New research finds that the best road to career success is to understand corporate culture but not be a slave to fitting in.
If you've ever wondered whether it's better to fit in or stand out at work when you're gunning for recognition or advancement, new research indicates that it may be best to do a little of both.
To figure out to what extent trying to fit in is tied to future success, the researchers created an algorithm that analyzed the language used in more than 10 million internal email messages exchanged over five years by 601 employees in a tech firm. They then compared that to who got promoted, who quit, and who got fired.
The researchers examined whether or not a person was using the same language and communication style as their colleagues in their emails, indicators of whether they were fitting in or standing out. For example, the researchers looked at how colleagues talked about personal matters or whether or not they swore. "People who fit in culturally learned to understand and match the linguistic norms followed by their colleagues," said one of the study's researchers in an interview.
As employees of a tech company that prizes innovation, it was easy to see who was more likely to come up with novel ideas and who had access to valuable new information. Disembedded actors might be standouts and more likely to come up with an innovative idea, but without conforming to a group, those ideas were more likely to be dismissed or not trusted.
On the other hand, doubly embedded employees who both fit in and were members of a larger network find it challenging to bring their new ideas to the table. The researchers also found that workers in this group were over three times more likely to be fired than those among the integrated nonconformists.
Those most likely to succeed were the assimilated brokers and the integrated nonconformists, suggesting that the tightly knit networks helped those who went against the company culture grain as well as those who conformed to it. In particular, the assimilated brokers were able to get ahead because they were able to understand and fit into the culture and could move between different groups in the company with ease.
The takeaway is clear: Fitting in isn't always a way to get ahead, but it's necessary to be able to in order to work effectively with different teams across the entire organization. The key is learning to find a way to do both.
The clock is now the closest it's been to midnight since the 1950s, with scientists citing "alternative facts" and threat of nuclear arms.
In a series of statements alluding to President Donald Trump's fiery rhetoric, experts from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock forward to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight on Thursday. They also cited the threat of nuclear arms and climate change, as well as a rise in nationalism and a disregard among political leaders for scientific facts. The clock is now the closest it's been to midnight—symbolizing, essentially, human extinction—since the 1950s, during the early Cold War.
"The current political situation in the United States is of particular concern," said David Titley, a member of the Bulletin's Science and Security Board and founding director of Pennsylvania State University's Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk, in a press conference announcing the change.
Titley called upon the Trump administration to acknowledge the human role in warming the planet and emphasized the need to reduce carbon emissions.
"Climate change should not be a partisan, political issue—the well-established physics of the earth are neither liberal nor conservative in character," he said. "Alternative facts will not make the challenges of climate change magically go away."
The reference to "alternative facts" was an allusion to a phrase Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway used to defend disputed claims about the size of the crowd at Trump's inauguration and has come to symbolize the new administration's tendency to embrace questionable, or outright false, claims. It wasn't the only reference at the Doomsday Clock press conference to the new U.S. president, as Rachel Bronson, executive director and publisher of the Bulletin, cited other concerns beyond the particular details of nuclear buildup and greenhouse gas emissions.
"The first has been the cavalier and reckless language used across the globe, especially in the United States, during the presidential election and after, around nuclear weapons and nuclear threats," she said. "The second has been a growing disregard of scientific expertise."
The clock, first created in 1947 to highlight the risks of the Cold War-era nuclear arms race, had previously been set to three minutes to midnight in 2015. Back in the 1950s, during a particularly tense moment in the Cold War, when the United States and Soviet Union both developed and tested the hydrogen bomb, the Bulletin set the clock to just two minutes from midnight. The clock was furthest from midnight, set to 17 minutes before the hour, in 1991, as Cold War tensions eased and the U.S. and Russia made progress on arms reduction.
"The Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than it's ever been in the lifetime of almost everyone in this room," said Lawrence Krauss, chair of the journal's board of sponsors and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University.
Speakers from the Bulletin also pointed to efforts by the United States and Russia to modernize their nuclear arsenals, as well as nuclear developments in other nations like North Korea, India, and Pakistan and Trump's suggestion during the presidential election that South Korea and Japan might consider developing their own atomic weapons.
"Saber rattling and loose but dangerous rhetoric have become almost commonplace," said Rachel Bronson.
The publication, which was founded in 1945 by scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project that developed the initial atomic bomb and said they "could not remain aloof to the consequences of their work," also pointed to rising threats from cyberattacks and biological warfare.
While computer hacking is not a new development, its role in undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the results of the recent election is, warned Krauss. And while new gene editing technologies like the tool known as CRISPR may help cure disease, they may also make it easier for even relatively unsophisticated attackers to unleash biological attacks, he said.
"Technological innovation is occurring at a speed that challenges society's ability to keep pace, even as many citizens lose faith in the institutions upon which they must rely to make scientific innovation work for them rather than against them," said Krauss.
With the press conference streamed through the Bulletin's website and on Facebook Live, Krauss called upon individual viewers to urge political leaders to address the problems of the day.
"We chose the Doomsday Clock 70 years ago, because we feel it allows us a rare opportunity to reach the global public directly with an enduring icon and to raise the profile of urgent, global, existential threats that the public needs to be aware of to act responsibly," Krauss said. "The future of the clock, and our future, is in your hands."
If you've already abandoned those lofty goals, it's time to dust yourself off and have another go at them.
Sometime in late January or early February, you start to see the signs. The gym begins to clear out. Your colleagues are back to cheeseburgers instead of salads for lunch. And that time you and your office pals carved out for personal development or acquiring a new skill keeps getting pushed back on the calendar.
But what if those big goals weren't dead in the water after all? What if we could recommit to them, but do so in a way that makes us more likely to succeed?
It's possible, says Steve Farber, president of Extreme Leadership, Inc. and author of The Radical Leap: A Personal Lesson in Extreme Leadership, and other books. With a little self-reflection and some attention to setting yourself up for success, you can get back on track to make those resolutions a reality. Follow this six-step plan.
Look at why you set the resolution in the first place, Farber says. Ask yourself, "Is this intrinsically motivating or am I doing it because I feel I have to?" It's important to be honest here. When you set a goal and are driven by an authentic reason that you want to accomplish it, that combination can keep you doing the things you need to do for success, he says.
But don't get too comfortable. Growth happens when you're just outside your comfort zone, Parris says. Make the steps manageable, but not so easy that you're wasting time not doing more.
Farber says that one of the best things you can do to get back on track is to get help doing so. Whether you need a coach or mentor to keep you accountable, or you simply need a friend who can give you a pep talk and a bit of motivation, think about what assistance will help you move toward your goals.
"Resolutions, goals, vision, anything that's future-oriented, we tend to think of as a lonely venture, that it's up to me to do this by myself. It's a good time to stop and ask who it is that I can reach out to for help, for support, for guidance, for resources, for coaching, for encouragement, and realize that not only do I not have to tackle this alone, but I shouldn't," he says. Be sure to tap your own network as well as look for external help. Farber says we often overlook people we know who can give help and inspiration.
All of the introspection and help in the world isn't going to work if you don't make the time to accomplish your goals, says executive coach Alexandra I. Levin, cofounder of The Back Forty, a coaching organization that helps people make changes in their lives. However, this can't just be the leftover time that you have after everything else gets done. You've got to prioritize the time you need and treat it as non-negotiable, she says.
If you've stumbled after telling people about your goals, you may also be dealing with feelings of embarrassment and shame. Those aren't helpful, but it's important to not just ignore them, either, Farber says. Find a friend, coach, or counselor with whom you're comfortable being honest. And don't let other peoples' opinions stand in the way of moving toward your goals.
Once you're making progress again, set smaller interim goals or observe milestones, and celebrate them when you reach them. Keeping motivated along the way will help you keep up momentum, she says.
Think of it as renegotiating, not as going back on your word, and you'll make the right choice every time.
Here's a dirty little career secret you won't hear often: It's always okay to change your mind. Let that "always" sink in—this way you'll remember it the next time you find yourself in a tricky situation where backing out may feel like burning a bridge, damaging your credibility, or worse. Chances are that in the long run, changing your mind amounts to none of those things—just as long as you go about it the right way.
It's decision time, and you're anxious. You're afraid you'll make the wrong choice. Or worried that once you commit, it's important to stick it out no matter what, lest you risk looking fickle or like you're not a team player. In some cases, career coaches will even tell you that follow-through is important for demonstrating commitment and integrity in the future—that you need to have a proven track record of making up your mind and seeing things through once you have.
Well, in my experience, what's really important is the experience. First—yes—commit, and then adjust to what you've committed to, even if that ultimately means changing your mind. It's your life and career after all. If you've made a wrong move, add it to your list of worthwhile experiences and move on.
Trust me: This problem arises at every stage of people's careers, and as a coach I've seen them all. When you're right out of college, it's natural to feel like you have limited choices and even less leverage. The feeling that you need to take––and stick with––an immediate opportunity can be difficult to counter. That was my own experience, after all. Later, once you've built up a career, you might get excited about a new opportunity but not see it for what it is, then feel afraid to admit that you've made a mistake.
No matter what, it's always fine to reverse course, even if you wind up letting some people down. There are ways to contain the damage and save face, but the main thing is to get straight on your own priorities, then move forward accordingly. It isn't easy. It's still something I have to remind myself nearly every day after all these years.
The way you go about changing your mind in even the toughest professional situations is always basically the same:
List all your options—even the least appealing ones and the ones that seem like distant possibilities.
Talk it out, preferably with a colleague you trust or a coach who can offer some battle-tested perspective.
Communicate the change of mind you've had as politely and definitively as possible, then just enjoy the ride that follows, including the bumps.
Cindy, a coaching client of mine (she's one of three whose experiences I'll recount in this story; I've changed their names and some details for privacy), was in design school and had previously been a model. When she got an internship offer for an apparel design role, it initially seemed like a perfect fit.
In the interview, the firm's owner breezed through her portfolio and offered her the position on the spot. Cindy stammered a yes as he promised to share more details by email. Cindy pretty much did fist pumps all the way home.
Now, you might think that was a rookie move, and maybe it was, but in the heat of the moment, decisions like these are easy to make and happen more often than you'd think. Needless to say, when she received them from the hiring manager, those promised details were devilish, particularly the part that read ". . . and the internship pays [insert insultingly low hourly wage here]."
"That's half what my classmates make!" thought Cindy. She tried to negotiate, but the owner wouldn't budge. Cindy now had a choice. She could:
Decline.
Swallow her pride, cut her personal budget, and take the internship, hoping it would be worthwhile experience anyway.
Take the internship and look for something better—fast.
Ultimately, Cindy declined. It was a tough decision, nearly a heartbreak, not to mention awkward to roll back her acceptance. But she ultimately learned to slow down in interviews and get all the information before making a decision. That experience was lastingly valuable, but despite the unpleasantness of the whole mishap, Cindy did one thing perfectly right: She approached the change of heart as a renegotiation—which, after all, it was.
Robert sold everything he owned and hit Silicon Valley armed with a decade's experience in corporate research. The stable paycheck had been great, but he was ready to take his chances on a startup. He was hoping for a jackpot.
At first, Robert's interviews went well, especially with a founder who described her vision in world-changing, passionate terms. Sure, she had far to go, but she was thinking big, and that resonated with Robert. He accepted an offer and quickly dived into the work. Okay, so it wasn't the research he'd longed for, but working for a startup meant wearing many hats, right? And grunt work. Lots of it, it turned out.
It was a nightmare. Robert's personal pep talks worked for about six months, and then he gave up. Whether he'd been lied to or he just wasn't ready for the grind wasn't the point—it just wasn't working out. This wasn't what he'd moved to Silicon Valley for. The only thing was that he didn't have a backup plan. He faced a choice:
Stick it out and pray for improvement.
Use his tiny new network to find a better gig—maybe—in one of the most competitive job markets back home.
Bail and go home.
Those were his options, which Robert wisely enumerated and shared with friends and family. Ultimately, he chose to stick it out for a year all told—an eternity in startup land. Then he headed home and launched a startup incubator in his hometown. It wasn't so much that Robert had to renegotiate with the founder whose team he'd joined; it was actually a bit tougher. He needed to renegotiate with himself: what his career goals actually amounted to and the best ways to achieve them.
With five years of work experience under her belt, Sara was ready for a change. So she polished her resume and discreetly began to interview. Soon she had two offers: one with a small firm doing pro bono and community work, and the second with a global giant—let's call it Ginormous, Inc. She loved the small firm, but Ginormous offered twice as much, plus a fat signing bonus that would land in her checking account right away. Sara couldn't resist, took the big offer, set a start date, and promptly spent the bonus.
But days went by and Sara kept remembering the smaller firm. Its work was meaningful; it touched her heart. She'd met with the founders, not some guy in HR. Every day she became more convinced she'd be happier there, even if she'd have to accept being a little (okay, a lot) poorer. But how could she tell Ginormous so soon after accepting? And what about that bonus?
Here's how Sara's options stacked up, and there weren't many of them:
Keep her Ginormous commitment and try to forget about the offer she'd passed up.
Ditch her big new corporate employer, probably by disappointing some people, join the small firm, and figure out how to pay back the bonus.
Ultimately, Sara followed her passion. She told the small firm she was still very interested in the role, as long as it was still open (it was) and explained her predicament. Together they negotiated a salary that included the bonus amount. She declined the Ginormous offer that she'd previously accepted, and quickly paid them back.
As all three of these experiences show, you always have options even when it may seem like you don't. You can renegotiate anything at any time—you just have to approach it that way. Yes, there will be consequences. But you'll find that time after time, colleagues and employers have all worked through similar dilemmas. Some people will be disappointed and may even think less of you than they did before, but that's not a contingency you can always control; more than that, it's no reason to continue down a career path that doesn't suit you.
Life often turns out differently than we envision. It's the experiences along the way that are the important part. Those experiences shape your character no matter which way you slice it. Never hesitate to sit back down at the table, no matter how long it's been since you shook hands and pushed your chairs away.
Ted Leonhardt is a designer and illustrator, and former global creative director of FITCH Worldwide. His specialized approach to negotiation helps creative workers build on their strengths and own their value in the marketplace. Follow Ted on Twitter at @tedleonhardt.
The company famous for email campaigns wants to be a one-stop shop for online marketing.
While MailChimp has made its name as an email marketing tool, the Atlanta company is branching out into other areas of digital advertising, starting with a feature launched on Thursday that lets customers buy and manage Facebook ads through the platform.
That means that MailChimp's 15 million users—many of them small e-commerce businesses using the service to communicate with their own customers—will also be able to reach audiences through Facebook without having to separately log in to the social networking site to manage and track ad campaigns.
"If you use Facebook's web interface, it's actually kind of difficult," says MailChimp CEO Ben Chestnut. "We take away a lot of the steps, a lot of the minutiae, that Facebook has in its interface."
In the future, the company plans to add integrations with other ad systems, likely including other social networks and search engines, Chestnut says. The move is part of a broader push by MailChimp to provide easy-to-use marketing tools particularly aimed at small online businesses.
MailChimp has even done some early testing of postal mail integration, contemplating features like physical postcards with discount codes linked to email campaigns, he says.
"One day down the road you might see people using MailChimp to build direct-mail campaigns," Chestnut says.
MailChimp worked with Facebook in order to develop the feature, which will let users target ad campaigns based on their existing MailChimp email lists or to audiences developed within the Facebook platform. It will also allow businesses to use Facebook's "lookalike" audience feature to reach Facebook users similar to their existing customer base.
Once customers do pick their target Facebook audiences, they can craft ads to bring users to their home pages or—if they're one of the e-commerce businesses that represent about 46% of MailChimp's revenue—highlight particular products or encourage them to sign up for MailChimp-powered emails highlighting future offers.
Some customers had previously approached MailChimp to ask if the company was able to sell lists of email marketing leads, which isn't possible given anti-spam laws and industry conventions. But by using social media marketing tools, companies are able to reach new potential users and have a shot at convincing them to register to receive marketing emails, Chestnut says.
"We've been in beta since mid-November, and we're seeing customers use it for everything," says Chestnut. Testers include some existing Facebook advertisers who have now mostly migrated away from Facebook's own marketing interface. The system integrates with popular online store software, letting customers closely track how the ads they place impact sales, he says.
MailChimp doesn't intend to charge extra for the Facebook integration, with any money spent on Facebook ads going straight to the social networking company. But Chestnut points out that success on Facebook can lead to businesses expanding their mailing lists and signing up for larger-capacity MailChimp plans.
And moving forward, in addition to adding integrations with new advertising platforms, the company plans to further explore how its existing service can be more closely tied in with other marketing avenues, such as sending emails to customers who responded to particular Facebook ads.
"We're adding this whole new channel, which is a big deal to us, but what's really going to be interesting is interweaving new channels with email," Chestnut says.
But why do some outside CEOs fail at their new companies while others succeed?
Researchers at Arizona State University wanted to see if board diversity played a role in a new outside CEO's success. ASU's research team studied 188 cases where an executive was brought in to lead a Fortune 500 company between 1994 and 2007. Each of those companies' boards were assessed for seven diversity factors including education level, functional area of expertise, industry background, and whether there was any members with an Ivy League background.
The research revealed that when the new board is more diverse than the leader's former one, the CEO did not always meet success expectations. According to the study, a CEO had only a 3.6% greater chance of leaving the new company within three years if the diversity measures were about the same between former and current boards. And the odds that a board member will resign were only 6.9% higher when the diversity measures were about the same between the CEO's present and previous boards.
Therefore, the researchers concluded that managing diverse teams is a necessary skill to succeed as an incoming CEO. They recommend developing that strength by both reporting to diverse teams and working on cross-functional ones, as well as serving on a more diverse board themselves.
The reason brainstorms devolve into groupthink has to do with the way memory works. Here's how to get around that.
You're probably brainstorming all wrong. Chances are you're using some form of the rules that were initially devised by the adman Alex Osborn that started in the 1950s. His process sounds intuitively reasonable: Get a bunch of people together. Have them throw out ideas without worrying about constraints. Don't criticize the ideas, just build on them. Don't worry about how strange the ideas are, just come up with as many as you can.
The problem with these rules for brainstorming is simple: They frankly don't work. We know now a good deal more about human psychology and brain science than Osborn did, but we're still brainstorming as though we don't. Many studies over the years have actually documented a productivity loss from his method of brainstorming. Groups that follow Osborn's rules come up with fewer ideas—and fewer good ideas—than the same number of people working alone.
Who's at fault here? Actually, it isn't poor Osborn, who was doing the best with what he knew (or thought he knew) about how teams work. The real culprit, simply put, is other people.
A big reason for this failure comes from the nature of group interaction itself. The first person to say something in the group is most often the biggest extrovert in the room (or perhaps the biggest narcissist). Regardless of who they are, though, the idea thrown out by that first person acts a little like a contaminant; it influences the working memory of everyone else in the group from that point forward.
That's because as soon as you hear an idea, it serves as a retrieval cue. It automatically reaches into your memory and starts to pull out information related to that idea. By the time a few people have thrown out ideas, the entire group is now thinking about the problem in just about the same way. As a result, groups explore an ever narrower range of potential ideas than individuals who work alone.
But that doesn't mean all group idea generation is totally doomed. There's actually a pretty straightforward way to think about brainstorming that gets around the way our memory operates. First, the group needs to think divergently—they need to come up with as many different possibilities as they can. Second, the group needs to converge on a few ideas that it wants to pursue.
When people work alone, they tend to diverge in their thinking, because each person follows his or her own train of thought about the issue. When groups work together, they tend to converge in their thinking, because the discussion leads everyone to think about the problem in a similar way. That points to a pretty easy fix for the traditional brainstorm.
At the early stages, you want to produce as many different options as possible. That means you want people to work alone so that each person thinks about the problem in ways that aren't contaminating the ideas of others.
One really simple way to do that is to send around a statement of the problem you're trying to solve, and to get everyone to send you (as group leader) at least three different options for solving it.
The way a lot of brainstorming sessions tend to work instead, the group leader simply sends around a memo or agenda before the group gets together, outlining the issue at hand but not actually demanding independent work before the team convenes. But without these solo brainstorms first, groupthink is basically inevitable.
It's only after those independent ideas are generated that the group leader should collect them and send them around to the entire group. But it's not time to put your heads together yet. Still working alone, group members should look at each idea and build on it. This way, each person is still taking their own distinct approach to the variety of ideas generated by other people.
If this sounds like a lot of work, it doesn't actually have to be. In fact, it can make your brainstorm much less mentally taxing than most tend to be. One option at this stage is to send each person two to three ideas generated by somebody else, then ask them to build on just those ideas—everyone in the group doesn't have to add something new to the ideas of everyone else in the group. Then collect the results and, if you need to, take a break.
The most productive brainstorms can take place in short bursts like this—they don't need to turn in marathons. Ultimately, though, you will want to keep circulating the ideas to other group members (ideally in manageable chunks) until everyone's had a chance to see and build on all of them. Another benefit of taking your time and breaking this part of the process is that you can give people a chance to spend real time on each idea—before tossing a single one out. Plus, this way everybody gets to see both the ideas their peers have come up with as well as some of the ways they've been built up and elaborated on by others.
Now it's time to finally get the group together. At this stage, you'll have a lot of material to get through, so it's helpful to continue your "small bites" approach: Converge on just a handful of the ideas that you've had everybody work on independently. Bring each one up for discussion, and give people a chance to combine some of the ideas that were generated. Ultimately, you want to find a few ideas that seem like good candidates for implementing.
Unlike traditional brainstorming, idea generation techniques that use this structure tend to work well. Groups whose members work alone when they need to diverge, and together when they need to converge, generate more ideas and better ideas than people who only work alone.
Of course, a technique like this is time consuming—much more so than a standard-issue, Osborn-inspired brainstorm. So you should only use it for the types of projects that really require your whole team's effort. Even if you don't want to spend this much time on a given problem, you should still get your group members to generate an initial set of ideas individually before bringing everyone together for a discussion.
It's the only way to prevent a group from swiftly bulldozing a host of other options it might have considered, and driving itself into a corner. Instead, you can benefit from turning over a range of possibilities in your teammates' minds. If brainstorms are about thinking, after all, then this is the most thoughtful approach.
"Most of us have no problem with being busy, but we're often busy on the wrong things," says Angie Morgan, coauthor of Spark: How to Lead Yourself and Others to Greater Success. "You could spend nine to five just emailing, but that's not driving results or moving you toward longer, bigger goals. When people say, 'I'm so busy,' it really means, 'I'm a poor planner,' or, 'I don't know how to prioritize or delegate.'"
People treat being busy as a badge of honor, but it could be damaging your career and organization, says Renee Cullinan, cofounder of the management and work-practices consulting firm Stop Meeting Like This. "Busywork has a double negative impact," she says. "It consumes time that could be better spent on other things, and it drains energy. Longer term, it breeds a work culture that values activity over results and busyness over effectiveness."
To avoid letting busywork consume your day, you first have to identify it. Morgan suggests looking at your job description and organization's objectives. "Work that is connected to those things should have a meaningful outcome," she says.
Cullinan says busywork often fits one of these three scenarios:
You don't know why you're doing what you're doing.
The effort seems disproportionately high compared to the results, such as polishing an internal PowerPoint presentation for the tenth time.
The team is running in place, with long "reply all" chains, boring status meetings, or missed deadlines.
One reason we can become consumed with busywork is because it's easier, says Morgan. "Work that has more meaning is often intellectually challenging work, she says. "It can be harder, but after pouring two hours into it you're going to feel good."
Always tie your work and tasks to clear business priorities, says Lori Scherwin, founder of the career-consulting firm Strategize That. "When other work pops up, ask yourself how it fits into producing one of those goals," she says. "If it doesn't, it likely falls into the category of busywork and gives you a reasonable basis to push back on doing it," she says.
But don't push back without seeking clarity first, adds Morgan. "Rather than going to your manager and saying, 'This is crap and not the best use of my time,' get some insight as to why it's important," she says. "You may not see the direct value, but that doesn't always mean it doesn't exist."
Cullinan suggests talking to your manager about how your key goals and deliverables compare to how you spend your time. "Ask, 'Can you coach me on what actions I can take to optimize how I use my time?'" she says.
And if the problem is related to daily work practices, try to reduce the amount of busywork you have by only attending meetings if your role is clear or asking to attend the relevant part of a meeting, suggests Cullinan. Also, reduce email busywork by avoiding sending messages that neither advance the dialogue nor produce a specific action, and by removing yourself from lists or subscriptions that aren't applicable to your job.
Unfortunately, some busywork will eventually need to be completed. Keep a "wait list," suggests Scherwin. "You likely run into daily situations where you are waiting; meetings run over, calls start late, people dawdle in," she says. "How much time are you wasting? Possibly up to several hours a week."
Prepare a list of small but important tasks you can do in five- to 10-minute intervals to keep you on track, such as catching up on reading, emails, or scheduling. "You'll get through these busywork tasks during the day, rather than having them pile up at the end of the day, and thank yourself for finally getting out of work on time," says Scherwin.
Reducing or eliminating busywork requires some cultural nuance, says Cullinan. "One person's definition of busywork may be someone else's definition of perfection or collaboration," she says. "If you think your actions could be misinterpreted, proactively communicate your intent, or consult someone in the organization who is particularly good at making great use of her time."
Sesame Street bravely goes where other kids' media companies don't, and tackles issues like AIDS, autism, and incarceration.
When I watched Sesame Street as a child, I remember it being loads of fun. Oscar the Grouch cracked me up. I loved how Big Bird could never quite get anybody else to see Mr. Snuffleupagus. I found the Count downright weird.
But interspersed with the silliness and alphabet learning, the show also tackled difficult issues. Take, for instance, when the actor who played the shopkeeper Mr. Hooper died in 1982. Sesame Street chose to address his death head-on. When Big Bird asks the grownups on the show where he went, they don't mince words: They explain that he is gone forever, but it will be okay. This was a brave plot decision for a show that targets preschoolers.
"Sesame Street has always been real-world," says Sherrie Westin, EVP of global impact and philanthropy at Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization that produces the show. "It's not a fantasy, it's not a fairy tale. One of the things that sets us apart is respecting children and dealing with real-world issues from a child's perspective."
Over the last few decades Sesame Street has expanded its global reach with programming in more than 150 countries including Afghanistan, China, and Bangladesh. But the organization has also deepened its commitment to helping children cope with a wide array of issues. "When we started in 1969, we were taking the newest technology at the time—TV—and using it to help level the playing field when it came to early childhood education," says Steve Youngwood, Sesame Workshop's COO. "What has evolved is that we've figured out how to get more targeted. We're still about school readiness, but we're also about life readiness."
Local experts identify the most important issues that kids are dealing with in each market. They then find ways for Sesame Street characters to help shepherd children through challenging situations. This led to the creation of Kami, an HIV-positive muppet who appears in South Africa and Nigeria. And Zari, a muppet in the Afghan version of the show, who wears both a hijab and a school uniform. In the U.S., a muppet named Lily explains that she does not always have enough food and must go to the food pantry with her family, and Alex is a muppet whose father is in prison, and that makes him feel sad, angry, and ashamed.
Sesame Workshop pours enormous resources into creating each of these characters, Westin explains. The organization takes a deliberate, data-driven approach. Members of Westin's team work closely with child development specialists, educational advisers, NGOs, and other experts who can point to trends and figure out the scale of a problem. Then they determine how best to address it. Sometimes they undertake a long, elaborate process of creating a new character for the TV show, or they simply create materials like comics or workbooks that they distribute to a particular community. Or they may do special performances in a community.
Cookie Monster
Around 2008, for instance, it came to Sesame Workshop's attention that 800,000 American children had parents who had recently been deployed in the U.S. military. In this case, Sesame Workshop took a targeted approach by visiting 40 military bases around the U.S. and overseas where characters like Elmo and Cookie Monster would offer advice to children of military parents who were away on duty.
The Workshop also developed videos, books, and activities to help families work through some of the hardest issues, including combat-related injuries and even death. In one video, Elmo must say goodbye to his father, Louie, as he is deployed. In another, a muppet named Jesse has trouble remembering her father who died, so her mom and friends help her by doing things like wearing his favorite hat or playing baseball in order to keep memories of him alive. "These are scenarios that happen to preschoolers," Westin says. "We have to address it."
As technology has evolved, Sesame Workshop has been able to help kids in focused, community-specific ways. Besides the TV show, there are some issues that only appear in books or on the interactive Sesame Street website. There are also some characters, such as Julia, a muppet who is autistic, who appear online but not on the show. This strategy is important because preschoolers come from a wide range of contexts. Issues that are very relevant to some kids—like deployment—might overwhelm another child.
On the Sesame Street website, parents can download toolkits that help deal with specific situations like grief, divorce, or the spread of the Zika virus. The TV show, on the other hand, deals with issues that affect a much broader swath of the population, like how to eat healthily or learning the basics of counting. "When we're dealing with a mass platform like TV, we do have to be sensitive," says Youngwood. "We will only bring something onto TV if we are sure we can do it in a way that is relatable and accessible to a broad audience. This may change how we address that issue." So, while a character with a parent in prison might briefly appear on the show, Sesame Workshop might create more in-depth workbooks for kids in that situation to help them to cope.
In its 48-year history, Sesame Street has perfected the craft of talking to kids about tough things. In fact, it is so good at doing this that sometimes kids don't even realize they are experiencing a teaching moment. Part of how they are able to do this is through the mechanism of the muppets themselves: Kids find these furry, friendly creatures fun. "They're an emotional connection point that allows an issue to be less threatening," Youngwood says. "Our number one rule is that we have to entertain, because that enables us to teach them. Particularly at the youngest age, if they're not having fun, they will never learn."
But Sesame Workshop also works with many child development experts to identify the best way to talk about a problem, using words that children can understand and process. It's a delicate balance: it means not overwhelming them with too much detail or too serious a tone, but not glossing over it, either. When it comes to the most serious problems, like losing someone in a war, parents themselves feel ill-equipped to help their children. "That's why we feel we play such an important role," Westin says. "We're also trying to give the parents the tools they need and making sure that they are talking with the child."
All of these social initiatives are important in improving the lives of preschoolers around the world. But they are also what sets Sesame Street apart as a children's media organization. When it comes to children's TV shows, the landscape is more crowded and fragmented than ever before, but Sesame Street stands out for having unparalleled brand recognition and the trust of parents. Part of this comes from having the courage to tackle the most uncomfortable issues and doing so in a thoroughly researched, data-driven way. "The challenge is how we continue to meet kids in all the various platforms so that we can have a real and lasting impact," Youngwood says.
The answer, Westin believes, is to continue to push the envelope. This means paying close attention to what children are wrestling with around the world and helping them. Case in point: Sesame Workshop recently launched a partnership with the International Rescue Committee to better understand how it can help children who have been displaced. The organization is already working in refugee camps to test and better understand the most effective way to help displaced children. "Half of the 60 million displaced people are children," Westin says. "We're looking for the best way for Sesame Street to play a meaningful role to reach those children who have had to flee their homes and their schools."
Aerial photos, modeling, and counting defied bad weather to get solid estimates for the D.C. protest. But inauguration turnout remains cloudy.
Amid reports that President Trump ordered the National Park Service to release more aerial photos of his January 20 inauguration to prove how large the crowd was, a respected imaging service is releasing new crowd-size numbers for Trump's competition that weekend—the Women's March on Washington. Almost every day since his inauguration, Trump has bragged about the size of his crowd, his "sea of love" as he called it during his ABC News interview, but his "million-and-a-half" estimate is way overblown, say experts who have compared it to Obama's 2009 inauguration by relying on Washington Metro ridership and other metrics. Keith Still, a crowd safety consultant, has estimated that the crowd was about one-third the size of the crowd at Obama's inauguration. The Digital Design and Imaging Service (DDIS), which flies camera-laden balloons above events and does a scientific count of crowds, was unable to tally the crowd at Trump's inauguration due to lousy weather and flight restrictions.
But DDIS now has a solid figure for the Women's March the following day—about 440,000 people, give or take 50,000. Crowd scientists told the New York Times that the march, which they estimated at 470,000, was three times the size of Trump's inauguration crowd.
How did DDIS come up with its number? Their camera-laden balloons captured the march from three vantage points. The company has been counting heads at major D.C. events for years, first gaining notoriety among crowd-estimating geeks with its figure for Glenn Beck's August 2010 Restoring Honor rally at the Lincoln Memorial. The company's estimate of 80,000 people was a lot smaller than Beck's claim of up to 650,000. Its method was also a lot more scientific, and hasn't changed much over the years.
The Women's March on Washington. January 21, 2017. Crowd count overlay depicts approximate location and densities and crowd as of 2:46 p.m.
DDIS flies an array of cameras over crowds at several hundred feet, and the high-res photos are divided into grids. Every person isn't counted, but counting of heads is used to sample crowd density in different parts of the photo.
In an image looking over the Mall toward the White House, for instance, DDIS added color overlays. Yellow dots represent individuals who were hand-counted. From that info, a second overlay color-codes parts of the image by density. Red areas hold a cozy, but not stifling, average of one person per nine square feet; orange areas hold one person per 25 square feet, and yellow areas average one person per 200 square feet. Adding up all the grids of different densities yields an estimate of the total crowd.
Nothing like that level of counting would have been possible for the inauguration, as flights over the event were prohibited. Overcast skies also ruled out the (already less useful) kind of satellite images used to estimate crowds at past inaugurations.
Though better, conditions at the Women's March were still far from ideal. DDIS typically flies its balloons at around 600 feet. But its own photos show clouds brushing the tip of the Washington Monument, which stands at 555 feet. (There were no satellite images for Saturday, either.) The shifting of the crowd was also a challenge. Unlike the set piece of the inauguration, the Women's March was a moving event, starting with a rally on the National Mall and progressing to a march on the White House. "We grabbed it in the middle between the rally stage and the migration across the Mall," says DDIS president Curt Westergard. "This is the Women's March crowd size as of 2:46 p.m. on January 21," he says.
Why that specific time? "I'd like to say there's great science in determining the peak," says Westergard. "It's really just the best odds." The march had been slated to begin at 1:30 p.m., but things don't run on time. "I saw people coming in, rushing, like they were late," says Westergard, comparing it to students cramming into class after the bell. He waited a bit to give the crowd time to fill in and also to get the fullest shot of Pennsylvania Avenue, of which his balloons had a solid vantage point.
Absent ticket sales or turnstile counts, even the most meticulous crowd counts are imperfect. The Women's March provided three challenges, says Westergard. His cameras couldn't get a good view of two zones near the White House, due to security restrictions. They couldn't see all the way up one important thoroughfare, 15th Street; and the view of some metro station lines was blocked.
Based on that, Westergard reckons that the actual number of attendees may have been 50,000 more or fewer than the 440,000 DDIS settled on. A team from Manchester Metropolitan University in the U.K., which worked mostly independently from DDIS, published its own estimate of 470,000 people. Getting within 10% of another team's number gives Westergard a lot of confidence in his data, he says.
Unlike the inauguration, the Women's March was not limited to Washington, D.C. Organizers list 673 sister marches as far afield as Russia, Indonesia, and Antarctica, with claimed attendance of about 5 million. "We are estimating crowd counts based on reports from each organizer in their community," writes organizer Tina Cassidy in an email. "The foundation for that is Facebook sign-ups, Action Network sign-ups, and EventBrite tallies. But of course, people just showed up!" The Women's March organization claimed the biggest crowds in U.S. cities, such as "well over 200,000" in Chicago and Denver, 600,000 in New York City, and 750,000 in Los Angeles. Without such a third-party scientific count, there's reason to be skeptical of figures for other cities.
And none of this resolves the inauguration vs. Women's March smackdown. "We have no comments on that; we have no knowledge of that," says Westergard. "We don't want to go there," he adds with a slight chuckle.
It seems unlikely, though, that Trump's swearing-in had "the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period," as White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters last Saturday. Photos of the National Mall at the 2009 and 2017 inaugurations, for instance show broad patches of empty ground at Trump's inauguration that had been thronged at Obama's first inauguration in 2009. Still, the professor of crowd science at Manchester Metropolitan University in the U.K. (the same group that did its own estimate of the Women's March) reckoned from photos taken 45 minutes before each oath of office that three times as many people attended the 2009 inauguration.
A satellite image taken over the clear skies of the Women's March in Denver. This image wasn't used for crowd counting. Courtesy: DigitalGlobe
"While it's hard to get absolute numbers, it's not as difficult to get a sense of relative numbers," writes NYU journalism professor and mathematician Charles Seife in an email. He points to both photo comparisons and public transit ridership numbers from the Metro in Washington, D.C. It reported 193,000 rides by 11 a.m. ET on Friday (opening remarks for the inauguration began at 11:30 a.m.). Metro counted 275,000 trips by the same time on Saturday, according to Newsweek.
Trump supporters downplayed the importance of attendance at the Women's March. "Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election!" tweeted the president. Still, the administration couldn't help jumping into the numbers fray. "In my view, though, it's kind of a silly thing to be putting so much effort into arguing about," writes Seife. "And it's an even sillier thing for a press secretary to lie about—which he very clearly did."
Don't be fooled by a stock market rally this week, says one business head. It's all part of the dangerously volatile "new normal."
This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.
Even before he took office, Donald Trump was busily reshaping U.S. industry. Few who'd followed his Twitter account over the course of the election could've been shocked to see Trump inveigh against GM, just days after New Year's, for plans to open a manufacturing plant for its Chevy Cruze in Mexico—no matter that that was more a symbolic defense of domestic manufacturing than a substantive one.
What was a little surprising, by comparison, was the auto industry's response. After canceling the $1.6 billion plant across the border, GM CEO Mary Barrahit the press circuit to declare that "we have more in common with the administration and the President-elect than we have at odds." Ford CEO Mark Fields likewise voiced enthusiasm for "a more positive U.S. manufacturing business environment under President-elect Trump and some of the pro-growth policies that he said he is going to pursue."
No big corporation—or really any business, regardless its size—wants open warfare with the federal government, so comments like these are understandable. But in many ways they're wrong.
In his inaugural address Donald Trump pledged to restore the glory of American enterprise, echoing broad commitments he'd made throughout the campaign. Trump has ridden into the White House on his image as a successful businessman and an outsider who can single-handedly fire up the economy. But if there were any doubt that President Trump's approach to business isn't actually "pro-growth," his first week in the Oval Office has put it to rest. Here's why.
Trump dashed hopes that he would take a more moderate path by tweeting "alternative facts" about millions of allegedly fraudulent ballots and issuing executive orders to cancel American involvement in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, renegotiate NAFTA, and repeal Obamacare. He's also cleared the way for the Keystone XL pipeline, and build a wall along the Mexican border. It wasn't long ago that some pundits were suggesting that the more outrageous of Candidate Trump's proposals would soon prove mere rhetorical flourishes, not President Trump's actual policies.
Just seven days after his swearing in, markets are taking note. Not the Dow, of course, which is up quite a bit thanks to what one economist rightly characterizes as investor optimism for all those "pro-growth" policies. But that optimism may reflect the short-term interests of publicly traded companies better than it does the longer-term prospects for the U.S. economy overall.
And now that it's clear Trump means what he's said quite literally, the dollar hit a seven-week low, and the price of gold is climbing amid threats of protectionism and widespread domestic protests.
As a business owner and business advocate, I'm highly sensitive to how surprises can weigh on my ability to lead and execute. Procurement orders arriving on time, employees showing up to work, and a predictable tax bill are just a few of the factors companies rely on in order to grow.
Even Barra, sounding hopeful a few weeks ago, seemed to plead for "people needing to understand [that the auto industry] is a very complex business with long lead times," which she pointed out are often measured in years—not the seconds that it took Trump to tweet misleading information about her company, and send its stock tumbling as a result.
In a 2012 Gallup poll, 73% of business owners cited a predictable operating environment as crucial to making capital investments, and there's no reason to imagine they've changed their minds about that in 2017. Uncertainty is still bad for business.
So when the President injects himself into corporate negotiations and threatens companies like Toyota, whose shares lost $1.2 billion in value in five minutes after an angry Trump tweet, markets get rattled. Business owners and investors get more cautious. And sometimes, they're led to make decisions to resolve complications that are more about smoothing the political waters than they are about growing their businesses: Toyota just this week announced plans to build an Indiana factory that it hopes Trump will look upon approvingly.
And as for that big stock market rally this week, it's too early to tell if this growth will be sustained. In an unpredictable environment like the one we're heading into, there will be peaks and there will be valleys, but it's the increasing scale of the ups and downs taken together that spell trouble.
Despite a notable reluctance to share his personal tax returns, President Trump's plan to cut the corporate tax rate to 15% is one move many business owners could champion. Even though analysts believe 92% of all businesses most likely won't see any tax savings through this reduction, there may still be reason to hope it'll spur new investment, plus repatriate corporate revenue being shielded in offshore havens.
But any economic upsides on that end might be canceled out by Trump's harsh anti-immigration stance, which could wreak havoc on American businesses. By one estimate, immigrant-owned businesses targeted by such policies are responsible for $775 billion in annual GDP. After his first week in office, Trump has made clear he plans to follow through on his immigration crackdown. His administration is already drafting executive orders to cut federal funding to "sanctuary cities" that protect undocumented immigrants and bar entry to refugees from war zones and Muslim-majority countries.
These positions also threaten Silicon Valley, where 74% of computer and mathematical workers ages 24–44 come from abroad. Imposing tighter restrictions on H-1B visas, which Trump's team has said it's considering, adds to the uncertainty and is likely already curbing the productivity of millions of immigrants who work and study here.
Small businesses are responsible for employing over 8 million Americans and generating 54% of all domestic sales, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Trump advocates rolling back regulations to stimulate growth, but even this "pro-growth" policy for Main Street shops may wind up causing more harm than help.
Under the Obama Administration, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act, a landmark regulation that curtailed risky trading behavior by big banks, cracked down on predatory lending, and lowered credit card processing fees. President Trump has sworn he'd kill the regulation as a means of unleashing new growth for the financial industry, but research by my company suggests that doing so could cost Main Street retailers savings of $9.4 billion per year in credit card processing fees alone.
Trump's policies will create workforce disruptions, monetary volatility, and uncertainty for businesses large and small. However, small businesses will be far less equipped to absorb these shocks than a big automaker like Ford or GM.
While I've no doubt that President Trump, on balance, is bad for business, I'm cautiously optimistic about the resilience of American industry despite the threats he poses to it. Mary Barra isn't wrong to point out that simplifying the tax code could boost the economy. I can also see the potential value of encouraging more capital spending.
But the prospective upsides of Trump's policies are eclipsed by the disadvantages of having direct interference from an unpredictable, protectionist White House. Judging by the past week, if businesses pretend they have more to gain than lose by adapting to Trump's world, the next four years may disappoint.
One week down, 207 to go.
Hiro Taylor is the founder and CEO of HeroPay, which helps merchants navigate the complex world of credit card processing, and the former Visa Country Manager of Myanmar.
Typically, when new independent workers can't squeeze enough initial business out of their existing networks, they turn to big business that are looking to outsource—and end up accepting the nearest available contract work. Anxious to get started, we prioritize quick money without formally developing a service or drawing up standards to run our businesses by.
Within a year, many are unhappy with our clients and work, wondering why we went out on our own in the first place. Even though we're making real money, some even wonder if we should go back to a traditional job.
One culprit here is easy to miss, and it's that we've become too absorbed into the company culture of our biggest client. Here's what it takes to get yourself out of that predicament or—better yet—to avoid it in the first place.
It isn't uncommon for independent workers to overextend themselves to match their clients' work cultures, worried that they'll lose the business if they don't.
That often means going against our own work styles, and the signs that that's happening can be subtle. We find ourselves feeling like we have to request time off, for instance, rather than informing our client of when our business is closed. Our client expects us to be constantly on call or available on a Slack channel all day.
Or maybe they require us to do our work in their office so we can conform to their schedule. Sometimes, being on site in the same physical space as the full-time employees you're collaborating with is helpful. Other times, it's pointless. Either way, your client may be treating you like an employee rather than a business owner—and letting that imbalanced dynamic dictate what they request of you, not what the project actually demands.
And it's easy to slip into a client's cultural norms; most of us are used to being employees, not business owners. In situations like these, it soon becomes apparent that while our sales shortcut may have allowed us to get started quickly, there's actually a hidden cost in failing to treat ourselves like a business. But recognizing that is the first step to fixing it.
Because here's the thing: Every company has a culture—even your tiny company of one. Maybe in your rush to launch, you didn't sit down to articulate your values and guiding principles—the core elements of any company culture.
If you don't set the boundaries up front, the client is more likely to see you as an employee (albeit one they don't pay benefits to) rather than an independent entity they've partnered with. Solopreneurs need to see themselves as an equal party in every deal they strike, no matter how small the project, and that means developing their own rules to prevent culture creep.
How do you do that? There are two parts to it. You have to know what your business believes—these are its values—and then to set guidelines based on them—in other words, boundaries.
Values are often seen as hollow principles, but they're critical for every business to function; they're just the set of lenses through which you view the world. To find your values, ask why you started the business in the first place. Also look to things that frustrated you about previous work situations; values often lie on the flip side of those frustrations.
Then, in order to draw your own boundaries, ask yourself how you get your best work done. Consider elements like where you do your work, your most productive hours, and how you handle changing priorities. Once you know what you value and can set down some critical boundaries, you can communicate them to your clients more quickly.
The next step is simply to educate clients up front. This isn't just critical for sparing you a lot of angst later on, it's actually fundamental to your business. Letting your clients know what to expect from working with you is critical to maintaining healthy relationships. What's more, this process actually begins before you agree to any work, not after you've signed the contract.
Twisting yourself into a pretzel at the beginning of a project is a sure way to end up with a difficult client and a whole heap of stress. In fact, the easiest way to educate clients is through your website. When explaining the parameters of your work to anyone who visits your site, you prime them for your first interaction. Those who disagree with your work style won't even make it into your inbox, saving you precious time and headaches later.
For those who do, carefully evaluate every prospect, even those referred through your network. During those initial discovery meetings, ask questions that get at the heart of your principles. When presenting a proposal, include stipulations that cover your hard boundaries. And never accept a client who violates something on your list of boundaries.
Once you set a boundary, don't back down—it's a slippery slope. If you move a boundary, a client may think you'll bend on others. Something subtle happens psychologically when we say "yes" but we really mean "no." When we break a promise to ourselves, we stop trusting ourselves; we lose our confidence. And losing faith in yourself is bad news when you work for yourself. So set your boundaries early and often.
While you want to be respectful of your client's culture, feeling like you have to adhere to it over your own is a red flag. Address it immediately, taking care not to step over your own needs as a business owner. The uncomfortable truth is that not all client relationships are salvageable.
If your client continues to demand that you accommodate their work culture, just fire them. Don't worry—you'll find another that's a better fit. They're out there.
Finally, give yourself some leeway, especially in the beginning. It's okay to tap your network or grab low-hanging fruit in order to get yourself started. But while you do, be sure to start treating yourself like a company right from the get-go, articulating your values and setting boundaries—all before you sign a single contract.
Remind yourself that you're a business owner now, not an employee. Being collaborative and accommodating within reason is a perfectly good, honorable, and humane thing to do, as long as you're doing it for the right reasons. More often than not, independent workers do too much of it for the wrong ones. Never let your client dictate your own work culture, and be wary of leaning too far into theirs. You'll both be grateful in the end.
With a growing staff of over 150, this CEO can still count the number of employee departures on one hand.
Getting poached sounds like just another cost of doing business, until it happens to you.
My company, a video platform for businesses based in Kitchener, Ontario, was raided by poachers after a new company moved into the region. I soon heard through the grapevine that if their HR department discovered a potential recruit had already received an offer from us, they'd automatically make one of their own with an incremental signing bonus. In other words, they were essentially using us to do their employee vetting for them.
It gets worse. Many of our employees started getting emails offering higher wages if they jumped ship. But not only did they not leave, they even forwarded those emails to me.
We've grown from a handful of employees to more than 150 in only a few years, and I'm not going to pretend we haven't nabbed talent from other firms. In some respects (including something of a Darwinian one), it really is the cost of doing business, but it still hurts when it happens to you. Having trained up a promising junior salesperson recently, only to see them lured away for a more senior role in another company, I can attest to that firsthand.
I've learned that companies looking to survive and thrive need to poacher-proof their organizations as best they can, and as early as they can. Here are some of the methods that have already worked for us.
Friends stick together, especially on the job, which is why we encourage employees to refer friends for open positions. In fact, nearly half of the people we've hired so far have been inside referrals. By comparison, the average rates at which companies fill roles via referral varies by their size, according to a recent study by the talent solutions company iCIMS, but is typically between 14% and 27%.
On one level, this is almost like a form of insurance. If your best friend is working with you, you may think twice about leaving for a competitor and leaving your buddy in the lurch. Deeper still, having a culture of camaraderie—consisting of people who genuinely like their coworkers as people—translates to them also liking their jobs that much more.
There are some downsides to consider here, though. If you tap only or even primarily your employees' existing social circles, your company winds up as diverse (or not) as the types of people they already hang out with—a reality that risks shortfalls not only of racial and ethnic diversity but also of age and socioeconomic background. What's more, bringing too many prior connections into the office sometimes creates tricky workplace politics.
To guard against that, we use referrals as only one of several starting points in our recruiting process—not as a criteria for extending offers. Diversity, on the other hand, is a key objective in our hiring process, and for starters, we make sure the people doing the interviewing are independent from those making the referrals.
But within the grand scheme of things, I've still found that referrals have a role to play. And since our modus operandi is transparency first with a dash of meritocracy, any office politics that comes from adding a social dimension to the workplace rarely finds ground to take root.
The prospect of a new job is always enticing, especially when it comes with higher pay and a better title. But I've found that the basic act of sitting down and talking through possible moves with employees is often enough to mitigate that "bright and shiny" appeal.
I'm not alone. One Fast Company contributor recently explained why she's seen success by sitting down with her staff to discuss their career goals and, in many cases, actually helping them find other jobs outside the company if and when it comes to that. In my experience, a straightforward, one-on-one conversation can help your team members think through choices they often struggle with privately. And it gives me a chance to show them, for instance, how higher compensation elsewhere may be offset by fewer opportunities for advancement or a different type of work culture. Of course, the hard part is building a foundation of trust so employees can and do share their ambitions and concerns before making sudden changes.
Another way to dampen the appeal is simply to showcase people who benefit by staying put. Highlight the successes of employees who stick around, perform well, and are promptly rewarded. The promise of career growth is one of the top differentiators between employees who are engaged on the job and those who aren't. But a recent survey found that while 60% of HR professionals thought their companies provided clear paths to advancement, only 36% of employees agreed. If you can close that gap meaningfully, consistently, and transparently, your employees will take note—and remain your employees for longer.
I'm an engineer by training, so I like to poke around under the hood. We administer quarterly eNPS surveys, a simple tool for measuring the likelihood of employees referring their friends and family to work for us. Quantitative analysis reveals patterns that are easy to miss, even if you're a vigilant boss. But it's just as important to act on the results.
For example, if one department is giving us a 35% eNPS score while others are ranking us at 90%, that's an early warning sign. One powerful way to flesh out these results, and find out why one team may not be as happy with their jobs as another, is through "skip-level meetings"—removing the manager from the equation and meeting directly with her team. It may sound a little Machiavellian, but there are few better ways to get straight, unfiltered feedback than to get the boss out of the room and have an open, honest conversation.
The expression "don't shit where you eat" applies doubly when it comes to fending off poachers in your own backyard. Especially in emerging tech ecosystems teeming with lots of young companies, it generally doesn't make sense to steal employees.
Here in the Tri-Cities (of Kitchener, Cambridge, and Waterloo, Ontario), we're all fighting to establish a thriving, competitive tech sector together. The benefits locally are already evident to most of the businesses here: Less poaching means young companies can continue to afford talent, which means rents and cost of living stay reasonable, even as the area's high-tech industry develops. Ultimately, communities can avoid the kind of rapid hyper-gentrification that saps so many tech hubs of their vitality.
Finally, it's worth mentioning that these tactics aren't necessarily for everyone. The dynamic in huge enterprises may mean that compensation is hugely important, whereas culture isn't as much of a factor. But for startups and new businesses in particular, these tips might just make a difference. The proof for us is in our retention rate. Even in a hot job market, I'm proud to say that I can still count every employee departure from Vidyard on one hand.
Michael Litt is cofounder and CEO of Vidyard, the world's leading video platform for business.
The Apple device manufacturer may be planning a possible U.S. expansion, and this election battleground state is on its radar.
As it gears up for a possible U.S. expansion, Apple's go-to manufacturer is kicking the tires in one of the crown jewels of Donald Trump's surprise electoral victory—Pennsylvania.
In December, representatives for Foxconn contacted a Taiwan-based trade representative for Pennsylvania to discuss a potential factory in the state, Fast Company has learned. Specifically, the Foxconn people wanted to know about state programs available to large companies considering building factories, and presumably creating jobs, in Pennsylvania. Such programs often offer special accommodations on tax and land rates as a way of attracting new companies.
The initial contact led to the Pennsylvania trade rep traveling to China to meet casually with Foxconn's chairman Terry Gou at an event in Shenzhen last Sunday. In response to an inquiry about the plans, a spokeswoman from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development told me in an email that Gou "expressed a desire to invest in Pennsylvania, but the meeting did not address specifics on a proposed project as of yet."
A high-profile factory in Pennsylvania—a key battleground state that featured prominently in Trump's campaign strategy toward the end of the election—would bode well for the new president, who is already in the habit of taking direct credit for job creation he had no role in. However, Foxconn's plans are far from solidified. The state is likely one of a number of states the company is looking at. Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania spokeswoman said that because Foxconn was vague about what they were thinking of building in Pennsylvania, the trade representative was able to provide only general information to the company. Nikkei reported on Monday that Foxconn has discussed building a plastics molding plant in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania trade representatives plan to meet with Foxconn representatives again in the near future, the spokeswoman said.
Apple's role in Foxconn's plans for a U.S. expansion is still unclear. Some reports have said that Apple would provide as much as half of the capital needed to build a new facility in the United States. Producing devices for Apple represents about half of Foxconn's business. Foxconn has been pumping out 100 million iPhones on average per year.
Apple may be motivated to bring more manufacturing to the U.S. to appease the administration of President Trump, who railed against the exportation of manufacturing jobs during his campaign. Trump went so far as to threaten to place a 45% tariff on foreign-produced produces entering the U.S. market. He also called on Apple specifically to make the iPhone in the United States.
Of course, if Apple and Foxconn made the surprising choice to move all iPhone manufacturing to the U.S. ("Designed in California, Made in the USA"), the price of the iPhone would go up dramatically. Estimates based solely on increased labor prices say the cost of an iPhone would double or more. And that doesn't even factor in the high cost of building the facilities and moving the human manufacturing expertise from China to the U.S.
The Trump administration has yet to show its cards on key issues like H-1B visas and tax reform. Apple may be trying to establish an amicable relationship with the new administration as part of an effort to influence future decisions on a range of tax, trade, and regulatory issues.
Saying no to your supervisor isn't easy, but nailing that habit can set you up for success over the long haul.
When you're dating, one of the most uncomfortable conversations is when you have to break it off. Inevitably, there's a period of awkwardness where you're fumbling for the right words: "It's not you, it's me," "It's not the right time," "I'm just not in the best place right now." There's nothing easy about it.
Professional conversations can be similar. Saying no to a coworker or manager can be nerve-wracking: cue the anxious sweats. All of us want to be team players in the office—the person who can be relied upon in a pinch, who's a proven doer and, can execute flawlessly. But there are times when you need to say no to extra work (in the nicest, least rude way possible), a difficult skill that the most successful people have mastered. Here's how.
"The moment someone asks you to do something you don't have the time or inclination to do is fraught with vulnerability," Brene Brown, who researches the psychology of vulnerability, shame, courage, and worthiness at the University of Houston, recently wrote for Oprah.com. "'Yes!' often seems like the easiest way out.
"But it comes at a price: I can't tell you how many times I've said 'Sure!' in my squeaky, I-can't-believe-I'm-doing-this voice, only to spend hours, even months, feeling angry and resentful," she continues. "For women, there's a myth that we're supposed to do it all (and do it perfectly). Saying no cues a chorus of inner shame gremlins: 'Who do you think you are?' 'You're not a very caring [mother/wife/friend/colleague].'"
This couldn't be further from the truth, though. Daring to set boundaries, says Brown, is proof of having true courage to put your well-being first even when you risk disappointing others. And, yes, this includes your boss.
These are a few potential reasons why you might need to turn down extra work:
Your plate is full.
You're tired of being the office pushover.
You'd like to set better boundaries at work.
The extra assignment would affect your work-life balance.
It will negatively impact your primary work responsibilities.
Now that you know you can turn down extra work, here's how to do it gracefully—and in a way that won't cost you when it comes to performance review time.
If you've decided to decline extra work, be sure about both your motives and your level of confidence. This is a decision you are making, which means you should use the word "I". The decision is about you and what is important to you, and not about the person asking.
Avoid sweeping statements like, "You always ask me at the last minute," or "We feel like this is unfair." In this situation, you aren't speaking for other members of the team, and you should only refer to this specific instance, as opposed to past instances and grievances.
Once you convey something along the lines of, "I'm glad you came to me with this opportunity, but unfortunately I won't be able to tackle it at this time," you may choose to have a separate conversation with the person about their track record of last-minute assignments or unbalanced workloads.
While politely declining a request from your boss can be fraught with tension, making up an excuse or a fake set of circumstances to get you out of the work makes you look bad. And it can come back to bite you.
Instead, be honest about your reasoning, and resist the urge to waver. Before speaking to your colleague or sharing your decision with your manager, ask yourself why you are saying no. Really think through your reasoning and craft a clear and concise way to convey that. Waffling will only ante up the pressure and send mixed messages. Don't stall, avoid the person, or just assume they will "take the hint." Be decisive— it's your career and you're in charge of it.
Treat others how you want to be treated. A rejection or an unapologetic "no" can be incredibly harsh—including to your boss. Be mindful of how the opposite party might feel, and understand that he or she may not fully agree with your decision to decline taking on additional work.
That's where providing an explanation and showing thoughtfulness—both about the project and the manager who's asking you to work on it—can go a very long way in determining their response. Remember to remain confident in your decision yet empathetic to your boss's needs, especially if they remain professional toward you.
A version of this article originally appeared on Glassdoor. It is adapted and reprinted with permission.
Your professors have connections, but they also have reputations to uphold. Here's how to earn their trust.
While you're still in college, there's probably nobody more qualified to vouch for your performance than your professors—yet they're often the last people you'd ask to help get you a job. It can be scary enough asking professors to help support you on class projects, let alone asking them to recommend you for a job, right?
But the thing is, most professors have excellent contacts in the professional world. And if they know you and like you, they'd be more than happy to help you succeed once you graduate.
But here's the rub: They have to know you, and they have to be familiar with your work. For this article, we asked college-focused career experts how you can build those relationships now to put your professors in a better position to help you—so you'll have one more career ally to help you land a job after graduation.
Participate in discussions. Ask questions. Show that you care about the subject matter, and your professors will show you that they care about your career once class is over.
"Remember, if someone is going to tap into their network for you, they are going out on a limb for you," says Tom Dowd, executive director of Muhlenberg College's Career Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
"You have to build the relationship and develop enough trust to where they feel confident linking their name and reputation with yours. This starts by how you conduct yourself in their classroom."
If you show your professor that you are invested in the work they're putting in, they'll be much more likely to write a letter of recommendation at the end of the year and do some networking on your behalf.
I know—you'd probably rather be at the gym, hanging out with friends, or doing something other than spending extra time with your professors. But going to office hours is the perfect opportunity to get to know professors on personal levels, and solicit feedback (this way you create a stakeholder in your success).
"You will also be able to learn more about your professor's network and what they require before making a recommendation," says Shareen Jaffer, founder of Skillify, a career-readiness program at the University of Southern California. "Remember, office hours are stated on the first day of class, so do not wait until the end of the year!"
What's the best way to maximize your chances of someone helping you? Help them.
Svetlana Dotsenko, founder of Boston-based ed-tech startup Project Lever (a service that matches you with faculty members in your field), shares her success story using this approach: "As an undergraduate, I offered to help a professor at Harvard Medical School with her clinical study," she says. "At first, I was just a sophomore and did not have a lot of topic knowledge, so I just joined the study to help translate patient-doctor interviews between Russian and English.
"As I progressed in my career, she offered me to the chance to help with data analysis, literature review, and conducting patient interviews—so I was able to do real research," Dotsenko says. "Next summer, an internship opportunity came along at the World Health Organization, and my professor was able to enthusiastically recommend me for the job."
So don't just ask what your professor can do for you. When you're having those one-on-one conversations, ask if there's any way you can help him. You might be surprised at the answer.
Participated in class? Check. Visited your professors during office hours? Check. Helped them out with a project? Check. Only after these steps should you approach your professor for help setting up informational interviews with professionals in their networks.
"The purpose of informational interviews is to talk to professionals who can provide insights on what working in a particular industry is like," says Michelle Chiu, a career coach at Prime Opt, a coaching center at the University of Washington.
Rather than flat-out asking professors for jobs, what you should be asking for is referrals and informational interviews. This allows your professor to leverage his or her network on your behalf with less pressure. He or she is making the introduction—the rest is up to you.
This article originally appeared on Monster and is reprinted with permission.
Your accent can make you a distinct, powerful speaker if you know what to do with it.
When I first began coaching executives nearly 40 years ago, I was surprised—as a Canadian—to find that so many leaders from the American South worried about their accents. Later, I had the chance to see former President Jimmy Carter speak at the Minneapolis Press Club, approached him, and pointed out what I'd noticed.
"What do you think about having a Southern accent?" I asked.
He flashed a big smile. "Well, it got me elected president!" he said.
Carter was obviously proud of the way he spoke. But no matter what your accent sounds like or how you feel about it, there are a few techniques to speak with more power and clarity in just about every situation—in meetings, on conference calls, in front of large crowds, or just with a colleague or two in the hallway. And the typical advice to "just speak slowly" won't cut it.
Some people feel a lot of pressure to ditch or dull their accents, which can make them feel self-conscious. First of all, stop that. Not only is that just plain unnecessary, but researchers have found that it's actually incredibly difficult to do.
I worked with an executive from a nuclear power company who told me he spent a year just trying to say "speaking" instead of "speakin'." Think about that for a second: Why would an executive with huge responsibilities at a nuclear facility spend so much time trying to coach himself into one particular change in pronunciation? The answer is simple: because he wanted to project more sophistication.
But I reminded him, "You need to think of sophistication as a whole, not just as sound parts." In truth, sounding sophisticated has nothing to do with your accent (or absence of it—which, by the way, is always relative, depending on your audience). It comes from your ability to be in the moment and express your ideas easily and with precision.
So your first step to communicating more effectively is to stop sweating your accent. Relax—you don't need to change who you are to be a great speaker.
One of the next things you should focus on is improving the clarity of your sound.
I was once asked by a major aerospace company to help one of their Scottish executives speak more effectively. His global team was struggling to understand him, especially on conference calls. As soon as we met, I noticed his Scottish accent was indeed pretty strong. After we worked together for two days, it wasn't any less strong, but you could understand him much better.
What changed? We'd focused on stretching out his vowel sounds as opposed to articulating his consonants. For example, instead of saying "busstop," with the 'b', 's'es, and 'p' enunciated, you'd say "busstop," stretching out the 'u' and the 'o. Don't get me wrong—it won't feel natural at first. Stretching out your vowel sounds takes practice, but you'll notice a significant difference in clarity one you get the hang of it.
One of the most common pieces of speaking advice for people with accents (as well as one of the top requests by listeners who are struggling to keep up) is, "Slow down."
But while it's true you need to focus on your pacing, that isn't the same as speaking more slowly. Obviously, you don't want to speak too quickly, but you also don't want to speak ploddingly, dropping small pauses in between your words. That can be excruciating to listen to, not to mention inefficient.
Instead, you want to pause only in between phrases—meaningful groupings of words supported by breaths. You need to sustain your sound (and pace) throughout the phrase, rather than breaking it up in between words. It's like stretching out a piece of gum as opposed to cutting it into pieces. When you speak in phrases, you'll get into a rhythm—one that you can actually control. And the more you get into a rhythm, the more at ease you'll feel as a speaker.
Finally, if you have an accent because English is your second language, you're likely going to mispronounce words every once in a while—and that's okay! Many people with accents get hung up on mispronunciation, but that's rarely the thing that throws listeners off.
I've worked with many Mexican business leaders for whom English is their second language, and while they speak it fluently, many occasionally get caught up on certain words. The Spanish word for "portfolio," for example, is "portafolio," so since the English version is so similar, they often revert to the Spanish word while otherwise speaking English. But while the error may be noticeable, it doesn't get in the way of comprehension or undercut their credibility.
So while you may feel self-conscious about mispronouncing words, just remember that under pressure, everyone's brains go back to early learning. Most of the time people will understand what you mean. Keep the big picture in mind. Your job is to show the power and relevance of your thinking, not the perfection of your pronunciation.
This week's top stories take an in-depth look at the leading symbol of the Women's March and explain the art of "defensive Googling."
This week we learned about the genesis of the Pussyhat Project that gave the Women's March movement their most recognizable symbol; a few tips for writing better to-do lists; and the nuts and bolts of "defensive Googling" for job seekers this year.
To-do lists are notoriously easy to write and just as notoriously hard to complete. Among their key pitfalls, as writer Stephanie Vozza puts it, is that they "don't provide context about the tasks, they don't give you a timeline, and they're easy to ignore." Sometimes the way around those problems is to stop yourself from adding certain items to your list in the first place.
Do you practice what digital marketing consultant and Google aficionado Tina Arnoldi calls "defensive Googling"? If not, you should consider it. Here's her game plan—with step one being to Google your own name—to help job seekers optimize their personal brands so that recruiters can find them easily (and for the right reasons).
When it comes to daily productivity, it's sometimes the things you stop doing, rather than the new habits you adopt, that make all the difference. Fast Company asked employees at some of the leading tech companies to reveal which routines they're trying to weed out of their workdays in the year ahead, and why.
There's no better way to invite distraction into your workday than to say "yes" to every request thrown at you. But batting them away in real-time can be exhausting. Here are a few alternative methods of tuning out the most taxing demands on your attention so you can stay focused for longer.
The day after Donald J. Trump's inauguration, millions of women (as well as men and children) participated in the Women's March in the U.S. and globally, and many wore pink knitted caps. That moment was weeks in the making, and it began when several American women decided to turn a common craft into a symbol of organized defiance. This week they shared their process and objectives with Fast Company.
Sometimes achieving one goal means kicking another one to the curb—just choose wisely.
Maybe you bit off more than you could chew when you made your New Year's resolutions—and you're just noticing that now. Don't worry, it's fine to pare down so you can devote all your energy to the goals that really matter to you. But figuring out which ones you'll feel okay about discarding isn't easy. Here's how to do it.
If you try to decide which goals you care about the most, you still might fail. Unfortunately, figuring out which resolutions to ditch and which to double down on doesn't hinge exclusively on their importance to you. It's also about deciding which are most achievable. The good news, though, is that "achievable" doesn't mean unambitious. For instance, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 2016 resolution was to run 365 miles over the course of the year—a goal that he reached by July.
According to Dr. Ritu Trivedi-Purohit, a clinical psychologist in private practice in the Chicago area, three factors increased his likelihood of success. Your first step to ditching the right resolutions is to size each one up according to the same criteria:
1. It can be broken down into modest bits. On a day-to-day basis, Zuckerberg's goal was actually pretty small. 365 miles is a lot of miles, but not if you spread them out—by running one mile a day, or a roughly 10-minute jog.
"Keep the resolution simple and positive," Ritu suggests. "For example, it is easier to add one fruit and one vegetable to your daily nutrition than changing your entire diet."
Making a new habit stick isn't easy. Unfortunately, many of the strategies that work for one person may not work for another, so when you try to make multiple habit changes all at once, you're playing with so many variables that you're bound to fall short on some.
2. It hinges on one new activity or behavior change, not several. Zuckerberg didn't need to adopt more than one new habit in order to succeed. To reach his resolution, he committed to just a single new activity: running. When you start small and take baby steps, it makes a world of difference.
3. You can tell others about it. If your resolution is personal or a little embarrassing to talk about, you may face longer odds of achieving it. When Zuckerberg committed to his running resolution, he shared it publicly and then built a community that would hold him accountable.
"Share your intention with someone who will hold you accountable, or better yet, will commit to make a change with you," Ritu suggests. You may not even have to do that in person, as Zuckerberg found. "You might find that joining an online group can help you find renewed inspiration, support, and accountability."
Maybe there's a really great goal you've set your sights on, but as the weeks and months tick by, you're realizing there are some serious obstacles to making real progress on it. Maybe your child gets sick or you get a new boss, or something else unexpected happens. Things like that could throw a wrench in your plans.
So when you're figuring out which resolutions you may have to dump, make a list of reasons (hell, call them excuses if you like!) for why you haven't made as much progress as you'd hoped. Then determine which of those reasons are the most intractable. Which would take the greatest effort or might wreak the most havoc on your life or work duties to try and remove—and which wouldn't be so hard to wipe out?
Emotional intelligence and personal development expert Neeta Bhushan says starting the year off with a positive attitude will set you up for success, regardless of your goals. But as soon as you start to fall short, your attitude can begin to tank. Don't let it.
"Regularly check in with yourself and keep yourself on track," Bhushan suggests. "Give yourself the flexibility and freedom to set yourself up for success to achieve your resolutions." Your goals can change, or even fall in number, just as long as your mind-set stays positive.
Not only do optimists make more money, at least according to one study, but psychologists have found that a positive attitude is self-reinforcing, especially when it comes to goal achievement. By surrounding yourself with like-minded people who are as confident in your odds of success as you are, you can insulate yourself from naysayers.
So it doesn't hurt to just go with your gut: If you feel more optimistic about one resolution than another, it may be worth sticking with that one.
Christina Nicholson is a former TV reporter and anchor who now owns and operates a full-service public relations firm, Media Maven. She is getting ready to launch "Master your PR," an online course that teaches small business owners and marketers how to handle public relations on their own.
Should you use a bot to schedule that meeting, but an app to order lunch? Let HipChat's general manager help you decide.
The HipChat team gets a lot of value out of bots because we know when to use them and when apps are a better choice. To be fair, not every team spends their days obsessing over the ins and outs for group messaging platforms like we do, so sometimes it isn't always clear what to automate—or even what the options are.
But you don't have to be an engineer to squeeze the most productivity out of your team on whichever collaborative platform your company uses. It's all about deciding what type of task you need to complete. Here's how we make that call, then look for the right means of automating it—or not.
First, some semantics: Almost every service bot you encounter in a chat service—whether it's to order an Uber within a room, receive notifications from PagerDuty, or track customer activities on Salesforce—is what's known as a "full" service outside of the chat platform itself. In these situations, the bot's job is to relay a user's text back to a service instead of through the service interface itself.
This can be helpful in cases of a simple question-and-answer interaction:
"What's the weather?"
"Is the site performing?"
"Did someone respond to that customer?"
Each of these queries is simple enough for a bot to handle without any additional interaction from the user. Here at HipChat, this is where we see the most opportunity for developers: The demand for this type of bot continues to grow.
However, if the problem is more complex and requires more detail to solve, applications are a much better option. Uber isn't a workplace tool, but it's a good example of this distinction, because ordering a ride is a complex request that requires a lot of information, and delivering it is a service that Uber has already spent years refining. So while I can order an Uber using a bot inside HipChat, it's probably better to open the Uber app on my phone, where I'll immediately see a map with my location, the real-time position of the driver, the route of my trip, and a fare estimate all at once. With one click of a button on that interface, a car will pick me up wherever I am.
To take the same action through a bot, I would type "/uber" into HipChat, followed by my address, and then wait for the bot to quote me an ETA. I could then either add or omit any additional information and context, such as car class, type, and driver rating. Sure, this works in practice, but the functionality between a bot and app is night and day.
How does this translate into the workplace? For starters, the appeal of having a bot integration to handle common tasks within a group collaboration platform, like HipChat or Slack, is that all the information and context lives in one shared spot—something that isn't always practical or even necessary if you're ordering an Uber.
So the rule of thumb is actually pretty simple when it comes to team productivity: You might put up with a rudimentary interface or drawn-out process to keep your team in the loop. But bots are only good when they work for you, not when you have to work for the bot by providing more information for it to complete a task.
So by now you may be thinking that we at HipChat just aren't that into bots, but that isn't the case. We've found that bots can enhance HipChat's core functionality and provide more customization and personalization options for all different types of teams.
For instance, our HipChat team is distributed across multiple time zones, and we were recently looking for a better way to communicate what we were working on in lieu of in-person standup meetings. Our team was already assembled in all the right rooms in HipChat. That meant we had a natural spot to share this type of detailed, highly contextual information—so we built a bot to facilitate standups.
Our Standup Bot is meant to let team members update the group on what they've been working on in an organized, useful way. The way it does that is simple: Standup Bot records when team members submit a standup report, prefixed with the command "/standup," then shuffles all of our teammates' reports into the right panel of the HipChat room.
We can view those reports all in one place, morning, noon or night, separate from the hustle and bustle of our chat room. One bot has made collaborating much easier for our engineering team, and it's now standard issue in all our engineering rooms.
In order to incorporate tools like this into your own team's chat, just start by reviewing the tasks in the daily workflow that can be automated: Which ones are complex tasks, requiring a lot of information in order to get the result you need, and which ones can be accomplished with more straightforward interactions?
If making that determination sounds simple, it is—you don't need to be an expert on bots. Responding to a customer on Twitter, for instance, is Uber-level complexity; you've got to get to the bottom of what they've contacted you about, decide how to formulate a concise response, embed and links, etc. All that means that it's probably best handled through an application—in this case, Twitter itself, or a social media platform like TweetDeck or Hootsuite. Scheduling a team meeting, on the other hand, is a simple interaction because there are only so many variables—date, time, location, number of attendees—meaning it's great for a bot.
Apps can unleash the power of teams, allowing them to do everything from collaborate on documents in real time to monitor the status of their work and even plan trips together. Meanwhile, bots automate some of the simpler tasks, like reminding team members of deadlines, making reservations for a team dinner, or receiving notifications on breaking news. And just knowing which to use when is the first step for making your team more productive, then keeping it that way.
Every organization has its own specific needs, and bots can enhance chat apps in ways that help teams collaborate better, reach decisions faster, or just make things a little more fun.
It's true that there's a lot of hype around bots at the moment, but behind it is a really solid idea for extending and personalizing the chat experience for teams of all types. And that goes for the teams that work day in and day out to refine that experience, like ours does here at HipChat—bots and all.
Steve Goldsmith is the general manager of HipChat at Atlassian.
