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At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)

The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,”

his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

If HR is such a vital component of American business, its tentacles reaching deeply into many spheres of employees’ work lives, how did it miss the kind of sexual harassment at the center of the #MeToo movement? And given that it did, why are companies still putting so much faith in HR

The simple and unpalatable truth is that HR isn’t bad at dealing with sexual harassment. HR is actually very good at it.

On The Office, Michael Scott once said of Toby, the Dunder Mifflin HR rep: “If I had a gun with two bullets, and I was in a room with Hitler, bin Laden, and Toby, I would shoot Toby twice.”

The retailer has emerged as one of the biggest winners of the pandemic. In August, Walmart announced a 9.3% rise in store sales and a 97% rise in e-commerce.

Walmart began rolling out the plan – called the Great Workplace program in 2019 – but its introduction to several stores was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic

Just 165,000 employees out of Walmart’s 1.5m workforce are expected to receive pay raises.

Yes, the machines are getting smarter, and they’re coming for more and more jobs.Not just low-wage jobs, either.Today, machines can process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. They can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations with appropriate emotional tenor.

Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. In applications around the world, software is being used to predict whether people are lying, how they feel and whom they’ll vote for.

Most of what we think of as expertise, knowledge and intuition is being deconstructed and recreated as an algorithmic competency, fueled by big data

wearables can serve another purpose — determining whether you’re a productive employee. The data-obsessed may be quick to embrace such an assessment, but what if an employer has access to that information as well?

The researchers say their mobile-sensing system, which consists of fitness bracelets, sensors and a custom app, can measure employee performance with about 80 percent accuracy.

The system monitors physical and emotional signals that employees produce during the day and uses that data to create a performance profile over time that is designed to eliminate bias from evaluations

But like the sports star, many of us have been stuck in situations that were detrimental to our mental health — at work or in our personal lives — feeling torn between societal expectations and self-preservation.

Her decision to avoid the press did not go over well with tennis officials. Ms. Osaka was fined $15,000, and the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments — the Australian, French and United States Opens, and Wimbledon — threatened to expel her from the French Open.

A survey of over 5,000 employees conducted last year by the advocacy group Mental Health America found that 83 percent of respondents felt emotionally drained from work and 71 percent strongly agreed that the workplace affects their mental health. While the respondents were not representative of the general population — they most likely found the survey when visiting the organization’s mental health screening tools — their responses show just how anxious some workers have become.

Workplace mass shootings are rare, but the killing of eight people by a fellow employee at a Northern California rail yard on Wednesday marks the third such rampage in under two months.

That could foreshadow a rise in this type of violence after the nationwide shutdown of businesses due to the COVID-19 pandemic, says Jaclyn Schildkraut, associate professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Oswego.

Another reason we may see more workplace attacks is that potential perpetrators, who've likely been in isolation over the last year, have had time to plan, Schildkraut notes. "One of the things that we know about shooters, especially those who target schools or other specific public spaces, is that they don't usually wake up and snap."

As President Donald Trump pleaded for the support of suburban women at a Michigan rally Tuesday evening (amidst a pandemic and economic crisis that have caused a mass exodus of women from the workforce), he argued that he deserved their votes because "we're getting your husbands back to work."

rump's assumption that all women have -- or should have -- husbands is also terribly retrograde and offensive and will almost certainly be off-putting to single women (among others

Biden's support among White women (the ones Trump is clearly angling for when he says "suburban") is 18 points higher than that of Hillary Clinton when she ran against Trump four years ago. But, with these latest remarks, the President has probably put the final nail in his own reelection chances with many women voters.

As ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence programs infiltrate workplaces, white-collar jobs are transforming the fastest.

The biggest workplace challenge so far this year across industries is how to adapt to the rapidly evolving role of AI in office work, they say.

according to a new study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and OpenAI, most jobs will be changed in some form by generative pretrained transformers, or GPTs, which use machine learning based on internet data to generate any kind of text, from creative writing to code. 

many American families crave flexibility, especially as traditional gender roles of mothers and fathers continue to blur.

more Americans chase the elusive work-life balance. Nearly equal shares of working mothers and fathers report that they feel stressed about juggling work and family life

In 1990, the United States had the sixth-highest share of women in the work force among 22 developed countries, with 74 percent of women ages 25 to 54 working. But by 2010, the share of American women working dropped to 17th place, with slightly more than 75 percent of women working compared to 80 percent outside the country

men at the venture firm essentially told Ms. Pao: “Speak up — but don’t talk too much. Light up the room — but don’t overshadow others. Be confident and critical — but not cocky or negative.”

Self-promotion is essential in venture capital, because individual partners take credit for successful deals to get promotions, board seats and payouts. But the double standard exists in all jobs

women who speak directly about their strengths and talents and who credit themselves instead of others for achievements were considered more capable. But they were also thought to be less socially attractive and hirable, in a series of experiments in which study participants interviewed people to be their partner in a competitive game.

A 2013 study found that many workers in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead to poorer work performance. Nearly half of the surveyed workers in open offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem for them and more than 30 percent complained about the lack of visual privacy.

“the loss of productivity due to noise distraction … was doubled in open-plan offices compared to private offices.

benefits in building camaraderie simply mask the negative effects on work performance. While employees feel like they’re part of a laid-back, innovative enterprise, the environment ultimately damages workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction.

Although she's not a household name in the United States, billionaire Luiza Trajano, the richest woman in Brazil, might very well become one soon if her radical new model to confront structural racism takes hold.

Its coveted trainee program, long considered a major stepping stone into Brazil's corporate world, will now only admit Black Brazilians into its ranks in an effort to upend a system that oftentimes sidelines Brazilians of African heritage from rising up the corporate ladder.

The Magalu announcement quickly reverberated across the Brazilian media landscape. It was a bold move, no doubt, but not one without blowback; there have been calls across social media for a boycott of the company's stores.

DiAngelo, who is 63 and white, with graying corkscrew curls framing delicate features, had won the admiration of Black activist intellectuals like Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” who praises the “unapologetic critique” of her presentations, her apparent indifference to “the feelings of the white people in the room.”

“White Fragility” leapt onto the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, and next came a stream of bookings for public lectures and, mostly, private workshops and speeches given to school faculties and government agencies and university administrations and companies like Microsoft and Google and W.L. Gore & Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex.

As outraged protesters rose up across the country, “White Fragility” became Amazon’s No. 1 selling book, beating out even the bankable escapism of the latest “Hunger Games” installment. The book’s small publisher, Beacon Press, had trouble printing fast enough to meet demand; 1.6 million copies, in one form or other, have been sold

Women are bankrolling political campaigns this year more than ever, driven by their rising rank in the workplace, boosts in women’s wealth, and networks set up to gather their donations and bolster their influence.

Forty-three percent of all reported contributions to federal candidates for this election have come from women,

The increase is especially pronounced on the left, with the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton galvanizing female donors. S

The Democrats are a class party; it’s just that the class in question is not the one we think it is. It’s not working people, you know, middle class. It’s the professional class. It’s people with advanced degrees. They use that phrase themselves, all the time: the professional class.

What is the professional class?The advanced degrees is an important part of it. Having a college education is obviously essential to it. These are careers based on educational achievement. There’s the sort of core professions going back to the 19th century like doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, but nowadays there’s many, many, many more and it’s a part of the population that’s expanded. It’s a much larger group of people now than it was 50 or 60 years ago thanks to the post-industrial economy. You know math Ph.Ds that would write calculations on Wall Street for derivative securities or like biochemists who work in pharmaceutical companies. There’s hundreds of these occupations now, thousands of them. It’s a much larger part of the population now than it used to be. But it still tends to be very prosperous people

there’s basically two hierarchies in America. One is the hierarchy of money and big business and that’s really where the Republicans are at: the one percent, the Koch brothers, that sort of thing.

a closer look at the forces that drive the relentless pace at elite companies suggests that — however much the most sought-after employers in the country may be changing their official policies — brutal competition remains an inescapable component of workers’ daily lives. In some ways it’s getting worse.

the basic problem is that the rewards for ascending to top jobs at companies like Netflix and Goldman Sachs are not just enormous, they are also substantially greater than at companies in the next tier down. As a result, far more people are interested in these jobs than there are available slots, leading to the brutal competition

Grueling competition remains perhaps the defining feature of the upper echelon in today’s white-collar workplace.

FOR many Americans, life has become all competition all the time. Workers across the socioeconomic spectrum, from hotel housekeepers to surgeons, have stories about toiling 12- to 16-hour days (often without overtime pay) and experiencing anxiety attacks and exhaustion. Public health experts have begun talking about stress as an epidemic.

The people who can compete and succeed in this culture are an ever-narrower slice of American society: largely young people who are healthy, and wealthy enough not to have to care for family members

An individual company can of course favor these individuals, as health insurers once did, and then pass them off to other businesses when they become parents or need to tend to their own parents. But this model of winning at all costs reinforces a distinctive American pathology of not making room for caregiving.