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. 

When did you last clean your mobile?

Anne says: Warning – this is pretty gross!

A study conducted by Lotti Tajouri, Associate Professor of Genomics and Molecular Biology at Bond University, might make you rethink how frequently (if at all) you clean your mobile.

There’s been similar studies about how our hands transfer germs onto surfaces. But I don’t think I’ve seen one like this about how much of a petri dish our phones are. The video in the article follows Lotti Tajouri as he washes his hands, then touches his phone and where he contaminates surfaces. So while we’re all paying attention to washing our hands for 2 minutes and using alcoholic gels, we blow it all by picking up our mobiles and sharing our germs!!

There’s a couple of tips for cleaning mobiles – but the use of Ultraviolet C lights could become something we see in offices soon. A quick search on Amazon returned over 900 options – they’re not expensive and perhaps we’ll all start using them at home as well. If you’re curious about the best ones, take a look at this New York Times review of devices.

Read: https://theconversation.com/watch-our-mobile-phones-are-covered-in-bacteria-and-viruses-and-we-never-wash-them-167784

A futurist’s guide to preparing your company for constant change

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Jakkii says: we had a great chat in our Remote Working Meetup Group this morning about anxiety and fatigue, and how people’s overall resilience is really being tested at the moment – or, really, as it has been since the pandemic first began. I’d already selected this piece for this week before our catch up, but it just resonated that little bit more afterwards. While we’re in the midst of a state of flux in our lives with what feels like regularly moving goalposts and regular change with regard to what we are and are not allowed to do, it can be – and certainly feel – that much more difficult to grapple with change in the workplace, as well.

The time to prepare for change is not when it hits. It’s before it hits, and during times of relative calm. Reacting to change in the moment keeps you forever on the defensive, and the consequences can be severe.

And isn’t that kind of how things feel, lately? I think we’re really wearing the brunt of a lot of reacting in our lives, much of it outside our control. It may be more difficult to get on the front-foot during covid, but I think any approach to how we can be more prepared for constant change is useful, and that of course includes how we can best set our organisations and people up to be able to roll with the punches, so to speak, when it comes to change at work.

So what can we do? The author, April Rinne, suggests the following:

• Conduct a change audit
  This includes understanding your organisation’s barriers to dealing with change, such as team burnout, anxiety, a lack of trust, a “just deal with it” culture, and insufficient metrics.

• Put mindset before strategy
  This is about developing a ‘flux mindset’, i.e. a mindset geared for change, so that you are more equipped to view change as an opportunity for growth and development and set (or reset) your strategy from there.

• Clarify and reassess who is responsible for your organisation’s change-readiness
  You may find it useful to appoint a dedicated role, or add dedicated roles, to help support your change-readiness efforts into the future.

• Embed and integrate “fluxiness” into organizational culture
  ”At the broadest level, truly thriving in constant change means putting change at the core of what you do.” Get fluxy with it!

We may not all be responsible for preparing our company for constant change – or even feel we have much a voice in doing so. However, we do have the ability to manage our own mindset, and to influence our immediate teams, particularly as leaders. I think at least some of this approach is useful even at an individual and team level, though it would require concerted, sustained effort and may benefit from coaching and outside objective advice and soundboarding.

Read: https://hbr.org/2021/09/a-futurists-guide-to-preparing-your-company-for-constant-change

At home

man what the hell http://pic.twitter.com/PO2Ukr9VS1

— hoodie (@99Cooking) September 15, 2021

Jakkii says: when you’re not enjoying a picnic or a walk or some sort of friendship bubble (or much more, depending where you live!), here’s a few things you can watch, read & do from home this week to keep yourself occupied while you’re staying safe, and staying sane.

• Keep the gags coming: where to find your lockdown LOLs online

• Lockdown viewing: 13 shows to try if you’ve already watched everything

• Need cheering up? Here’s some comfort culture to binge on

• Spend some time finding out how to pronounce words in different languages on Forvo

• Go retro with oodles of old TV from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s.

• Get trivial again this week with oodles of online trivia! Isolation trivia tonight 6.30pm (& again on Sunday with Burger Urge), Trivia Livestream and Time for Trivia ($12) on Wed 29th, and Townie Music Trivia and 80s Music trivia on Thurs 30th. Good luck!

Friday Fives

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Hybrid workplace and the future of work

• Work in 2021: what has changed?

• Ready your organisation for a hybrid work model

• Telstra’s HR leader on hybrid work: ‘We’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible’

• Why workers might eventually reject hybrid work

• The role of communication in a hybrid workplace

Remote work and the digital workplace

• Your remote teammate isn’t disengaged, you just didn’t set them up for success

• Is your company any good at remote work?

• Slack is rolling out a Stories-like feature for sharing work updates

• Shadow IT can be your best friend in the digital workplace

• Lounge’s new app aims to reimagine the office for the remote work era

Communication, collaboration, engagement, and culture

• Josh Bersin’s employee experience (EX) framework for an irresistible organisation

• How remote teams keep their company culture alive

• The cure for burnout is not self-care

• How to turn your values into concrete organisational behaviours

• Employee experience strategy: six key moments when it comes to engaging your team

Community management, moderation and misinformation

• How Facebook hinders misinformation research

• ‘It’s almost like grooming’: how anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, and the far-right came together over COVID

• How to handle change in your community: 5 lessons from a change manager

• The three S’s of creating community connections

• How to choose the right community platform

Privacy, data and security

• A new app helps Iranians hide messages in plain sight

• Microsoft uncovers giant Phishing-as-a-Service operation

• How Hamburg became Europe’s unlikely data protection trailblazer

• The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

• Why employee surveillance software could do more damage than it’s worth

Big Tech, tech and regulation

• Microsoft is heading for a new antitrust showdown

• Facebook snubs SBS, The Conversation on media deals

• Tim Cook faces surprising employee unrest at Apple

• These deepfake voices can help trans gamers

• AI’s Islamophobia problem

Facebook

• The Facebook Files (and a response to this from Facebook’s Nick Clegg, “What the WSJ got wrong”)

• Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows

• Facebook grew Marketplace to 1 billion users. Now scammers are using it to target people around the world

• It’s getting harder for people to believe that Facebook is a net good for society

• No more apologies: inside Facebook’s push to defend its image

Social media

• What social media needs to learn from traditional media

• YouTube shares overview of its content recommendation systems, and the key factors that define reach

• How TikTok serves up sex and drug videos to minors

• The CIA’s least covert mission

• The influencer industry needs proper regulation to build trust and credibility

Extras

Me, after I win an argument. http://pic.twitter.com/F9LDQ2xyAA

— Dolly Parton (@DollyParton) September 16, 2021

This is interesting: Mathematicians discover music really can be infectious – like a virus

Things that make you go hmmm: Baby poop is loaded with microplastics

Space: Here’s a sneak peek at the far-out future of space travel

Podcast: Nature of Work Podcast Episode 4: Healing the broken frontline of work

Friday playlist: It’s good vibes only this week with this Good Vibes playlist

Finfluencers and TikTok financial advice on The Future, This Week Podcast

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This week: Finfluencers – more and more young people get their financial advice on TikTok and other social media platforms. Also, robot vacuums and pet poop AI and the epic #Epic #Apple battle comes to a temporary end.

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

10:27 – TikTok finfluencers offer financial advice

Listen: https://sbi.sydney.edu.au/finfluencers-and-tiktok-financial-advice-on-the-future-this-week/