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WSJ: The New Most Dreaded Word at Work: 'Hey'

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WSJ: The New Most Dreaded Word at Work: 'Hey'

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The New Most Dreaded Word at Work: ‘Hey’

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Instant messages with nothing more than a quick greeting—known as “hey hanging”—spark office anxiety. “Am I fired? Am I in trouble?”

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HBR: 5 Jerks at Work & How to Deal With Them

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HBR: 5 Jerks at Work & How to Deal With Them

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When we're new in the workforce, we're often forced to figure out how to climb up the ladder while managing a variety of "difficult personalities" with little or no preparation. In her book, Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them, author Tessa West profiles five specific difficult personalities that you're likely to encounter at the office. Though each "jerk" differs in terms of behavior patterns, they all have one core psychological trait: They threaten your sense of certainty and control at work - your ability to predict what your day-to-day looks like. Here are a few strategies around how to understand their inner workings and weak points, as well as effective ways to manage them.

The Kiss-Up / Kick-Down: Reach out to well-connected or seasoned workers at your organization - people who are aware of the office politics and reputations of other employees. Your goal is to build an understanding of how widespread the problem is and get the names of other potential victims whom you can follow up with. If you gather enough information, approach your boss.

The Credit Stealer: Credit stealing is best handled outside of the room where it occurs. Before your next meeting, get together with your peers and make a plan. Promise to echo the contributions each of you share and give credit where credit is due.

The Bulldozer: Prevent yourself from being bulldozed by learning how to "hold the floor" early on in a new role or organization. Small acts of leadership, like stepping up to spearhead a project or lead a presentation, will help establish your reputation as an authority figure among your team members. Once that label is in place, your actions and behaviors will carry much more weight.

Micromanager: Confrontation will be necessary, but there's an art to confronting a Micromanager. When you do approach your boss, don't lead with micromanagement like them. Rather, lead with a conversation about getting aligned on your big-picture goals.

Gaslighter: Record everything. Gaslighters are allergic to record keeping. Documenting their behavior serves as evidence of what the Gaslighter told you privately and in person. This forces them to confirm things in writing, making it more difficult for them to change the narrative later on.

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5 Jerks at Work and How to Deal with Them

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When we're new in the workforce, we're often forced to figure out how to climb up the ladder while managing a variety of "difficult personalities" with little or no preparation. In her book, Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them, author Tessa West profiles five specific difficult personalities that you're likely to encounter at the office.

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NYTimes: How a Virtual Assistant Taught Me to Appreciate Busywork

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NYTimes: How a Virtual Assistant Taught Me to Appreciate Busywork

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HBR: The Art of Asking Smarter Questions

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HBR: The Art of Asking Smarter Questions

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Idea in Brief

The Situation

With organizations of all sorts facing increased urgency and uncertainty, the ability to ask smart questions has become key. But business professionals aren't formally trained in that skill.

Why It's So Challenging

Managers' expertise often blinds them to new ideas. And the flow of questions can be hard to process in real time, so certain concerns and insights may never be raised.

The Remedy

Strategic questions can be grouped into five domains: investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective. By attending to each, leaders and teams are more likely to cover all the areas that need to be explored-and they'll surface information and options they might otherwise have missed.

As a cofounder and the CEO of the U.S. chipmaker Nvidia, Jensen Huang operates in a high-velocity industry requiring agile, innovative thinking. Reflecting on how his leadership style has evolved, he told the New York Times, "I probably give fewer answers and I ask a lot more questions....It's almost possible now for me to go through a day and do nothing but ask questions." He continued, "Through probing, I help [my management team]...explore ideas that they didn't realize needed to be explored."

A version of this article appeared in the May-June 2024 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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With organizations of all sorts facing increased urgency and unpredictability, being able to ask smart questions has become key. But unlike lawyers, doctors, and psychologists, business professionals are not formally trained on what kinds of questions to ask when approaching a problem. They must learn as they go.

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Sheena Iyengar studies how we make choices -- and how we feel about the choices we make. At TEDGlobal, she talks about both trivial choices (Coke v. Pepsi) and profound ones, and shares her groundbreaking research that has uncovered some surprising attitudes about our decisions.

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MarketWatch: Why It Pays Off to Be Kind at Work

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MarketWatch: Why It Pays Off to Be Kind at Work

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Welcome to the "Am I a Jerk at Work?" quiz! Each question is designed to assess how you would respond to a series of tricky, hypothetical workplace situations. At the end, you'll find out whether you're a Conniving Trickster, Classic Jerk, just Going Through the Motions-or have been an Ideal Coworker all along.

It can also be fun to take these quizzes from the perspective of someone else at work (how would your boss respond to these questions?). And if you're really bold, have your coworkers take it as if they were you. It can be a great way to see how others at work perceive you.

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Welcome to the "Am I a Jerk at Work?" quiz! Each question is designed to assess how you would respond to a series of tricky, hypothetical workplace situations. At the end, you'll find out whether you're a Conniving Trickster, Classic Jerk, just Going Through the Motions-or have been an Ideal Coworker all along.

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Who's watching?!?!

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Eurovision News about Countdown. Eurovision 2024 countdown: 100 days! What do we know so far?. Eurovision 2023 countdown: 100 days! What do we know so far?. Eurovision 2022 countdown: 100 days! What do we know so far?.

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Forbes: Job "Engagement" Scores Just Hit an 11-Year Low. 

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Forbes: Job "Engagement" Scores Just Hit an 11-Year Low. 

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A new Gallup analysis finds the biggest drop in worker engagement among both employees who work exclusively remote-and who work full-time office, but could do their jobs remotely.
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Return-to-office policies, poorly trained managers, "mental distance" from coworkers and few opportunities for growth are all likely contributors to employee engagement scores that have dropped to their lowest point in 11 years, a new Gallup analysis found-all as the job market remains strong but layoffs have risen and job openings have cooled in certain sectors.

The research and advisory firm, which tracks on an ongoing basis how involved employees are in their jobs, found that in the first quarter of 2024, worker engagement dropped three percentage points to 30% from the end of the year prior, representing 4.8 million fewer employees who are "engaged" in their work, the lowest since 2013.

"We're down to a level of engagement now that we saw 11 years ago after a decade of growth," says Jim Harter, Gallup's chief scientist of workplace and wellbeing. "That's disturbing." (The latest surveys were conducted in February of a random sample of more than 18,700 U.S. adults.)

Harter says some of the biggest drops came among the youngest age groups, as well as among employees with work arrangements on both ends of the flexibility spectrum. Gen Z workers, or those born after 1997 (but who were at least 18 in this survey) had the most pronounced fall-off in engagement, the analysis found, dropping six percentage points in the first quarter.

People who work remote exclusively-as well as those who work full-time in-office but in jobs that can be done remotely-also both saw sharp drops in engagement, falling five and six percentage points, respectively. Employees with hybrid work arrangements did not see as steep a drop in sentiment.

The data, Harter says, "suggest that physical distance is becoming mental distance, and then on the other end, people see others with remote-ready jobs who have flexibility and they don't. I think that's that's causing some disengagement." He adds "there's kind of a happy medium there that I think organizations need to get right."

The numbers reached a peak in 2020 amid the pandemic, Harter says, when 36% of workers were highly engaged in their jobs, which Gallup defines as being involved and enthusiastic about their work and workplace. Gallup measures worker sentiment on issues such as whether people feel they know what's expected of them, whether they have opportunities to grow and whether they feel connected to an organization's purpose.

On the latter question, workers who work fully onsite but in jobs that could be done remotely saw a significant drop, falling from 38% who agreed in 2021 to 32% early this year. These workers "have taken a big hit in engagement over time," Harter notes. "Honor autonomy, but build a framework for great clarity and collaboration led by a manager who coaches."

So far, it does not appear that layoffs in certain sectors or lower quit rates are having an impact, Harter says. (In March, the U.S. added far more jobs than expected, and the unemployment rate dipped slightly, but separate reports show layoffs hit a 14-month high and the number of workers quitting their jobs has fallen.) "Generally, when we see the economy go down, it leads to lower levels of active disengagement," he says, referring to people who are more than just unenthusiastic about their jobs, but actually resentful of them, "because people have a tough time getting out of a bad job."

That's not yet showing up significantly in the "active disengagement" numbers, which remain stable from the fourth quarter of last year (17%). "That would tell me that the economy isn't at a point where people don't still have some choice."

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Job 'Engagement' Scores Just Hit An 11-Year Low. Gen Z's Fell The Most.

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A new analysis finds that poorly trained managers, return-to-office policies and few opportunities for growth are all likely contributors to worker engagement scores that have dropped to their lowest point in 11 years,.