We are back with the latest roundup of the trends and news shaping the future of work. This week, our pulse check will cover Oracle and Intel layoffs, the release of Places, new solutions for hybrid work, and a few simple practices leaders can adopt to ensure an agenda theater is not ruining their meetings.
To keep track of workplace trends and discussions, check out the previous episodes of our digest. To prepare your team for the future of work which will stay digital-first, and flexible without seeing corporate culture disintegrate, take a look at oVice – a virtual office platform for remote and hybrid teams.
Layoffs
SurveyMonkey parent Momentive Global lays off 11% of workforce | TechCrunch
According to TechCrunch, the company announced the lay-off in an 8-K filed on October 13. The company also created a spreadsheet where laid-off employees voluntarily shared their contact info to get more recruiting visibility.
2. Oracle continues to lay off staff in the US | CIO
The company laid off over 200 employees across multiple departments – engineering, product, marketing, and others. A recent wave of layoffs, effective starting October, is the second one for Oracle which had also trimmed its US workforce in August.
3. Intel Is Planning Thousands of Job Cuts in Face of PC Slump | Bloomberg
For the first time in over 5 years, the company is reportedly laying off thousands of employees, with marketing and sales departments affected the hardest. The chipmaker might be making this decision due to a steep decline in year-on-year revenue revealed in the company’s quarterly report.
4. Laid-off Snap employees are fielding dozens of messages from TikTok, Facebook, and Netflix recruiters | INSIDER
While big tech names keep trimming their headcount, recruiters are trying to get ahold of top talent who are now back on the market. According to a post by INSIDER, employees laid off by Snap last month have no shortage of interest – up to the point of having over 70 offers lined up.
Remote and hybrid work
1. With Places, Microsoft aims to help companies better manage hybrid work setups | TechCrunch
Microsoft has announced the rollout of Places – a solution designed to help hybrid workplace managers “optimize the use of physical space”. The platform gives leaders an instant view of a teammate’s schedule and offers helpful suggestions on the meetings that work better in-person and those that can stay remote.
2. Remote work isn’t hurting our mental well-being. The lack of work-life boundaries is | Fortune
What if the talk about remote work being stressful and work-life balance slipping through the cracks is overblown and exaggerated? Office proponents are often missing a simple truth – remote workers would have more room to fight isolation and interact with the outside world if they learned to set boundaries and unplug.
3. In Hybrid Work, Don’t Rely on Just One Aspect of Productivity | SHRM
The “productivity paranoia” is among the newest buzzwords coined by Microsoft, whose research showed how little trust managers have in their reports and how the desire to control the work environments results in higher stress and lower efficiency. How should leaders get better at managing remote and hybrid teams? The key might be in focusing on building connections inside the team – and productivity will follow.
4. Success With Hybrid Work Demands HR Involvement: 5 Ways To Build Effective Partnerships | Forbes
The adjustment to the workplace of the future creates a lot of unseen before challenges – which schedule is right, how do you build culture without seeing each other, how to make sure people don’t feel isolated? The answers to these questions often lead to HR departments, making cross-department relationships between human resources and other teams essential to an organization’s success.
Leadership and team management
1. Is Agenda Theater Ruining Your Meetings? | Harvard Business Review
In theory, creating a meeting agenda should help leaders make the most of everyone’s time and quickly deal with matters at hand. Realistically, all the time spent preparing agendas rarely justifies the outcome, making meeting plans the very evil they were supposed to obliterate.
2. A Disengaged Workforce Is a Harbinger of a Toxic Workplace Culture | Inc.com
Workplaces that run low on enthusiasm and engagement are not highly creative nor productive – yet they are the ones 60% of Americans work at. While managers acknowledge the problem, they don’t have actionable ways to address concerns and alleviate stress. Putting together an action plan for fighting employee disengagement and acting on it might be one of the most productive ways to transform your team.
3. Don’t rush your hiring process | Unleash
Recession or not, the job market is still tight, which makes hiring a lot harder. As they chase talent, HR managers might want to get someone to accept their offer as soon as possible – yet, according to Unleash, that is a misstep.
4. Changes to feedback at work have been accelerated by the pandemic | Quartz
“How can we get better at getting better?” is the question Cassie Werber, the host of Work Reconsidered asks in the latest podcast episode. Workplace feedback is important – it can encourage people and lift their spirits or become a profound growth catalyst and help us improve. How can leaders make sure they get the art and science of feedback right?
Workplace trends
1. Why Gen Z are right to be worried about money | BBC Worklife
You’ve heard the same tune for years: Gen Z is more pragmatic than other generations because they lived through the recession of the 2000s. In 2022, they are actively entering the workforce, but the financial future of the generation that is soon to dominate the market appears quite bleak.
2. People Still Quit Jobs, but More Office Workers Are Staying Put | Wall Street Journal
Last week we covered an article from Unleash that showed how, despite the economic cooldown, the Great Resignation is still ongoing. As much as this is the case, more workers are concerned about job security and holding tighter to their desks.
3. Forget the toxic boss, meet the toxic underlings | FT
Workplace bullying has been around for ages – people studied it, wrote articles about it, and featured it all over pop culture. In that stereotypical portrayal, bosses were the bullies. The tables may be about to turn as a new breed of a bully – an abusive underling – starts to emerge.
4. Mental Health in the Workplace: Why Telehealth Is So Important | Entrepreneur
For centuries, the attention to healthcare benefits was drawn to physical health alone, with paid sick leave and insurance coverage. Mental health has largely been overshadowed – but, as jobs get more draining, employers can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to their team’s mental well-being.
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