connect with colleagues and make business calls late at night, without losing out on sightseeing. For me, video was a huge helper here. I got more done via video that year than I could have by just using email and making ordinary phone calls.

Of course, we all have to sleep at some point, and traveling constantly is exhausting. So even though I did some creative scheduling to take advantage of time differences, I didn't want to be woken up at 3 a.m. by colleagues who were just having lunch on the other side of the world. My phone's "do not disturb" function came in handy there.

Plan To Stay Connected (It's Easier Than You Think)

A lot of people think it's hard to stay connected while traveling, and it can be. But I found a few easy and affordable ways to stay online virtually whenever and wherever. I invested in a T-Mobile phone plan that let me roam with unlimited data in just about any country, without having to laboriously search for SIM cards and sign up for new plans in each new place. This way, as soon as I landed in a new city, on a remote island, or in the hinterlands, I could at least check in on some work items.

Other commonplace collaboration apps were no-brainers, like Google Docs. I used cloud-based tools, including Dropbox, for personal stuff, too. From passport photos to immunization records, having online connectivity that syncs with your phone can save you a lot of time, money, and hassle. And if you sign up for iBooks or Kindle Unlimited, you can keep your reading material (including travel guides) at your fingertips without buying new ones in each new destination and lugging them around.

I actually found that you can access cell coverage or Wi-Fi from just about anywhere these days—from the beach to a high-altitude hike in the Himalayas. I even took a board call mid-hike one day on my way to base camp on Mt. Everest. I also made sure to carry an unlocked phone so you're not locked into one carrier when staying for longer periods. I was able to secure a 3-GB plan in Nepal for the equivalent of about $10 and phone calls back to the U.S. for two cents per minute.

For everything else, there's WhatsApp for texting and Skype audio for making calls to traditional phone lines. If you have Google Hangouts and a data plan, you can make free phone calls to regular phones in the U.S. while abroad.

Pack Your Laptop And Batteries

Your smartphone can't do everything, I found, not even coupled with a tablet. Unfortunately, there's still no substitute for a full-fledged laptop. We might be getting there sometime soon, but I wouldn't have given up my laptop for anything. And be sure to bring lots of backup batteries for your devices (Anker is my brand of choice). The last thing you want is to be tethered to an outlet in a cafe or hotel room when you're trying to see the world.

Keep A Backup Device At The Bottom Of Your Suitcase

When you're traveling nonstop, you can expect more than life's usual dosage of surprises. For me, it was when my phone was stolen out of my hands while in a tuk-tuk (like a cross between a rickshaw and motorcycle) in Cambodia. Before long, I'd learned the hard way that they sell different phones in different regions—and that GSM cellular frequencies are different all around the world.

A colleague very generously shipped me a new iPhone, but it got stuck in customs for weeks. So be sure to keep a backup phone with you just in case. I had an iPhone 4 that still worked; it wasn't ideal, but it was certainly better than nothing.

Know When To Shut The Damn Thing Off

The digital infrastructure that lets us keep in touch from anywhere is a modern marvel, but it's also important to maintain work-life balance. I had to remind myself to unplug and take time to enjoy the places we visited—otherwise what was the point?

In fact, since this was a family trip, I was extra keen to stay in touch with my family and loved ones around the world. We Skyped and FaceTimed quite a bit with family and friends. At one point I explained to my septuagenarian dad that while it cost me $3 a minute to talk to him on my cell phone, it was free when we connected by video—he was amazed.

When I stepped back and thought about it, so was I. Then I closed the app and went outside.

Scott Wharton is VP and GM of Video Collaboration at Logitech.

That firm handshake is great, but it's what you say next—and how you say it—that matters more.

You already know the basics of leaving a polished first impression, like dressing well, making eye contact, and having a firm handshake. That's great advice, but it's probably not enough. If you really want to be memorable (for the right reasons), you need to think about what you say and how you say it. Here are a few straightforward pointers that many people miss.

1. Mix The Business With The Personal

In The Godfather, Michael Corleone tells his brother, "It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business." Well, a good first impression should be both personal and "business." If you connect only at a personal level, you risk seeming unprofessional or irrelevant to whatever business context you may find yourself in. But if you connect only at a business level, you'll be relevant, but you won't be nearly as memorable.

Fortunately, you don't have to make a trade-off. I just had a phone conversation with a potential client from Berlin who worked in the construction industry. Instead of just saying, "Oh, I've worked with many clients in the construction industry," I tried to connect with him on a more personal level. We ended up discussing construction generally, then landed on the subject of building walls, touching on everything from the Great Wall of China to the Berlin Wall.

These were unplanned digressions—but that's the point. I'm confident he will remember our conversation not just because I connected on a business level, but because I connected on a personal level. And best of all, you can do this without knowing much about the person you're speaking with beforehand. My client had grown up in Berlin and worked in construction, so it wasn't totally unusual that we'd discuss the Berlin Wall—something very well known that might have some personal (not just business) relevance for him. Sure enough, it did.

2. Drop A Powerful Statistic

Public speakers and writers are often counseled to use compelling facts and figures to grab audiences' attention, but the same technique can work in one-on-one conversations, too. If you're able to impress someone with a data point they've never heard before, they're likely to remember you—no matter what the context.

And the more relevant the statistic is to their business concerns, the better. For example, a client who works in staffing recently told me that his firm was able to consistently predict whether or not employees would be successful after 13 weeks of work. Not 12 weeks, not 14 weeks, but 13 weeks—the specificity of that time frame stuck with me. The statistic wasn't only interesting, as he gave me an insight that may be important to me as I keep growing my own business.

3. Offer A "Did You Know?"

It doesn't have to be a business-related stat, though. Offer the person you're speaking with an interesting fact that they can use in their personal life. You can also make an impression with basically any kind of a thought-provoking insight that they'll want to tell people outside of work. To point is just to be interesting.

For example: Did you know that people born blind gesture in ways that are similar to sighted people? When I first heard that, I was fascinated. You won't want to drop a "did you know?" as a complete non sequitur, but as long as you're keeping the conversation a mix of business and personal, there should be a natural opportunity to weave in an interesting idea or two that might not have any direct connections to your work. If you succeed at that, they'll be more likely to remember you.

4. Keep It Pithy (And A Little Surprising)

Finally, if you want to make a memorable first impression, keep your speaking pithy. Pack as much punch into as few words as possible. If you're too long-winded, you might be memorable, but not in a good way—people will just want to escape your clutches.

I was recently at a party when a man came up to me and said, "I like your bauble." I was wearing a five-carat blue topaz necklace, one of my most prized pieces of jewelry, from Hong Kong. It was such an unusual way to compliment my necklace, but I could tell he meant it sincerely. Still, the ambiguity and slight edge of his remark has stuck with me, and I remember our interaction clearly.

Making a good first impression is about more than a look or a handshake. It's about establishing a strong connection in just a few short minutes of conversation. That leaves you with only a short time frame to surprise, delight, and intrigue the person you're speaking with, but with these four strategies, you can do that pretty quickly and with just a little preparation.

Getting rejected can help point the way forward. Here's your guide for going back to the drawing board.

So you made a plan to raise a round of financing and were greeted with a resounding yawn. You're not alone. Raising money for a startup is really hard and usually takes much longer than you think, with many founders discovering they need to meet with far more investors than they'd thought.

Here's the thing: Venture capitalists are trained to say no. There are a limited number of investments they can make, and they're primed to look for reasons to withhold funding—especially lately, as VCs show more caution than they did just a few years ago.

These challenges aren't insurmountable, though, and getting rejected for funding may even be a useful experience for some startups. Here's a seven-step guide, based on my experience as a startup advisor, to using that setback as fuel to propel you forward.

1. Ask For Feedback

Venture capitalists and most angel investors are polite, at least to your face. They don't want to earn a reputation as someone who isn't supportive and easy to work with. So the very first thing you can do after getting turned down is to ask why. The reasons that they give for passing on an investment may be valid, and possibly even something that hadn't occurred to you initially.

But don't just ask the VCs you've pitched to. It can also be useful to get back-channel feedback from the rest of your network. Describe how you pitched your startup and why investors ultimately told you they chose to pass. This may help you discover that you've got to rethink your business model, your target list of investors, or your marketing approach toward them.

2. Look Again At Your Business Model

Investors are obviously looking for companies that have spectacular growth potential. In other words, the bar is high. As an entrepreneur and startup CEO, you already know that you need to have a good understanding of the potential size and growth of your target market and understand your customers' needs and pain points. Likewise, you know that you need to have a realistic grasp of the current and potential competitive landscape.

A rejection is a useful red flag that your understanding on these fronts may not be as ironclad as you'd thought. It may turn out that your business model is as sound as you've always believed, but getting turned down for funding is a sure sign that it's worth taking a second look.

3. Tweak Your Product Positioning

Sometimes investors are concerned that you're addressing too narrow a niche market. Other times they may think you're targeting one that's too broad. Whatever the case, VCs and angel investors want to support companies that will address a potentially large, rapidly growing market. In other words, it's all about your forecasts and your plans for capitalizing on them.

That means validating your financial projections from a "top-down" perspective when it comes to market size and growth potential and "bottom-up" approach to your customer and sales funnel. And your product and marketing plans need to follow suit. So getting rejected for funding may suggest that a pivot is in order. Or maybe you just need to readjust by a matter of degrees—to focus on a slightly different product or target market. If you decide to do this, make some progress along that front before going back to investors.

4. Review Your Financing Market Materials

As an entrepreneur approaching investors these documents are your stock in trade:

• a compelling elevator pitch
• a succinct executive summary
• a business plan that shows a strong business model
• a set of financial projections with the potential to deliver a 10–30x return on investment

If investors have rejected you, it may be time to go back to all four of those materials and see how they can be improved. Taken together, they're the narrative you're telling about your startup's future success. And getting turned down is an indication that the story could be better.

5. Target Different Investors (Or The Same Ones Differently)

Your chances of getting funded might rise if you focus on so-called "smart money" investors. Like any sales process, you need to build a target list and then work that list. Smart-money investors have domain expertise in your target vertical markets, or else deep technical expertise in your product area.

If the VCs you've approached so far don't exactly fit that bill, you may need to draw up a new list. On the other hand, if you've pitched smart-money investors unsuccessfully, you might be missing some of the information they're likely looking for. You want to have investors who can buy into your vision—but your vision needs to be detailed enough, since they'll understand the dynamics of your industry or technology better than most.

6. Consider Alternative Funding Sources

It may be that you just aren't ready for a certain category of investors. VCs tend to move downstream and are more likely to invest in growth-stage companies versus seed stage or even Series A. So maybe you just need some more bootstrapping first.

Is there money available from your friends and family? Maybe you're far enough along to get angel investors interested in your deal. With the passage of the JOBS Act earlier this year, there are also new sources of funds from equity crowdfunding. Or maybe a small-business loan is right for you. For some technologies, there are government grants available. The point is to get more creative and flexible than you might have been previously.

7. Make Some More Progress

It may be that you have to communicate with investors over a period of time and demonstrate that you're meeting key milestones. What are your key performance indicators, or KPIs, that will validate your business model a bit better? What have you accomplished that reduces technology and market risks?

Ask yourself what you can do to build up more of a track record and show your progress when you go back to investors a second time. You might just need to have more to show for yourself. So stay patient and think strategically, and you'll boost your chances of bouncing back.

Patrick Henry is a business consultant and founder at QuestFusion. He's a seasoned CEO with 25 years of experience in the tech industry wherein he raised over 200 million dollars in equity capital.

HackerRank tapped over 120 top universities around the world and had each of their best coders go head-to-head.

With early college admissions under way for many universities around the country, we got to thinking: Which colleges have the best coders in the world?

While there are academic rankings, like the Top Computer Science Programs by U.S. News & World Report, there is no list that ranks colleges purely by their students' ability to code. The criteria for the U.S. News & World Report, for instance, includes number of research papers produced, global research reputation, and number of conferences. In fact, practical coding skills aren't even part of their methodology at all.

We decided to answer the question: Which universities have students who can roll up their sleeves and code?

At HackerRank, millions of developers, including hundreds of thousands of students, from around the world regularly solve coding challenges to improve their coding skills. In order to figure out which colleges have the best coders, we hosted a major University Rankings Competition. Over 5,500 students from 126 schools from around the world participated in the event. Companies also assess developers' coding skills using HackerRank to hire great developers.

According to our data, the top three best coders in the world hail from:

1. Russian Federation College, ITMO University (Russia)
2. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Middle School (China)
3. Ho Chi Minh City University of Science (Vietnam)

The University of California, Berkeley was the #1 college in America, and came in fourth overall.

First, we defined what it means to be the "best" university. We thought it would be fairest to rank universities based on both number of participants and high scores. Our engineering team created a formula to rank each university. Each university had to have at least 10 participants to place on the leaderboard. We narrowed the data to the top 50 colleges around the world:

The Best Coding Schools In The World

Two Russian universities ranked #1 and #6, respectively in the HackerRank University Competition. Meanwhile, Russian universities aren't listed among the top 50 universities in the traditional U.S. News & World Report list. Similarly, we found that Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh university has talented coders, but they didn't rank high in U.S. News & World Report report either.

This is not to say that the U.S. News & World Report is misguided. Instead, the results of the HackerRank University Competition suggest that such traditional academic rankings aren't the only source of the best coders in the world.

In fact, one acclaimed high school in China blew many universities out of the water. San Yat-sen Memorial Middle School (which in the U.S. equates to high school level of education), placed second, above UC Berkeley and IIT. One Chinese blog mentions that the school is actually bigger than most universities in China, and includes a science museum.

Wentao Weng, who ranked the #13 overall, says he first started learning how to code in what he calls "Junior 1," which is 11 years old. Weng told us that computer science isn't necessarily a stand-alone subject in grade school, but it's well supported.

"It's not one of the subjects; however, we can also try to become the one of the best coders among high school students to [get admission] into a good university," Weng says. "So our teacher supports us in [studying] computer science, and we take some time on it. "And we have done many contests both online or offline [to] learn."

He practices roughly four hours per day during school, but almost the whole day on weekends. His classmates have a similar work ethic. Cai Ziyi started coding at 12 years old. He says that most student programmers join the Olympiad in Informatics (OI) as an after-school hobby.

The Best Coding Schools In The United States

Zeroing in on the top 25 universities in the U.S., eight schools cracked the top 50 overall. Many of schools listed in our competition are in line with the U.S. News & World Report, except we surfaced a few underdogs. Schools that aren't normally seen in academic rankings, like Ohio State, UC Irvine, and North American University, all ranked in the top 50 worldwide in the HackerRank University Competition.

While the traditional academic rankings, like the U.S. News & World Report, are one indicator of quality of education, it's not the only place to find great coders. Great coders can come from any university in the world. In fact, as the students at San Yat-sen prove, you don't even need a degree to be able to code well.

Note on scoring: To calculate the score of a school in leaderboard, we take all participants from a particular school(M) in descending order of the students' scores and calculate using the formula below. The values for α and β for this leaderboard are 0.8 and 3 respectively.

In order for a school to be listed on the School Leaderboard, the school must have at least 10 students submitting code in University Competition. Students are ranked by score. If two students have the same score, the tie is broken by the time at which the user finishes the first correct submission of the last challenge solved.

This article originally appeared on HackerRank and is reprinted with permission.

Feeling over-connected and overwhelmed? Here are the apps you should get rid of for peace of mind in 2017.

Your smartphone may feel like an extension of your hand, but it can be causing you more grief than joy. It's no surprise why the concept of "digital detoxes" has become so popular; people feel too connected to their technological objects.

If it's not feasible to completely unplug there may be ways to mitigate the feeling of being overloaded. If you want to scale back your digital usage a mass app deletion may be just what you need.

There are numerous reasons why you may want to mass delete some apps. Dr. David Greenfield, an assistant professor of psychiatry and founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction, explains that people get a dopamine reward response basically every time they check their phone. "Our smartphones have basically conditioned us to respond to them on an as needed basis," he says. Thus we've become proverbial slaves to our phones. Greenfield adds that while most people do not have a clinical internet addiction, "a vast majority of us are over-using [our smartphones]."

For Dr. Greenfield, the best way to solve this problem is to get rid of the phone altogether. That's an extreme step for the most extreme cases. But scaling down how often people use their phone is one way to also help. Greenfield didn't recommend specific apps that he thinks are markedly different from others, but he provides some overall examples of the types of apps that suck us in the most.

Read More: My Life Without A Smartphone

Apps That Distract

Social sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram cram our lives with notifications. Every time you get a push alert from your phone there's a part of your brain that has an elevation of dopamine. And you get a second shot of that when you check it. This creates a feedback loop of rewarded digital behavior. Dr. Greenfield compares it to the rush people get when they use a slot machine. If you get rid of these social apps, however, you'll greatly reduce your propensity to crave that kind of digital rush.

Games like Pokémon Go aren't great for you either. Not only do they contribute to compulsive digital use, but they are also a huge battery drain. So any game that has you constantly checking your phone and idly keeping it on should probably be deleted.

More critical is the danger in checking on messaging apps while driving. Greenfield says that the number of people dying in their car while using their smartphone now exceeds those deaths associated with alcohol. To mitigate this issue, people should get rid of their messaging apps that may distract them to text and drive. This includes Facebook's Messenger as well as WhatsApp.

Apps That Drain Your Bank Account

Beyond the health reasons for getting rid of apps, some are also burning a hole in our pockets. If saving money is a goal this coming year, perhaps consider getting rid of some apps.

Shopping apps: Every company now has an app because it's the trendy thing to do. And perhaps you've downloaded one or two of those apps—be it Amazon or specific stores like Home Depot. Deleting them will not only free up space on your phone but will also stop you from making frivolous late-night purchases.

Delivery Apps: The same goes for delivery apps like Seamless and Grubhub, as well as courier ones like Postmates. When it's so easy to access them, you're more likely spend money on them. If you're hungry and it's almost dinner time, not having a delivery food app will likely help push you toward making dinner, which is a much healthier option too.

Apps That Undermine Your Goals

Then, of course, there are the apps you downloaded with good intentions that you just aren't using. There are hundreds of weight loss, personal training, and organizational apps; if you have one or two of them think to yourself, "do I really use this?" Despite the apps' good intentions, it's probably better to accomplish personal goals not on your phone, since then it won't contribute to your technology overload.

Apps That Just Take Up Space

Aside from apps you downloaded with good intentions but never use, consider decluttering your screen by deleting (or if you can't delete moving to a folder) any of the apps the come with your phone like Stocks and Compass. Organizational pros advise clearing your workspace of everything but the most essential objects that you use everyday; you should approach your phone the same way.

For most, the best smartphone goal is to reach what's called "conscious computing." This means you are mindfully using your devices for only the things you need. What people need to remember is that without you even noticing, technology has the propensity to change how you behave. "Technology is not inherently evil but it is very psychoactive," says Dr. Greenfield.

Deleting the above apps can help be more technologically mindful. You may also want to take some time out of your day to specifically not use your phone. If you're in a waiting room, maybe just wait and not check your social feed. Sure it may be boring but according to Greenfield, "boredom is where creativity happens."

Related Video: Follow These Steps To Avoid A Cell Phone Hack

Correction: An earlier version of this post said that Dr. Greenfield is a professor of psychology; he is a professor of psychiatry. We regret the error.

Lorne Michaels shares how he's harnessed his team's "collective intelligence" for over 40 years.

You've been invited to join one of two teams of comedy writers working on a TV show.

The first group, Team A, is composed of exceptionally smart comedians. They're polite and courteous to each other, and they take turns speaking. No one interrupts. When another person veers off topic and starts telling a funny story, a colleague gently reminds him to focus on the script, then steers the conversation back on track. The team is efficient. The meeting ends exactly when scheduled.

The second group, Team B, is evenly divided between successful writers and young comedians who've never worked on a television show before. Teammates jump in and out of the discussion haphazardly. Some ramble, others bring up half-formed ideas. They all talk so much that it's sometimes hard to follow the conversation. When a team member abruptly changes the topic and starts telling a funny story, the rest of the group follows her off the agenda. The meeting doesn't actually end: Everyone sits around and gossips.

Which group will be more successful in putting together the show?

Why Teams Do (And Don't Do) Well Together

In 2008, a group of psychologists from Carnegie Mellon and MIT wondered if they could figure out which kinds of teams were clearly superior. The researchers wanted to know if there is a "collective intelligence" that emerges within a team that's distinct from the smarts of any single member.

So the researchers recruited 699 people, divided them into small groups, and gave each a series of assignments requiring different kinds of cooperation. One assignment, for instance, asked participants to brainstorm possible uses for a brick. Some teams came up with dozens, while others kept describing the same ideas in different words.

Another had the groups plan a shopping trip and gave each teammate a different list of groceries. The only way to maximize the group's score was for each person to sacrifice an item they really wanted for something the team needed. Some groups easily divvied up the buying; others couldn't fill their shopping carts because no one was willing to compromise.

What interested the researchers most was that teams that did well on one assignment usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ''good'' teams from the dysfunctional ones was how teammates treated one another. In other words, the right group norms—those small habits, unwritten rules, and mutually agreed-upon ways of treating one another—could raise a group's collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.

Two Behaviors That The Best Teams Share

But when the researchers reviewed videos of the good teams' interactions, they noticed that not all norms looked alike. "It was striking how different some of them behaved," said Anita Woolley, the study's lead author. "Some teams had a bunch of smart people who figured out how to break up work evenly. Other groups had pretty average members but came up with ways to take advantage of everyone's relative strengths. Some groups had one strong leader. Others were more fluid, and everyone took a leadership role."

First, all the members of the good teams spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as "equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking." In some teams, for instance, everyone spoke during each task. In others, conversation ebbed from assignment to assignment—but by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount.

"As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well," said Woolley. "But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined. The conversations didn't need to be equal every minute, but in aggregate, they had to balance out."

Second, the good teams had "high average social sensitivity"—a fancy way of saying that teammates were skilled at intuiting how members felt based on their tone of voice, how people held themselves and the expressions on their faces. They were good at picking up on non-verbal cues and really listening to what people said—and what they left unsaid—when they were talking.

The Secret To SNL's Longevity

When executive producer Lorne Michaels started Saturday Night Live in 1975, most observers thought the show would bomb. For writers, Michaels had assembled a bunch of comedians who hardly knew each other. Most had never worked on a television show before. They were thin skinned, tended to date each other and break up, and were antisocial and anti-establishment. What's more, the show's writer's room was a competitive place: When one person's skit was put on air, another writer's idea would get cut. Television executives thought it would be a nightmare.

And yet, today, Saturday Night Live is one of the longest-running, most successful shows on television. And if you ask the show's writer and performers why, they'll talk about Lorne Michaels's leadership style. There's something about how he runs team meetings, they'll say, that made everything come together. Michaels himself, still the show's executive producer, says the reason why Saturday Night Live has succeeded is because he abides by two rules: He gives everyone a voice, and he forces people to really listen to each other.

Michaels will often keep a sheet of paper during a meeting, and make a note each time someone speaks—and then won't end the meeting until he forces everyone to talk a roughly equal number of times. And Michaels is almost ostentatious in his demonstrations of social sensitivity—and he expects the cast and writers to mimic him.

During the early years, Michaels was the one who appeared with a soothing word when an exhausted writer was crying in his office. He's been known to interrupt a rehearsal or table-read and quietly take an actor aside to ask if they need to talk about something going on in their personal life. Once, when the writer Michael O'Donoghue was inordinately proud of an obscene commercial parody, Michaels ordered it read at 18 different rehearsals, even though everyone knew the network's censors would never let it on the air.

Michaels says the job of modeling norms is his most important duty. "Everyone who comes through this show is different, and I have to show each of them that I'm treating them different, and show everyone else I'm treating them different, if we want to draw the unique brilliance out of everyone," Michaels told me.

"SNL only works when we have different writing and performing styles all bumping into and meshing with each other," he said. "That's my job: To protect peoples' distinct voices, but also to get them to work together. I want to preserve whatever made each person special before they came to the show, but also help everyone be sensitive enough to make the rough edges fit. That's the only way we can do a new show every week without everyone wanting to kill each other as soon as we're done."

Why The B Team Wins Out

Which brings us back to the question of those two hypothetical comedy-writing teams and which one you'd rather join: the professional and experienced Team A, or the free-flowing, informal Team B.

The answer is that you should opt for Team B. Team A is filled with smart, effective people. They'll all be successful as individuals. But as a team, they still tend to act like individuals. There's little to suggest that, as a group, they become collectively intelligent, because there's little evidence that everyone has an equal voice and that members are sensitive to teammates' emotions and needs.

Team B is a lot messier. People speak over one another, they go on tangents, they socialize instead of remaining focused on the agenda. Everyone speaks as much as they need to, though. They feel equally heard and are attuned to one another's body language and expressions. They try to anticipate how one another will react. Team B may not contain as many individual stars, but when that group unites, the sum is much greater than any of its parts.

"When I see the entire team drawing some kind of inspiration from the same thing, I know everything is working," Michaels said. "At that moment, the whole team is rooting for each other, and each person feels like the star."

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times and the author of Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, a New York Times bestseller and Audible's #1 business audiobook of 2016. Duhigg is also the author of The Power of Habit.

This exercise, which has helped Trump and Clinton supporters see eye to eye, can help you deal with any conflict in your life.

Tensions are running higher than usual these days.

In addition to the everyday disagreements we have with our friends, family, and coworkers, the brutal election over the last year appears to have ripped the country in two, with liberals and conservatives unable to see eye to eye. In addition to everyday arguments at the office about which marketing idea was better or how much to spend on a colleague's baby shower, those on opposite sides of the political divide feel anger, resentment, and animosity toward one another. Heated emotions are bubbling to the surface.

Spencer Greenberg, founder and CEO of Clearer Thinking, a non-partisan organization that conducts research on decision-making and creates free tools for the public, sees our current state of discord as an opportunity to learn to be more empathetic. He's been developing strategies for helping Clinton and Trump supporters to better relate to one another.

Empathy, it is a learned trait. Our ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes to understand how they are thinking or feeling can be developed and trained. According to Daniel Batson, a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas, empathy has been used as a tool in peacekeeping for years. "People have used it to achieve important goals," he says. "It has been used to bring together Palestinian and Israeli leaders. The Helsinki Accords came out of a conflict-resolution workshop that relied on empathy exercises."

At a recent Clearer Thinking event in New York after the election, Greenberg issued a challenges to his audience, which consisted of both Trump and Clinton supporters: Try to state the position from someone from the opposite side of the political divide so accurately and comprehensively that they agree you've captured their view. In fact, you'll know you've succeeded if you can express their position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that they say, "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way."

This is a strategy that was developed by a social psychologist Anatol Rapoport, who made the case that the only way to fruitfully engage with someone who has different beliefs from you is to re-express their beliefs, list points of agreements and things you may have learned from them, then go on to express your position.

At the event, Clinton and Trump voters had the opportunity to write short essays that required them to step in the shoes of someone from the other side and try to see the world from their perspective. Clinton supporters, writing as Trump supporters, included lines like, "I worry what the future will be like for the next generation in the area where I live. If things are going badly, doing more of the same thing is a crazy plan. We need a big change in this country." Conversely, Trump supporters, writing as a Clinton supporters, wrote things like, "Overall, I think it is good that we continue to let many immigrants into our country, as we have been doing for a very long time. Diversity makes our country a better place, and immigrants also benefit from coming here."

Greenberg himself took part in this exercise. As a Democrat, he was writing from the perspective of someone who's supported Trump. "Empathizing with another person does not imply you agree with them, it means you can see why someone in their position with their experiences would feel the way that they feel," he says. "Personally, what I find especially valuable about the process of writing an essay from another person's perspective, is that it pushes you to go beyond merely a dispassionate understanding, towards actual empathy. All too often the opposing side is dehumanized, and empathy is the antidote to dehumanization."

Related: Escape Your Echo Chamber And Understand What Really Makes Trump Supporters Tick

If you are feeling particularly angry with people who voted differently from you or if you feel confused about their motivations, you might want to give the exercise a try. You could then ask someone you know from the other side to read it and provide their thoughts. It would allow you to start a conversation on the right foot, and it also paves the way for you to explain your own position to the other person effectively. "If you can simulate the valid feelings experienced by those on the opposing side, even just for a flickering moment, and even if in the end you still think they are very much mistaken, then you've made progress towards the possibility of beneficial cooperation," Greenberg says.

Batson, the psychology professor, agrees that this exercise can be good for dealing with misunderstandings between people, if misunderstandings are indeed the basis of conflict. However, he points out that there are limits to what exercises like this can accomplish. "It can lead to a clarification of the other person's position," he says. "But someone else's position might be morally questionable. If someone has a truly despicable attitude, for me to know that they have those attitudes doesn't change anything." He points out that if someone else has racist beliefs, you might be able to state their reasoning, but it won't necessarily bridge the gap between you.

For Greenberg, this exercise is particularly helpful in the case of a widespread political divide in the country, because there are clearly reasonable and moral people on both sides of the fence. The goal is to try and empathize with those people.

But the exercise has applications beyond politics. The next time you are experiencing conflict with a coworker, a friend, or a family member, try sitting down and writing down their position in terms they can agree with. At very least, this might make you feel less antipathy toward them, at best, you might be on your way to arriving at a productive compromise you are both happy with.

Your mobile-responsive career site doesn't cut it anymore.

We're days away from 2017, but many companies are still hiring like it's 2010. The entire hiring process—from the way job seekers find listings to the way recruiters reach out to prospects—has evolved quite a bit in the past few years.

Now it's time for every employer to catch up to the times, lest lose the top talent to competitors that beat them to it. These are three factors that, more and more, will make or break a company's recruiting in the year ahead.

1. Mobile First

Mobile internet traffic surpassed web traffic three whole years ago already, in 2014. That shift has now worked its way into the job search, with 77% of job seekers using mobile devices to look for new opportunities.

For employers, mobile-first recruiting is now nonnegotiable. Many are responding by creating mobile-friendly websites and using responsive design to improve the navigation experience on all devices. That's a great start, but it's only part of the solution. Mobile-driven recruitment needs to cover two other bases as well:

Content: Every bit of content you develop in order to draw in talent needs to be written with the expectation it'll be viewed on mobile. This includes your career site copy, job descriptions, blog posts, and any other recruiting collateral. You may have a responsive site, but if you're making job seekers scroll and scroll in order to see your copy, you're likely to lose them.

Technology: Your career site isn't the only thing that needs to be optimized for mobile. Many organizations use an "applicant tracking system" (ATS) as their core recruiting software. Some make the mistake of building a dazzling mobile-optimized career site, only to then direct applicants to an antiquated ATS that isn't not mobile-friendly. If you don't provide an end-to-end mobile application experience, you're leaving weak links in your application chain.

2. Candidate Experience

Have you ever applied to one of your company's job? How long did it take? And how painful was it? Go ahead and try it! This is the simplest audit you can possibly do, and it's one of the first steps in gauging your "candidate experience," or CX, which is now a factor employers can't afford to ignore.

Your goal should simply be to make it as easy as possible for candidates to apply. The less friction (i.e., time) in the application process, the better. If niche talent that rarely "looks" for a job is the focus of your recruiting, yet it takes 20 minutes to complete your application, you're in trouble.

Indeed.com recently audited the application processes of every Fortune 500 company. What did industry-leading companies like Apple, Netflix, and Salesforce have in common? Their job applications each took less than 15 minutes. The median time was 13 minutes. If you find yourself going beyond that, you may be losing applicants.

Another common CX mistake is the dreaded "black hole," where job seekers never actually learn whether and at what point they're taken out of the running. It's an all-too-common result of recruiting workflows built for speed and scale that lack basic empathy, but there are real costs to this—and they're rising. Social media and sites like Glassdoor make it easy for frustrated candidates to amplify their negative interview experiences, which can swiftly damage an employer's reputation and turn prospects away.

A poor hiring experience can cost your organization more than just talent, though—it can mean lost revenue. In many cases, job candidates are also customers. Virgin Media recently linked negative candidate experience to lost customers (and revenue), and found that its poor hiring practices cost the company approximately £5.3 million per year.

3. Employer Brand

Today's job seekers have a broad range of tools to research companies, cultures, and individuals. That means every company has an employer brand, whether they choose to shape it or not.

According to LinkedIn's 2016 Global Talent Trends report, 62% of global recruiting leaders cite employer branding as their top priority. Despite this, many companies aren't taking an active enough role in shaping their own images as employers. Companies that fail to do that proactively and compellingly may be losing candidates they don't even know about—those who, after researching the company and finding no compelling reason to apply, look elsewhere for work.

Effective employer branding starts with your employees. You don't need to have a dedicated employer brand team or a massive budget to influence your employer brand, but you do need to provide your employees with some guidance (and permission) to share their employee experience. Those authentic stories can help you make an impression with candidates before they've applied, and influence their decision to pursue your company.

All you really need to do is give your employees guidance and some resources on how to share what it's like to work for you on social media and within their own networks. Launch a blog that makes it easy for your current staff to tell their stories. And let them be honest. The candidates that that level of honesty may cost you are likely the ones who wouldn't mesh with your culture anyway.

If you can make the investment, do some research to find out what social platforms your ideal hires are most likely to use and begin building a presence there. Another thing your company can do is draw up an "employer value proposition," a short document outlining what you promise to deliver to current and future employees. This way you'll have some clear criteria to hold yourself—and your hiring process—accountable to.

The truth is that the pitfalls in recruiting will only pile up the longer you wait. It's time to meet job seekers where they already are—and on the terms with which they're already weighing new opportunities.

Lars Schmidt is the founder of Amplify Talent, a recruiting and branding agency that helps companies like Hootsuite, NPR, and SpaceX reimagine the intersection of culture, talent, and brand. He's also the cofounder of the HR Open Source initiative. Connect with Lars on Twitter @Lars.

By 2018, World View may be offering mere mortals the chance to get a life-changing view of the Earth from space.

Something inside you fundamentally changes when you glimpse the Earth from outer space.

Not many people have had this privilege. In the history of mankind, only 558 human beings have seen our planet from this vantage point. But those who have say that seeing the Earth as nothing more than a tiny blue speck hovering in the ether is life-altering. Take it from Ron Garan, who logged more than 178 days 71 million miles above the Earth as a crew member on the International Space Station.

"I got into this routine where I would say goodnight to the Earth before I went to bed," he tells me. "I would float over to the cupola [the window at the bottom of the space station] and gaze back at our planet. A lot of things that seem so important on Earth dwarf into insignificance from up there. The possibilities from space seem so much clearer: You're hit with the realization that we don't have to accept things the way they are. We can move beyond the status quo."

Looking at the world from this perspective has spurred astronauts towards faith, social justice, and peacemaking—a cognitive shift that has been described as "the overview effect." Charlie Duke and Jim Irwin, for instance, became fervent Christians. Russell Schweickart started practicing transcendental meditation. John Glenn, who recently passed away, pursued a career in public service as a senator after his years at NASA. Garan wrote a book about global collaboration to ensure a better future for the planet.

But what would happen if more people had access to this view? Would the world be a better place? Would the fragility of the Earth, when compared to the vastness of the universe, inspire people to work together toward common goals? Garan believes so. "The more people who experience this, the better off those of us on the surface of the Earth are going to be," he says.

He's now working to turn this vision into reality by joining a startup called World View in the role of chief pilot. The company is building enormous balloons that will gently float more than 100,000 feet into the atmosphere, ferrying people upward so they can take in the vista without special training. World View is currently in the final stages of testing its technology, and while it doesn't yet have a fixed date for its first passenger flights into space, people close to the company say that it should be ready for prime time by 2018. Dozens of customers have already reserved seats and are willing to pay top dollar for the privilege: Early bird tickets cost $75,000.

Why Balloons?

World View is the brainchild of Jane Poynter and Taber MacCallum, who spent two years together in the early '90s in Biosphere 2, an enclosed artificial world meant to simulate the process of creating a self-sustaining habitant on another planet. They've collaborated on a range of projects over the last two decades, but in 2011, as the private space industry gathered steam, they decided to start a business focused on getting spacecraft into the stratosphere. "There are lots of aircraft low in the atmosphere and lots of satellites very high in the atmosphere," MacCallum, World View's CTO, explains. "There was this green field in the middle."

After doing consumer surveys to better understand the space tourism market, World View found that people weren't keen on rockets because they seem scary, unsafe, and likely to cause motion sickness. Moreover, rockets go from the Earth to outer space in approximately four minutes, rushing through the best part of the journey: the view. High-altitude balloons were more appropriate for the space tourists—especially if they could go up with a cocktail in hand.

Over the last three years, the company has been raising capital to build the technology to make the balloon flight happen. In April this year, they closed a Series B round of $15 million led by Canaan Partners.

To bring people and equipment to the stratosphere, World View is taking a very old technology—the stratospheric balloon, first developed in the 1950s—and modernizing it. During the Cold War, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. focused all of their energies on developing rockets to stay ahead in the space race. Balloons, by comparison, seemed limited in capabilities and difficult to manipulate. "We realized that nobody had taken modern technology and applied it to stratospheric ballooning," MacCallum says. "We're talking about Tesla batteries, 3D printing, modern computation, and electronics. With these technologies, we're learning to do things, like very precisely changing our altitude in a balloon."

When they started the project, they wanted to build on ballooning equipment from the last century, but struggled to find any. After much digging, they discovered that the Indian government had continued to produce high-quality old-fashioned balloons. In 2015, World View invited these Indian experts to collaborate on developing the next generation of ballooning tech. "We had to go online to people's eBay junk stores to find plastic sealers from the 1950s because those were the only ones [the Indian consultants] knew how to use," MacCallum says. "We were searching for these sealers everywhere and refurbishing them. Now we're using computer-controlled, automated sealers, but we had to start where the technology was at."

Space Tourism, Minus The Bumpy Liftoff

World View's space tourism vehicle is called Voyager. Equipped with the latest technological advances, the balloons gently ascend into near space, up to 100,00 feet above the Earth.

Poynter, who is now World View's CEO, envisions that this journey will be a relaxing, luxurious experience. You, along with a dozen other passengers and crew, will get into an enclosed Wi-Fi-enabled capsule before dawn, receive your beverage of choice from a fully stocked bar, then lift off in the darkness until you get to the top of the atmosphere. There will be no turbulence and no nauseating g-forces to deal with. From the large windows on every side, you will have a clear view of the starscape above, free of light pollution. For about two hours, you will be able to watch as the sun comes up from behind the Earth.

"You get to see the sunrise in real time from space, which almost no one has ever seen," Poytner says. "Astronauts don't see a true sunrise because they are circling the earth every 90 minutes. One minute the sun is behind the Earth and the next minute it's gone. You get a sense of our place in the solar system in a way that is very unique." The daylong experience of viewing the Earth from space is carefully calibrated to create the life-changing cognitive shift that, until now, only certain astronauts experience.

Initially, the trip will cost $75,000 per person, although over time, prices are expected to come down. In comparison, a Virgin Galactic trip costs $250,000 for several days of travel aboard a jet aircraft. World View will be pitching the Voyager as a luxury tourism experience to people who are used to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a golf trip or a lavish family getaway. MacCallum believes that the comparatively lower price point, coupled with the fact that the journey is far less physically grueling than flying in a rocket, will appeal to a greater number of potential passengers and help the company scale.

Limitless Applications

But Poynter and MacCallum are thinking way beyond the tourism industry. The commercial applications of the technology could be far more lucrative than taking visitors up into the sky.

Even as World View develops the Voyager, it is building a range of unmanned balloons, called Stratollites, that will ascend up to 150,000 feet. These devices can be manipulated so that they stay in one specific location or travel vast distances, and can carry up to 4,500 kg in commercial payloads that could include sensors, telescopes, and communication devices. Unlike rockets, they can launch rapidly on demand and return payloads back to Earth safely.

Stratollites can be used for a wide range of possible applications, from collecting better weather data to capturing higher-resolution images of the Earth to setting up more accurate communications systems for internet delivery or disaster recovery. MacCallum explains that the unique benefit of the Stratollite is that it can stay in one location for an extended period of time, unlike satellites, which circle the planet. And because Stratollites are closer to the Earth, they can take images in much higher resolution.

While a satellite might take a picture of a city every few days from orbit, a balloon can stay above that city for days or months, identifying the minute-by-minute traffic patterns in that location. This information could be valuable to city planners or delivery companies like UPS or FedEx. "We're offering persistence over a particular location," MacCallum says. "It's like having your own personal satellite that hovers over one spot with the instruments that you're interested in putting there."

The other important factor is financial. Geostationary satellites cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and launching and operating mass orbiting satellites can add tens of millions more. World View's executives declined to give specific figures, but say that Stratollites will cost significantly less than other technologies.

World View says that it has a slew of orders coming in from the Department of Defense, NASA, and private companies, including those in the communications and meteorological industries. Stratollites are already flying on a regular basis, and the data they are collecting are helping World View tailor the technology to specific applications and refine it for the Voyager system.

"The goals on both sides of the business are to change the world," says Garan. "The applications of the Stratollite can help improve life on the planet, whether that's providing internet access to impoverished parts of the world, better climate modeling to more accurately predict the weather, quicker disaster response such as forest fire detection—the list goes on. Because we are making it affordable, countries that could not afford these capabilities before can now afford them."

In other words, another giant leap for mankind.