Group items tagged

very interesting article on morality of linking to platforms or articles that might engage in racist or certain harassment behaviors and when to not link anymore

Fascinating article on Baylor research on how internal social networking sites supported and managed within the workplace helps newcomers (younger people usually) to connect and learn from each other, interact directly with more senior people, and inadvertently cause problems for middle managers who did not want to mentor new hires and who did not necessarily have the social/technology proficiencies to participate in the SNS, Science Daily, 1/29/2013. Their conclusions showed that a "company can improve morale and reduce turnover." Researchers are Hope Koch, Baylor, Dorothy Leidner, Ph.D., Ferguson Professor of Information Systems at Baylor; and Ester Gonzalez from Washington State University. Excerpt: he study centered on a financial institution's efforts to reduce IT employee turnover by starting a social and work-related online networking site. Under the supervision of executives, the IT new hires developed and managed the site's content. Since most new hires had moved hundreds of miles to start their new jobs with the institution, they initially used the social pages as an introduction to the community. After a year or so with the organization, the more senior new hires began using the system to acclimate and mentor incoming new hires. All study respondents worked in the institution's IT department and included new hires, middle managers and executives. With less than three years of experience, most new hires and interns were men between 21 and 27 years old. The middle managers and executives were baby boomers or members of generation X. The internal social networking site helped the new hires build social capital in several ways, according to Koch. "It gave them access to people who could provide useful information and new perspectives and allowed them to meet more senior new hires and executives. These relationships set the new hires at ease during work meetings, helped them understand where to go for help and increased their commitment to the financial

got to this through Stephen Downes's Daily. This blog by Tim Rayner makes a distinction between sharing and gifting on social networks. He considers gifting as sharing with a purpose. Mindful sharing as opposed to sharing for sharing's sake. His argument is that gifting is the real power of social networks.

blog post by Jennifer Gilhool, 6.4.2013 "You are connected to work 24/7. You don't need your lap top to be connected. You are connected via BlackBerry, iPhone and iPad to name just a few. These devices no longer provide flexibility. Instead, they tether you to the office. They enable you to work all the time and anywhere. And, now, many companies believe that is the definition of flexibility: "'What flexibility means today is not part time,' the head of work-life at one large organization told me recently. 'What people want is the ability to work anytime, anywhere.' That's true if your target labor pool is twenty-somethings and men married to homemakers. The head of HR at another large organization asked, when I described the hours problem, 'What do you mean, how can we get women to work more hours?'" - Why Men Work So Many Hours, Joan C. Williams, May 29, 2013 Harvard Business Review Why Your Manager Doesn't Want You To Innovate Ron Ashkenas Ron Ashkenas Contributor LinkedIn: Busting 8 Damaging Myths About What It Can Do For Your Career 85 Broads 85 Broads Contributor Someone has taken the "human" out of "Human Resources" departments across America. And, this behavior is not limited to operations in America. I work for a multi-national corporation that cannot seem to wean itself from the 24 hour work day. Colleagues in China often begin their day with a 6:00 a.m. meeting and end it with a meeting that begins at 10:00 p.m. or, worse, 11:00 p.m. To combat this problem, the company leadership agreed to a global meeting policy. The policy provides that global meetings should occur only between the hours of 6:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. and that no meetings should occur on Friday nights in Asia Pacific. Further, the policy provides a 10 hour fatigue rule. In other words, there should be 10 hours between your last meeting of the day and your first meeting on the next day. First, if you need a global meeting policy, you are in

An amazing interview with Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, July 2013 Highlights: What is your area of expertise as a writer or online publisher? I'm not an expert and I aspire never to be one. As Frank Lloyd Wright rightly put it, "An expert is a man who has stopped thinking because 'he knows.'" Brain Pickings began as my record of what I was learning, and it remains a record of what I continue to learn - the writing is just the vehicle for recording, for making sense. That said, one thing I've honed over the years - in part by countless hours of reading and in part because I suspect it's how my brain is wired - is drawing connections between things," "Do you believe in "writer's block"? If so, how do you avoid it? I think the operative word here is "believe." If you fixate on it, it'll be there. It's kind of like insomnia - the more you think about not being able to fall asleep, the less able to fall asleep you become. It's different for everyone, of course, but I find that you break through that alleged "block" simply by writing. As Tchaikovsky elegantly put it, "A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood." The writer's creativity … Define creativity. The ability to connect the seemingly unconnected and meld existing knowledge into new insight about some element of how the world works. That's practical creativity. Then there's moral creativity: To apply that skill towards some kind of wisdom on how the world ought to work."