Tag Archives: Employees

Harvard Business Review – November/December 2024

November–December 2024

Harvard Business Review (October 22, 2024) – The latest issue features:

Why Employees Quit

New research points to some surprising answers. 

Summary.   

The so-called war for talent is still raging. But in that fight, employers continue to rely on the same hiring and retention strategies they’ve been using for decades. Why? Because they’ve been so focused on challenges such as poaching by industry rivals, competing in tight labor markets, and responding to relentless cost-cutting pressures that they haven’t addressed a more fundamental problem: the widespread failure to provide sustainable work experiences. To stick around and give their best, people need meaningful work, managers and colleagues who value and trust them, and opportunities to advance in their careers, the authors say. By supporting employees in their individual quests for progress while also meeting the organization’s needs, managers can create employee experiences that are mutually beneficial and sustaining.

Personalization Done Right

The five dimensions to consider—and how AI can help

Summary.   

More than 80% of respondents in a BCG survey of 5,000 global consumers say they want and expect personalized experiences. But two-thirds have experienced personalization that is inappropriate, inaccurate, or invasive. That’s because most companies lack a clear guidepost for what great personalization should look like.

Authors Mark Abraham and David C. Edelman remedy that in this article, which is adapted from Personalized: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI (Harvard Business Review Press, 2024). Drawing on decades of work consulting on the personalization efforts of hundreds of large companies, they have built the defining metric to quantify personalization maturity: the Personalization Index. It is a single score from 0 to 100 that measures how well companies deliver on the five promises they implicitly make to customers when they personalize an interaction.

The authors argue that personalization will be the most exciting and most profitable outcome of the emerging AI boom. They describe how companies can use AI to create and continually refine personalized experiences at scale—empowering customers to get what they want faster, cheaper, or more easily. And they show readers how to assess their own business’s index score.

Design Products That Won’t Become Obsolete

Morning News: Rise In Employee Marijuana Use, Trump Business Probe

A.M. Edition for May 26. WSJ’s Matt Grossman discusses the increase in marijuana use among American workers. 

CEOs of the biggest banks are set to testify before lawmakers starting today. A special grand jury is convened in the investigation into the Trump Organization. Marc Stewart hosts.

Business Customs: ‘Why Do Americans Tip?’ (Video)

Tipping is a quintessential American custom. In the U.S. consumers tip for services ranging from baggage handlers at the airport to housekeepers at hotels. But according to some analysts, tipping has created an environment where restaurant servers are subjected to sexual harassment and low pay.

About 70% of tipped workers in the restaurant industry are women and about 45% are people of color. In a recent study by One Fair Wage and UC Berkeley’s Food Labor Research Center over 78% of restaurant workers reported witnessing hostile behavior from customers who were asked to follow Covid-19 safety protocols, more than 40% noticed a change in the frequency of unwanted sexual comments from customers and 83% said their tips had declined during the pandemic.

With Covid-19 leaving millions to do essential work for low pay there have been renewed calls for a $15 minimum wage and the elimination of the tipped minimum wage — the base salary for many restaurant workers. Forty three states, including Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, have a tipped minimum wage for workers who in some cases are paid as little as $2.13 an hour by their employer.

But many in the full-service restaurant industry oppose the proposed changes, saying they would lead to higher menu prices and fewer hours for workers. According to the National Restaurant Association, the pandemic has already enacted a devastating toll on the industry, wiping out 2.5 million restaurant jobs and more than 110,000 eating and drinking establishments in 2020 alone. Watch the above video to find out what the $15 minimum wage and the elimination of the tipped minimum wage would mean for restaurants and their employees.

Society: Sleep Industry Helps Consumers “Sleep Less, More Productively” As Their Health Worsens

From a The Architectural Review online article (April 9, 2020):

The Long Sleep by Briton RiviereThe sleep industry caters to a working consumer’s wish to sleep less, yet sleep more productively, and accommodates transnational industry which has joined the state as a custodian of biopolitics. Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 spells out in detail how the state and a capitalist economy are encroaching stupendously on the private sphere, in which sleep was one of the last vestiges of unfettered time.

About 15 years ago, someone calculated the financial loss US companies incurred through workers’ illicit practice of sleeping on the job. Indeed, the trope of the lazy sleeper is an old one, resignified at present in our more than callous attitude towards the homeless, whose sleeping bodies punctuate many a journey to and from work.

Even in this most passive stance – someone simply disregarding normative codes and regulations by giving in to a physical need – sleep seems suspiciously subversive. Less an act than a way of being, the sleeper, by sleeping when and where it is not condoned, challenges everyone else, who is doing/working/functioning/functionalised. Contrary to the tree falling in the forest, the sleeper in the workplace or in public space affects and thus ever so slightly transforms those around them.

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