From Work Slumps To The Opioid Crisis: This Week’s Top Leadership Stories
This week, we learned what signs you should watch out for to determine if an office has a toxic work culture, the role that employers can play in addressing the opioid epidemic, and how to pull yourself out of a work slump.
These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of October 9:
1. How To Identify A Toxic Culture Before Accepting A Job Offer
When companies are recruiting candidates, most of them will tout their “amazing culture and values.” But don’t just take hiring managers at their word. Look for signs to see whether their word matches up to the reality. Entrepreneur Piyush Patel says there are several clues: How is the office laid out? Are candidates acting relaxed, or formal and rigid? Does the office smell like food? Patel says, “I use that as a litmus test in my own leadership, because if people are eating at their desks, we either don’t have a good plan or we’re scrambling when we should be scaling.”
2. I Lost My Brother To Opioid Addiction. Here’s How Employers Can Address The Crisis
The opioid epidemic felt remote to HR and talent expert Lars Schmidt until he lost his brother, Kai, to addiction. “I was someone who’d been lucky enough to be able to glance at the headlines from afar. I was dimly aware of the opioid epidemic’s magnitude, yet disconnected from its reality.” Now Schmidt believes there’s more that employers can do to assist employees struggling with opioid addiction, or who know someone close to them who is.
3. Six Ways To Pull Yourself Out Of A Work Slump
You greet Sunday with a sense of dread, feel nauseous when Monday morning rolls around, and slog through the rest of the week. If this is your life, there are still steps you can take short of quitting your job. This week we learned how to take an inventory and turn it into an action plan. For instance, maybe you can dig deep into what really makes you unhappy–is it your coworkers, or the projects that you’re doing? Is there one particular aspect of your job that you do like, and can find more tasks and projects like that?
4. This Is How The Way You Read Impacts Your Productivity
We know that taking notes by hand helps us learn better, but as Fast Company‘s Michael Grothaus reports, our brains might also prefer analog reading. According to one study, we overestimate our ability to comprehend information when reading from a digital device. This makes us speed through the materials, typically leading to lower comprehension rates overall.
5. Got A Panel Job Interview Coming Up? Here’s What You Should Avoid
Panel interviews are can be nerve-wracking, but a few quick tricks can help you prepare. For starters, brush up on who’ll be interviewing you, and what their roles are in the organization. And don’t make the mistake of addressing only the most senior person in the room–chances are they’re not the only one who has a say in whether or not you get hired.
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