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. 

What motivates you to learn?

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Anne says: This article is from one of my favourite researchers and writers, John Hagel III. If you completed any studies with me when I was lecturing at UTS, you’ll likely recall some of his readings (please don’t tell me if you don’t!). For me, this is not a new topic but as always, Hagel has taken a different angle on the problem of lifelong learning. While addressing the espoused theory: we all need to be lifelong learners if we want to succeed, he views it through a practical lens. Why aren’t people lifelong learners, and what are organisations doing about it?

Hagel looks at the issue by asking what motivates people to learn? From an organisational perspective, the assumption or modus operandi is fear – if you don’t learn, upskill, reskill, stay current, you’ll become obsolete and lose your job. Motivation to learn = fear of losing your job.

Yet, the research project explored this assumption further. And the findings? People who engaged in lifelong learning, who approached learning beyond the fear of losing your job had a passion for learning. The researchers called it: the passion of the explorer.

They found three key elements associated with the passion of the explorer:

1. Explorers have a long-term commitment to achieving impact in a specific domain that excites them

2. They are excited in the face of unexpected challenges. Explorers view these hurdles as an opportunity to learn and achieve even greater impact. In fact, if they’re not confronted with enough challenges, they get bored and seek environments that will give them more.

3. When confronted with new challenges, explorers have an immediate desire to seek out and connect with others who can help them get to better answers faster so that they can increase their impact.

The not so good news – only 14% of learners in their study (of 1500 people) demonstrated this passion. Why? The researchers believe that organisations do not encourage these sorts of behaviours in people, instead they quash people who ask questions, look at processes differently. They produce learning programs to replicate behaviours, processes – not challenge them.

How do we change? And why would organisations want to change? In our current environment, we’re already undergoing significant changes to the way we work. If we want to embed innovative mindsets and flexibility, then we need to motivate people to find their passion of the explorer. Hagel believes the opportunity is there – but we need to move away from cultivating fear towards cultivating passion.

It’s time to reconsider how our learning programs are motivating people. Fear or passion?

Read: https://hbr.org/2021/10/what-motivates-lifelong-learners

Rethinking assumptions about how employees work

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Jakkii says: As a team with research at the heart of everything we do, we’re not big on assumptions here at REG – although, of course, for a variety of reasons there are times you have to use your best educated and informed guesses instead. Yet, sometimes assumptions are inescapable, particularly in decision making, and that’s not necessarily a good thing:

…assumptions can also have a negative effect by preventing people from considering new ways of working. They can create biases that reinforce the status quo and reject creative innovations.

This article looks at 5 assumptions that, even 20 or so months into the pandemic, are still holding on when it comes to how people work. The post-pandemic world of work requires us to challenge those assumptions if we’re going to use this crisis nature of the pandemic as a catalyst for positive change, whether we are moving to hybrid or fully remote workforces or even having everyone return to the office.

The article takes a look at 5 major assumptions that need to be challenged (focused really on knowledge work), and for the most part, these honestly come down to managerial biases and concerns, and a failure as an organisation to support leaders in supporting their people through what work looks like when someone’s not at a desk and under your eye for 8 hours a day. More, what it looks like to lead and guide people while helping them manage their work and their outputs, and measuring individuals and teams on outcomes.

I would almost say this is more a call to arms for people who hold any of these ‘assumptions’ to challenge their inherent beliefs about their people and about work, and consider both how employees might work now as well as how they might work in the future. How, as leaders, can we best empower and support our employees, wherever they might be working? How do I, as a leader, learn to shift my thinking on performance and productivity from hours at desk with my literal oversight, to performance and productivity based on outcomes and deliverables?

As always, if you’d like to talk more about different ways of working and the future of work, get in touch! We’d love to hear from you.

Read: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/rethinking-assumptions-about-how-employees-work/

At home

This the greatest Halloween decoration I’ve ever seen…. http://pic.twitter.com/V4G5kS5le0

— Jordan🥴 (@Idontknowyoucuh) October 15, 2021

Jakkii says: it’s the end of October! That month just flew by, didn’t it? It’s Halloween this weekend to cap the month off spooktacularly – if you’re decorating or dressing up, I’d love to see pictures of your costumes and decorations! Share them with me in the comments or on social media. And, of course, here’s a few things you can read and do from home this week.

• Visit Gourdlandia from home, and see the incredible art they make out of gourds!

• Find out how to make an authentic cup of matcha

• Sick of overly complicated wikipedia articles? Try the Simple English Wikipedia! Also great for kids.

• Learn how to create a TikTok trend

• Missing the beautiful nonsense that is corporate jargon by not being in the office? Try this tech BS generator!

• Exercise those brain cells online with Isolation Trivia (tonight, 6.30pm QLD time) and Townie Music Trivia (Thursday, 8pm NSW time).

Friday Fives

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Hybrid workplace and the future of work

• This is what hybrid work looks like in action

• Creating flex work policies … when everyone has different needs

• The next step in hybrid work? Making it truly exceptional

• Employees are designing the workplace of the future

• Cluster commuters: how returning to the office could change our cities and our lives

Remote work and the digital workplace

• Research: cameras on or off?

• How to stay sane while working remotely

• Governing your digital workplace with some big questions

• The collective intelligence of remote teams

• Remote leadership: which style suits you?

Communication, collaboration, engagement, and culture

• A ‘net purpose score’ is a better way to measure employee engagement

• A TikTok-famous elderly pug is a mascot for the burned-out masses

• What’s your return on visibility?

• A leader’s words can change a culture

• Employee experience is more important than ever

Community management, moderation and misinformation

• Facebook admits site appears hardwired for misinformation, memo reveals

• Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation

• A contrarian take on the disinformation panic

• How to give soul to your community

• Evaluating the effectiveness of deplatforming as a moderation strategy on Twitter

Privacy and data

• Australian Online Privacy Bill to make social media age verification mandatory for tech giants, Reddit, Zoom, gaming platforms

• UK ministers face High Court battle over WhatsApp use

• TikTok dodges questions about biometric data collection in Senate hearing

• Want hybrid work to succeed? Trust, don’t track, employees

• Data privacy: giving power to the people

Big Tech, tech and regulation

• Facebook says it’s refocusing company on ‘serving young adults’

• In hearing with Snap, TikTok and YouTube, lawmakers tout new rules to protect kids online

• Vox Media has built a visual way to experience podcasts. It’s accessible to deaf audiences — and gorgeous

• Spotify adds virtual merch tables for music artists in pact with Shopify

• Bitcoin is still concentrated in few hands, study finds

Facebook

• The Facebook Papers: What you need to know about the trove of insider documents

• How Facebook shapes your feed

• The indisputable harm caused by Facebook

• Facebook was born, lives and thrives in scandal. It’s been lawless for years

• How to fix Facebook, according to Facebook employees

Social media

• The “ghost stores” of Instagram

• Trump’s social network won’t give him what he wants most

• Reddit says it wants to build the biggest creator economy on the internet using its own NFT platform

• What happens when an influencer wants to retire? These ones found someone to replace them

• Cuban memers are using sarcasm to avoid jail time

Extras

Idk who needs to hear this but throw away that box your iPhone came in. You don’t need it. You will never need it

— 𝒹ℯℯ ꨄ (@DeegashK) October 15, 2021

This is interesting: Carbon-capturing sunglasses offer a view of fashion’s future

Things that make you go hmmm: The yodeler who sued Yahoo

Space: Inside the experiment to create Mars on Earth

Podcast: The Decade of Courage – time for workplace change that matters

Friday playlist: Make it stop!

Sydney Business Insights – The Future, This Week Podcast

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This week: the podcast about podcasts, how Spotify’s ambitions might change podcasts forever, plus LinkedIn getting out of China and Norway’s EVs in other news.

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

00:00 – What is Spotify doing to podcasts?

Listen: https://sbi.sydney.edu.au/what-spotify-is-doing-to-podcasts-on-the-future-this-week/