Steering Point Articles
How Does Smartphone Use Impact the Workplace?
“It’s not just teenagers who are hooked on their smartphones. In a 2022 Gallup poll, nearly 60% of Americans said they used their phones too often. Meanwhile, people in Ireland spend an average of 4.5 hours on their phone a day. Only 10% of that time is spent talking to someone in a phone conversation. The rest is given over to scrolling. A lot of that scrolling takes place at work.”
Workplace Performance Growth
“Performance growth in the workplace is crucially important for several reasons. The data consistently shows a positive correlation towards optimal productivity, identifying work on areas, enhancing strengths, setting clear expectations, talent retention, job satisfaction and continuous improvement.”
The Burnout Epidemic
“Working a job that we feel offers value to the world or that we feel we offer value to is key to avoiding burnout and having a healthy relationship with our work more generally. A 2015 study published in the Journal of Managerial Psychology found that when employees feel like they fit well with their organisation and their specific role, they’re less likely to experience burnout.”
Harnessing Data to Fuel Employee Empowerment
“Analysing data such as customer satisfaction scores has been increasingly embraced with more old school metrics such as exit interviews becoming less common. By analysing and examining key metrics such as customer satisfaction scores and revenue, organisations can make more informed decisions on product development and resource allocation.”
Management in Times of Global Conflict
“Leaders – even experienced leaders – have not had to deal with the level (and variety) of problems currently facing the world. On top of the conflicts and political unrest, which impact everything from supply chains to employee morale, there have been shifts in the level of engagement businesses are expected to make regarding social issues. Not engaging, or engaging in the wrong way, can quickly prove damaging, maybe even fatal, as many businesses have found out the hard way.”
Managing an Ageing Workforce
“A multigenerational office dynamic leaves companies best placed to succeed, with older employees working in tandem with younger ones, each bringing their specific skills to the table while learning off one another. And for all the talk of differences between the generations, their values have actually been found to co-align.”
Embracing Ambiguity: Leadership in the Liminal Space
“Leaders importantly must lead by example and embrace change demonstrating adaptability and resilience. By doing so this can encourage others to emulate this behaviour and may even prompt them to mirror their actions. Leaders can adapt to this period by highlighting and affirming to employees what will remain concrete and identifying the potential in what can be transformed to drive organisational change.”
Should Brands Weigh in on Social Issues?
“Over the past decade, it’s become not just acceptable but expected that major brands will weigh in on the issue of the day. From Black Lives Matter to #MeToo through issues around gender identity and abortion, consumers wanted to know they were not giving their hard-earned cash to enterprises they deemed to be against their principles. For their part, brands were happy to play along, appeasing consumer desires and sometimes outright cashing in on them. All that changed on October 7th.”
The EU AI Act: What you Need to Know
“The EU AI Act seeks to set a definitive definition of AI that is also broad enough to cover the diversity of AI’s current use-points and any potential future developments. As such, drawing from the OECD’s definition, the act describes an AI system as: “a machine-based system designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment and that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments.””
What is Rejection Therapy and Can it Help You?
“Rejection therapy shows that it’s not just the fear of rejection that is in our heads but the expectation of it too. How many things do we not ask for in life simply because we presume we’ll be rejected? We’re so focused on what we assume will be the humiliation of the no that we don’t even consider there could be a yes. Rejection therapy is not about getting yeses, quite the opposite…”
Thinking Under Pressure: Lessons we can Learn from Aviation
“We know aviation is characterised by strict safety protocols, rapid technological advancements, global connectivity, and the diverse weather conditions it operates in. Ensuring safe and efficient air travel in an ecosystem that demands precision, adaptability, communication, trust and collaboration across multiple agencies. It is ever-evolving.”
Combatting Decision Fatigue
“Decision fatigue is “the idea that after making many decisions, your ability to make more and more decisions over the course of a day becomes worse,” says Lisa MacLean, MD, psychiatrist and chief wellness officer at Henry Ford Health System. “The more decisions you have to make, the more fatigue you develop and the more difficult it can become””
