#workplace-culture

#workplace-culture

I knew I needed help, so I put an ad in MySpace. A woman named Beth responded and I met her for an interview at a coffee shop. As we talked I realized she had all the skills I didn't have. She had a design degree. She had business savvy and technical skills. And she was wildly smart and more importantly, kind.

You should probably ask my org. First, they have to be relentless in pursuit of doing great work. Meta employees take pride and ownership in their work, he said. They also take it personally. Two of Bosworth's tips were based on communication. Good Meta employees are both direct and appreciate directness in return.

The people carrying the heaviest weight are often the ones least likely to speak up. They're balancing Q1 deliverables with questions that never make it to a staff meeting: Does anyone see what's happening? Will anyone acknowledge it? If I speak up, what does it cost me?

What started as a casual indulgence became a shared ritual. And without intending to, Grease Wednesdays began to change our department culture. We all began to get to know each other as individuals, with pets and families and hobbies. The ritual also smoothed tensions between departments, built friendships between unfamiliar teammates, and helped us realize we hadn't felt all that connected before.

DixonBaxi takes creative sabbaticals to help designers connect with each other, recognizing that meaningful collaboration and relationship-building are essential components of a thriving creative environment and sustained innovation within the agency.

In France, eating solo is deeply frowned upon. A recent poll found that, while just 12% of French workers over the age of 49 regularly lunched alone, the number shot up to 29% for workers under 25. A 25-year-old worker in the French paper Les Echos described mandatory dining with colleagues as patriarchal, and after she started eating alone, was fired for failing to integrate with her team.

People can "win" internal fights in those boardrooms by arguing for the ideas and perspectives that the boss already loves. So "fighting for the best idea" becomes a public way to endorse and validate the emperor's—er, boss's—opinions.

You got the selfish, non team player caring only about their own quota who will steal your work to make themselves better. Don't confuse this with being an overachiever. You got the self centered person who's time and work is more important than yours. That person also has been at the company for 600 years so they know it all and thinks they're very smart saying the same jokes over and over.

Last week, I watched a young guy at the coffee shop make the barista's entire day. Not with a big tip or elaborate compliment, just a genuine "thank you so much" and eye contact that said he actually saw her as a person, not just a caffeine dispenser. The barista's shoulders relaxed, her smile turned real, and suddenly the whole atmosphere shifted.

Growing up, I watched my dad handle stress the same way he handled everything else: silently, stoically, and with a stiff upper lip. When his company downsized and he lost his job, he just nodded, shook hands, and never talked about it again. Meanwhile, my younger cousin posts TikToks about her therapy sessions and hosts "crying parties" with her friends when life gets tough.

For justice-centered leaders, there is a stubborn dichotomy between our genuine commitment to equity, inclusion, and alignment in our organizations on the one hand, and our continuing self-diagnosis of high levels of misalignment, conflict, and turnover on the other. Three years after Maurice Mitchell's seminal piece, " Building Resilient Organizations: Toward Joy and Durable Power in a Time of Crisis," rang the alarm of "urgent concerns about the internal workings of progressive spaces," the current discourse suggests that the needle has not moved much.

Although IPWatchdog has the word "Dog" in it's name and logo, the publication is in no way associated with dogs. However, Gene and I have a shared love of dogs and have SIX German shorthaired pointers (3 sets of male/female siblings) ranging in age from 11 months to 6 years old. We love dogs so much that when we posted our first job post in 2020, one of the job "requirements" was "must love dogs" (Plural).

Research shows that 70 percent of workers believe they're above average at multitasking. Here's the problem: that's statistically impossible. And this delusion is killing our productivity. I've fallen for this trap myself. During my years in corporate, I prided myself on juggling multiple projects, answering emails during meetings, and keeping dozens of browser tabs open. Running my own company later taught me a harsh truth-what I thought was efficiency was actually just organized chaos.

So life is good. But not perfect, as he told the X sphere this week. "Appalled when I see workers on their phones. My dad used to always say 'there's always something to do.' No customers? Sweep the floor. Floor swept? Clean the machines. Machines clean? Organize stock. Organized? Clean again. Insane that anyone lets you on your phone lol. (I worked in various forms of customer-facing retail for about 7 years, but this extends beyond that)."

You may be jumping to conclusions about your former boss. Your interviewers could have been nasty for all kinds of reasons. They might already have known who they wanted to hire (possibly an internal candidate) and were irritated that they had to interview other people. They may intentionally haze candidates to see how they hold up under pressure. They might have been mad at one another. Or they could just have a nasty office culture. You're probably lucky you didn't take a job there!

A horse toy in China meant to be a Lunar New Year decoration has turned into a symbol of corporate agony on Chinese social media. The red horse toy in question, made by the shop Happy Sisters in China's western Yiwu city, features an upside-down snout, giving it a morose look at odds with its festival golden bell. Per the Chinese zodiac, the incoming year will be the year of the horse.

The past 10 years have seen the number of women in the UK's tech sector creep up from 16% in 2015 to 22% in 2025, and black women still only account for 0.6% of people in tech roles. There are countless reasons for this, including a lack of inclusive culture in the sector, limited visibility of career role models, insufficient flexibility in the workplace and misconceptions about the type of people who work in tech roles, along with the influence of unconscious bias.

So, you've finally done it. No more putting it off, pushing through the grind, waiting for a more opportune time once things settle down. Alas, you've mustered up the gall to cash in on your paid vacation time. Now you have several days strung together to travel, rest, or do whatever the heck your heart desires. I love that for you.

The meetings that actually work-the ones where breakthroughs happen and teams leave energized rather than depleted-operate on a completely different logic. They're designed around how human brains actually function, not how we wish they would.

A toxic job should be avoided at all costs because the longer you are stuck in a stressful, backstabbing orexploitativework culture, the harder it is to escape it.

My new team has a completely flexible work-location approach. There is an office, and we can come in if we want to. But there's no requirement or badge-swiping. Those of us who are local also collaborate daily with colleagues in drastically different time zones-Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific (APAC). So our overall team is distributed enough that in-person work can't be our organizing religion.