Remote Work Study Shows The Possibility Of A New Corporate Two-Class System

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By Jack Kelly

A recent UK study showed the results of working from home during the time period between 2011 and 2020. It looks like remote workers didn’t do too well.

Some of the takeaways include the following:

  • People who mainly worked from home were less than half as likely to be promoted.
  • Around 38% remote workers didn’t receive a bonus.
  • Telecommuters put in 6.0 hours of unpaid overtime on average per week in 2020 and homeworkers worked well into the evening.
  • The sickness absence rate for at-home was 0.9% on average in 2020.

The survey sadly indicates that remote workers felt the pressure and stress to put in more hours while not reaping the rewards. Although we’d like to believe that all at-home workers would be treated similarly to in-office employees, the study, and some basic understanding of human nature, points to inevitable differences in the treatment of the two groups of people.

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Four Ways Today’s Teams Are Making Us Lonely

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by Mark Mortensen

They say it’s lonely at the top. But in the workplace, even team members are feeling lonely.

Firms should see loneliness as an organizational issue, not a personal one. Aside from being associated with an array of health problems, loneliness reduces work performance and creativity. It also turns employees into poor decision makers. Firms with lonely employees can ill afford to ignore the problem. Especially when the problem is due in large part to the way teams are designed.

Through our executive education and consulting work, Constance Hadley and I had the opportunity to conduct two research studies on the link between social isolation and team design. We ran our first survey, which involved 223 global executives and managers, in December 2019 and January 2020, well before the pandemic-triggered a shift to work from home. The results surprised us. Even though these executives were part of an average of three teams at the time, 76 percent said they struggled to make connections with their teammates. More than half felt that their social relationships at work were superficial.

In April 2020, we sampled a different group of 275 global executives. Nearly three quarters of them were part of at least two teams. One fifth belonged to five teams or more. As work from home had started for most, feelings of loneliness and social isolation were common. But the findings of our first survey made one thing clear: Solving the problem wasn’t a matter of waiting for in-office work to resume. The pandemic merely highlighted issues brought about by work environments that have drastically changed in the last 30 years.

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12 common resume mistakes (and how to fix them)

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By Sarah K. White

Have you made any of these top resume mistakes? If so, take some time to revisit, review, and update your resume before you apply for your next job.

Writing a resume is not an easy task, no matter how long you’ve been in the game or how confident you are in your skills and experience. But there are steps you can take to make the process easier and turn your resume into a document that gets noticed for the right reasons.

If your resume isn’t getting the attention you want, there’s a good chance you’ve made at least one of these all-too-common mistakes.

1. Allowing inconsistencies

Even something as seemingly insignificant as your start dates not lining up correctly can raise a red flag for employers.

Review your resume to make sure that all the details match your other public profiles. For example, if you have certain dates for a job position on LinkedIn, make sure you have the same dates listed on your resume. The same goes with job titles, stick to your actual title and keep it consistent across all of your professional platforms. It’s a small oversight that might signal to employers you aren’t being entirely truthful on your resume or professional profiles.

Fix this mistake: Before you send out your resume, make sure all the information aligns with your LinkedIn profile and employment records.

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Getting Leadership Team Composition Right

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By Jack McGuinness

As we have mentioned in other articles, leadership teams are not and should not be like any other team in an organization. Knowingly or unknowingly, they create the conditions for their organizations to either thrive or flounder. Because the stakes are so high it is absolutely critical for CEOs to get the composition right.

Executives at many companies rise the ranks in large part because of their past accomplishments and functional expertise; sales results for the head of sales, successful product launches for the CMO, balance sheet and capital raises for the CFO, technological innovation for the CTO. Advancement is also often a reward for putting in hard work and years of service or forming the necessary political bonds with the right senior influencers. Functional track record, work ethic and relationship skills are important for any senior executive, but are insufficient when an executive is asked to be part of an effective senior leadership team.

Great leadership teams establish and steer an organization’s strategic direction and set the tone for how their organizations operate. In normal circumstances this is challenging work, but today’s uncertain and complex environment requires leadership teams to be much more than a collection of talented senior executives. To be successful, leadership teams have no other option than to leverage each other’s talent so they can navigate the uncertainty in a manner that fuels innovation, enables operational agility and inspires confidence.

So, what does it take to be a great leadership team member? In our experience and in speaking with many CEOs, there are four unique skills that all senior leaders must have or at least be working to develop to be great leadership team members. These are foresight, management of complexity, a greater good focus, and modeling values.

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7 business skills every IT leader needs to succeed

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By John Edwards

The days when CIOs could glide into a long-term career based solely on their technical abilities are rapidly fading.

“It’s no longer enough for IT leaders to be tech experts,” warns Bob Hersch, a principal at Deloitte Consulting. The best-in-class CIOs of today are also business savvy, using their knowledge to embed IT as a service capability.

“This business-centric approach integrates IT into an overall business strategy,” he adds.

The best way any IT leader can augment his or her current technical knowledge — and strengthen their long-term career prospects — is by committing to acquiring the following seven essential business skills.

1. An entrepreneurial mindset

CIOs, regardless of their organization’s size, have to act like entrepreneurs, operating with speed, agility, and ever higher levels of passion, empathy, and creativity, advises Ram Nagappan, CIO at global investment firm BNY Mellon Pershing.

Disruption is the new constant. “Competition is coming from all corners of the market, with fintechs and startups moving at light speed,” Nagappan says. To meet competition head on, CIOs must think like entrepreneurs and act as agents of change. “They need to constantly think about how their business could be disrupted at any point in time and how they can creatively deploy technology to get ahead of potential disruptors and future-proof the business,” he suggests.

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