Tag: Workplace Dynamics

Producing Various and Sundry

Freakonomics asks, “What makes a good boss?”

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I came across Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s “Eleven Laws of Showrunning” in the context of the entertainment industry not having the best management training for showrunners, the creative captains who steer a narrative show through all aspects of pre-production, production, and post-production. One of the notions raised in yesterday’s post was the fact that, well, a lot of people in a lot of industries are promoted to a management position… and the results are less than ideal.…

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Various and Sundry

A Savage Outlook on Work

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

A few weeks ago, I realized I could easily go back and re-watch a bunch of episodes of Mythbusters, which led to the natural rabbit hole of watching additional Mythbusters-related videos on YouTube which led to some of Adam Savage’s current YouTube videos originally recorded as a video/Patreon version of Reddit’s “Ask Me Anythings” (AMAs)… though, in truth, this seemed to be themed around work which, hey, works for my often work-focused Wednesday posts… This…

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Various and Sundry

Nuance on the trend of “Quiet Quitting”

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

Earlier this Fall, there was a flurry of posts, thought pieces, and assorted hand-wringing about “Quiet Quitting,” which sounded weird until I learned far too many people have been using the phrase to describe people doing their jobs, just not going above and beyond. To reference The Princess Bride, I don’t think “quitting” means what they think it means. In fact, I rather side with the people pushing back at hand-wringing over people doing what…

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Various and Sundry

Re-visiting the Four-Day Workweek

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

Part of the silver lining of experiencing a horrendous global pandemic has been people re-examining how they do things. I referenced Joe Pinsker’s article for The Atlantic last year, which is well worth a read if you haven’t checked it out already. Well, Alex Christian over at the BBC has an article exploring what’s going right, what’s going wrong, and some of the challenges of moving to a four-day workweek. The main issue is making…

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Various and Sundry

Time Off for Productive Behavior

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

In offices across the land, someone’s co-worker is making a remark that ‘it’s hump day.’ Wednesday. Just two more days after this. But what if the weekend was only one more day away? Joe Pinsker over at The Atlantic does a deep dive into the move by several companies to reduce working days (and hours) down to four, but keeping the pay that had been allocated for five: effectively giving their employees an immediate 20%…

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Various and Sundry

Jobs, Mental Health, and the Malasch Burnout Inventory

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

The CDC announcement last week that vaccinated people could go all maskless all sorts of places has led to the inevitable realization for many of us that, “Oh, yeah. I guess we might be back in an office this summer.” But even before then, I’m sure many of us have been contemplating more about what we want out of a job — along with wondering what is up with Zoom today. So I found this…

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Various and Sundry

More About Work as Religion

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

Continuing this week’s series of video posts, I came across this video from The Atlantic that touches back to an earlier article I linked to about work becoming people’s faith. I’ve long been interested in work-life balance and finding joy or at least satisfaction in work, perhaps because, as mentioned in the video below, conventional wisdom is no longer satisfied with jobs or, to a certain extent, no longer even satisfied with careers. No, it…

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Various and Sundry

Time, Autonomy, and Value Found in Work

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I recently read an article by Kara Baskin about a 2016 workplace study. The professors (from MIT and the University of Minnesota) were experimenting with elements of the oft-invoked, but not always defined “work-life balance.” The link above is to the article, not the study itself and is worth the quick read, even if the conclusions don’t necessarily come as a shocker. For example, having more control over one’s schedule including to be able to…

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