Work
In Marker. More on Medium.
Number Crunch
Is WFH a paradigm shift, or a simple carryover from the pandemic?
700,000: That’s the number of white-collar workers who quit their job in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—the highest ever recorded in a month in the bureau’s “professional and business services” category of knowledge workers.
Americans quitting their job has been a growing trend in recent months. About five out of every 100 low-wage workers quit in May, too, with higher unemployment benefits raising the bar for hourly-wage salaries.
White-collar workers make well above that government stipend, but they are still feeling overworked and burned out. The pandemic turned mass remote work from some futuristic concept into a…
Why Europe doesn’t produce innovative new companies
Back in 1991, while I was still halfway through my MBA course, I left the U.K. and headed to California. As a very atypical U.K. passport-holder, I knew I wanted more from my life than merely to be one more cubicle slave among millions. And I knew, from the few years I’d spent in the U.K., that if I remained on the gloomy little island it would be impossible for me to create any commercial enterprise that could potentially grow to employ thousands of well-paid people.
I’m briefly back in the U.K. 30 years later and nothing at all has…
Companies that can’t offer Black workers money, security, and positions in leadership should expect to lose their talent
A friend said something to me about white-collar jobs that has stuck with me for weeks now. He said that the reason there’s so little representation in the corporate world is because there’s so little room for Blacks to be mediocre.
He didn’t mean mediocre in the sense of underperforming. He meant mediocre as in meeting goals and just being good enough without the added pressure of having to be a top performer day in and day out, especially when compared to their counterparts.
And then it hit me, as it should hit you too. …
Your company is not apolitical, no matter what your CEO says
I have several jobs, and one of them is “lowly adjunct” in the graduate school of journalism at NYU, where I teach a class about digital media innovation. As part of the course, my students have to conceptualize and prototype a new media product that could be used in a journalistic or newsroom context. Its innovation might be technical, journalistic, or a new business model. The class is very entrepreneurial and involves hard business skills, but my Twitter bio just says “NYU j-school prof,” so people on the right who don’t like my politics periodically accuse me of indoctrinating journalism…
Everyday Design Icons
Why the symbol of corporate creativity will survive the remote-work era
Chances are if you’ve spent time in offices, you’ve spent time around whiteboards — and, perhaps, you’ve spent time dreading them. But where did these things come from, and how did they become a physical symbol of the mandatory brainstorming session?
Fittingly, the precise history of the whiteboard is somewhat tentative and subject to revision and correction. Many accounts give inventor credit to a Korean War veteran named Martin Heit, who discovered he could write on film negatives with a Sharpie, then wipe the markings away; in the mid-1950s, he designed the first whiteboard, essentially coated with a similar laminate…
Number Crunch
A global study conducted by Microsoft’s Work Trend Index found that 41% of respondents were considering leaving their jobs
41%: That’s the share of respondents in a 30,000-person global survey of workers conducted by Microsoft’s Work Trend Index who say they are considering leaving their jobs, as reported by Bloomberg.
The survey found that 54% of workers say they are overworked, and 39% say they are exhausted. Their bosses, meanwhile, seem not to be sharing in their struggles, as a majority of managers and company leaders surveyed reported that they were thriving at work.
Working remotely during the pandemic appears to be a mixed bag for workers — while some employees value the flexibility it provides, others suffer from…
Comment of the Week
Readers weigh in on the great WFH experiment, a year into the pandemic
Earlier this week, Marker launched Index, a new publication about the lived work experience —“a place to diffuse lessons and learnings, candid moments of triumph or failure, missives for change or cathartic humor” as editor-in-chief Danielle Sacks recently described. As part of launch week, writer Will Leitch wrote about his experience working remotely for the past 16 years and shared his candid thoughts on why so many Americans are still struggling to do it right, even a year into the pandemic. …
An exploration of the office, work culture, identity, bias, navigating your career—and more
Dear Readers,
At Marker, we’ve chronicled the professional whiplash of the past year. Some people’s careers have soared throughout the pandemic, while others have lost their jobs or businesses. Some started companies or fundraised for the first time, while others struggled to balance working from home while running a homeschool, dealing with mental health issues, or coping with the death of a loved one or co-worker. Some pushed back against institutional racism in their industries as others were awoken to their own biases. …
Number Crunch
Some of these interns sure look a lot like employees
43%: That’s the share of internships offered by for-profit companies in the United States that are unpaid, according data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, per the Washington Post.
While unpaid internships have long been a subject of contention, Jane Slater, a reporter at the NFL Network, kicked off a furious online debate last week when she bemoaned the negative comments she’d received for posting an unpaid internship opportunity. …
Number Crunch
Employers are hoping FOMO gets you to come in, too
25%: That’s roughly how many employees in the U.S. are going into the office nowadays, according to data from Kastle Systems, an office security firm, cited by the New York Times.
That said, there are some significant regional differences: More than a third of employees in Texas are back in their offices, while that number is under 20% in the New York, Chicago, and San Francisco areas. As vaccines roll out, and it becomes safer to commute and work in shared spaces, many businesses will expect their employees to return to the office. While technology has made it easier than…
Marker
Pop business for the intelligent reader. A publication from Medium.
