Much has been said about the open office floor plan. The concept arose out of Silicon Valley and became a popular way to supposedly create “collaborative” work environments where innovation happens. Oh, and as an added bonus, companies saved a lot of money designing office spaces as open. I’m not sure which came first, the chicken or the egg- the realization that money could be saved this way, or that “collaboration” and therefore innovation would thrive in this type of design. But in many studies, including this one: The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration, it was found
A friend of mine once shared with me a story of leaving a job to pursue one that seemed like a great opportunity. Soon after taking the new job, she discovered the culture was a nightmare. The company owner had terrible temper and was not necessarily following appropriate guidelines for the business they were in. Needless to say, it was not a culture fit for her and she moved on to find another job. When determining your next career move, culture should definitely be a considering factor. In the next few weeks, we will be talking about culture on The
We conducted a focus group about a year ago with a group of business leaders around the idea of organizational values and culture. In this focus group, we presented seven key values, based on research that defined organizational culture. The goal was to see what these professionals thought about these seven values in the context of a broader assessment product. And whether this values set could predict a company’s culture in order to match candidates to cultures that align with individual the candidates’ values. Often things like this come down to semantics, but one piece of feedback where there was
Last week, during a meeting with a client’s leadership team, we got on the topic of just how much time they spend each week in meetings. One of the managers told me that meetings take up about five to six hours of his day, every day! That only leaves him two hours to get his work accomplished. When I asked him to tell me about his meetings, his list went something like this: 8 AM- Meeting with team 1 to discuss issues 9 AMM- Meeting with team 2 to determine what issues from 8 AM meeting are critical 10 AM-
I’m pregnant. With our third child. We are beyond excited and joyful about this new life coming into existence. But when you have an 8-year-old and almost 5-year-old, you and your husband both have demanding yet rewarding careers, and you are what the doctors call old enough to be of “advanced maternal age,” you get some interesting comments when you tell people this news. Some of my favorites have been: “You know, they say women with three kids are the most stressed.” “Well, when did that happen?” (I’m not sure if they were asking about conception or the decision to