for W3c validation

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. 

The perfect number of hours to work every day? Five

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Jakkii says: Despite the headline, this actually takes a look and some of the pros and cons of moving to shorter days, including where it’s worked well, such as reducing time per package to ship in a warehouse, and where it falls short, such as in increasing stress as you try to fit more work into less time and a reported negative impact on culture, loyalty and relationships.

Further, it points out that not all job types are suitable for five hour work days, or even need them. Not all jobs require the kind of deep focus that tends to peter out at around the 5 hour mark, and in some job types people are needed in order to do the tasks over longer periods, such as providing aged care or health services.

In general, the article lends itself to the idea that flexibility and choice is the best move, allowing people where possible to create a work schedule that suits their needs both on a jobs-to-be-done basis and on a personal, work-life balance basis. However, as the article points out, that does risk exacerbating inequalities between work types – e.g. between desk-based and frontline workers – that already exist. I’m not sure that’s avoidable, to be honest, but it is something we should always be aware of, and something that the pandemic really drove home with regards to who could just simply work from home and who could not.

Either way, the answer for your team(s) may not be a 5 hour work day, but it might look different to how it used to. Perhaps it might be a different type of hybrid model, as one organisation from the article uses, where staff work two short days and three longer days a week. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Read: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/working-day-time-five-hour

Follow this simple 5-step process to transform your luck to become more creative

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Do you notice all of the unexpected opportunities that reveal themselves throughout the day? What might your career, business, or life look like if you did?

Jakkii says: This quote gets at the heart of this article – what can you do to improve your “luck” when it comes to being more creative, whether in problem-solving or in being innovative? According to the author, it’s to follow these 5 steps to allow you to identify opportunities and take them to allow you to be more creative and more innovative.

These steps are:

1. Diagnose your beliefs

   1. Behavioural beliefs, such as “I can’t be sure it will work.”

   2. Control beliefs, such as “I’m not an entrepreneur or innovator.”

   3. Normative beliefs, such as “My colleagues or friends would laugh.”

2. Be willing to choose your beliefs

3. Feel the cost of not acting

4. Assess the payoff

5. Choose a new belief

In the end, this is all about understanding what your fears and concerns are (diagnosing your beliefs) so that you can move through them and eventually reframe your thoughts (choose a new belief) to something that allows you to more readily see and act upon the opportunities that present themselves. That way, instead of not seeing the ad that told you to stop counting (or seeing it with a belief of ‘I can’t be sure this is true’), you will see your opportunity to make your own luck and be able to act accordingly.

Read: https://www.fastcompany.com/90648241/follow-this-simple-5-step-process-to-transform-your-luck-become-more-creative

Friday Fives

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Hybrid workplace

• Hybrid working isn’t a halfway house, it’s a whole new future of work

• Figure out the right hybrid work strategy for your company

• Let’s keep meetings virtual after Covid

• New hybrid work innovations in Microsoft Teams Rooms, Fluid, and Microsoft Viva

• How effective is your learning culture in the hybrid world of work?

Remote work and the digital workplace

• Switch to more home working after Covid ‘will make gender inequality worse’

• What is governance and why does it matter for the digital workplace?

• 15 useful and engaging types of intranet content and features

• Five ways to manage disengaged remote workers

• These startups are betting on a remote-first world

Communication, collaboration, engagement, and culture

• Empathy shouldn’t be optional in your workplace culture

• Don’t just put a rainbow on it. Build a culture rooted in authenticity and belonging

• Words and phrases to avoid in a difficult conversation

• 6 ways hybrid workspaces are changing communications

• Good tech beats free snacks: the new employee value proposition

Community management, moderation and misinformation

• The hidden cybersecurity risk in social media disinformation

• Facebook to update its community standards to clarify what it considers satire

• India’s healthcare workers are busting misinformation on WhatsApp

• Banning extreme views on YouTube really does help stop their spread

• Silicon Valley insiders want a new internet protection agency

Privacy and data

• International coalition joins the call to ban surveillance advertising

• All the ways Amazon tracks you—and how to stop it

• ‘Scambaiting’: why the vigilantes fighting online fraudsters may do more harm than good

• Nine out of 10 health apps harvest user data, global study shows

• Data sovereignty issues are complex but critical

Big Tech, tech and regulation

• Parties unite to deliver greater internet censorship powers to government-appointed official

• Big Tech has a battle ahead over antitrust regulation — and it’s going to get messy

• Progressives, moderate Democrats tussle over tech antitrust package

• Microsoft should face the same antitrust scrutiny as Facebook, Republican says

• How Twitter hired tech’s biggest critics to build ethical AI

Social media

• Social media data for social and behavioural research

• He had a worrying new rash. Reddit had the answers

• I’m scared of the person TikTok thinks I am

• On social media, Gen Z and Millennial adults interact more with climate change content than older generations

• David Dobrik was the king of YouTube. Then he went too far.

Extras

Parent: If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?

Machine Learning Model: yes

— Jordan Hall 💻 (@DivineOmega) June 20, 2021

This is interesting: New material inspired by spider silk could help solve our plastic problem

Things that make you go hmmm: The rise and fall of an American tech giant

Space: “being a billionaire is a lot harder than it looks”: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk want to burn their cash in space

Podcast: What anthropologists can teach us about work culture

Friday playlist: ‘I’m working through 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die’: Guardian readers’ WFH playlists

Sydney Business Insights – The Future, This Week Podcast

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This week: how COVID-19 reveals how the fashion industry predicts trends, and why the success of solar becomes a problem.

Sandra Peter (Sydney Business Insights) and Kai Riemer (Digital Disruption Research Group) meet once a week to put their own spin on news that is impacting the future of business in The Future, This Week.

The stories this week

09:26 – Predicting what are we going to wear?

18:20 – The dark side of solar power

Listen: https://sbi.sydney.edu.au/predicting-fashion-and-replacing-solar-on-the-future-this-week/