Friday Faves - What We're Reading This Week - Ripple Effect Group

Friday Faves is our weekly blog series highlighting a few select pieces from the REG team’s reading lists. You can catch up on past Friday Faves on the archive.

Business scents: the rise of digital olfaction

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Anne says: I have a confession. I was once on the receiving end of a very clever (I thought) April Fool’s Day joke that related to digital scents. I even downloaded the app that was going to allow my phone to emit aromatherapy scents by scratching the screen. I know, I know – I was right there, about to scratch the screen and my sensible brain kicked in… what was I thinking??

A number of years on, I’m still skeptical of digital scents. However, after reading this article, I’m starting to relax, a little. This article describes two emerging fields of digital olfaction (the action of smelling) and their use cases may become game changers in so many industries. A key element to these fields of study is the need for collaboration across a diverse range of scientific disciplines such as organic chemistry, silicon engineering, machine learning, data science, photonics, and software engineering – to name a few. The manner in which these disciplines are combined to produce smells that people recognise or can describe – like baking bread, is fascinating.

The key breakthroughs, in my opinion, will be in the health and safety, medical fields. The example used describes digital olfaction in food industries to evaluate the quality control, like detecting salmonella. Of course, there’s the commercial application where your fridge will tell you that the milk is about to go off, but that feels gimmicky in comparison to the broader industrial usage.

The health industry and reduction of environmental impact from industry will have breathtaking (‘scuse the pun) results across so many applications, from noxious gases to breathing into your smartphone for early detection of disease (like COVID19).

I was relieved to note that the transmission of digital scents is still in early days and not showing as much success. No surprises for me.

Please read this article – there’s so much to absorb in this emerging field that I haven’t had the space to mention. And for now, don’t bother downloading any apps promising aromatherapy scents through your screens, they don’t work!

Read: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/business-scents-the-rise-of-digital-olfaction/

3 ways to encourage informal communication in a hybrid workplace

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Jakkii says: One of the biggest challenges of being remote is often informal communication, that random chit chat and casual socialising that seems to come quite naturally when you’re all co-located and working from the office. It’s an important aspect of work that serves a number of functions, helping us build relationships – notably with people outside our immediate teams. Naturally, being in a hybrid workplace doesn’t remove this challenge, and in fact adds its own concerns, trying to balance the dual nature and experience of work between in-person and remote.

This article first discusses how to plan for unplanned conversation, then offers three suggestions for encouraging that informal communication in your hybrid workplace. These are:

Create opportunities for magic to happen in person and on video
Provide personalised training
Set clear expectations

In a lot of ways, this is one of those articles where the advice might seem obvious once we read it. Sometimes we need someone else to step these things out to remind us that there’s no magic bullet, and that what we’re doing is what we should be doing, and that we just need to stick with it. And, of course, other times something might seem obvious to ourselves, but it turns out to have been anything but for someone else. And for both of those reasons, I think this article is worth a read, as informal communication is so important both to getting work done and to our sense of connection, engagement and belonging as employees. Make sure you’re planning how to allow these unplanned moments to happen as best you can in your hybrid workplaces.

Read: https://www.fastcompany.com/90634744/3-ways-to-encourage-informal-communication-in-a-hybrid-workplace

Friday Fives

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Future of work

Remote work and the digital workplace

Communication, collaboration, engagement, and culture

Community management, moderation and misinformation

Privacy and data

Big Tech

Extras

me deleting the oxford comma from a post so it meets the character limit pic.twitter.com/RkTYwzLyBz

— girlboss don biggaveli (@rwxoxo) August 7, 2017

This is interesting: Meet the woman who will decide what emoji we get to use

Things that make you go hmmm: The 60-year-old scientific screwup that helped covid kill

Space: A whole new moon: what lunar living will look like in 100 years

Podcast: Me, Myself & AI podcast – Designing a better future: Mastercard’s JoAnn Stonier

Friday playlist: Well, not a playlist this week, but a book list: 50 amazing new nonfiction books to read