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Got overemployed workers? That’s on you.

By Jennifer Carsen

I recently read a fascinating article on what’s known as “overemployed” workers – folks secretly holding down two (or more) full-time jobs. I think a better term for this would be “extreme moonlighting” – or maybe “work bigamy.”

In any event, if this is going on at your workplace, it’s completely your fault. Let me explain:

  1. If you are supervising an employee so poorly that you think they’re crushing it, but they’re actually working on your company’s tasks just a few hours a week, that’s on you.
  2. If an employee is struggling, for whatever reason, and you haven’t worked with them to rectify the situation, that’s on you.
  3. If you don’t have a policy explicitly barring employees from taking on one or more additional full-time jobs, that’s on you.
  4. If you do have such a policy but aren’t monitoring or enforcing it, that’s on you.

It’s a safe bet that these workers are remote, or hybrid at best, but this isn’t actually a work-from-home issue. It’s a management issue.

Employees who don’t have enough to fill their allotted full-time hours should of course be raising their hands and saying so, but this doesn’t always happen (especially if an employee is getting terrific reviews, keeping everyone happy, and already being credited for going above and beyond the call of duty).

If someone is actually pulling this off so successfully that you have no clue, they are either vastly underutilized or extremely talented (perhaps both). Either way, the solution is better, more attentive supervision.

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Filed Under: Employee Engagement

ChatGPT: The New Child on Your Team

By Jennifer Carsen

A lot of people are championing ChatGPT as the be-all-end-all for everything. And, to be sure, it’s an amazing tool.

But it’s important to remember that it’s only a tool.

Specifically, it’s something called a large language model, which works by taking a massive amount of data – most of what’s publicly available on the web – and stringing together what it thinks is a plausible output. It doesn’t know anything. It can’t reason, or think, or empathize.

In my early dealings with AI, I have had success thinking of it like a 3-year-old child:

  • It can’t keep secrets
  • It has a vivid imagination
  • It often comes up with things that make absolutely no sense
  • It’s surprisingly clever sometimes
  • It needs a lot of close supervision
  • You need to check (repeatedly) to make sure it’s done what you’ve asked
  • You should not entrust it with anything important or fragile

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Filed Under: ChatGPT & Other AI

Do You Run Bad Meetings?

By Jennifer Carsen

I have always fervently believed that the best meeting is no meeting at all. Sometimes – very occasionally – meetings are truly necessary, but most of the time they are huge time-wasters for everyone involved.

And, worse still, meetings are the very worst kind of time-waster in that they involve multiple people and give the participants the illusion of “doing work.”

But meetings almost never involve the type of work that truly matters at your business (namely, increasing revenue, improving the experience for your current customers, or hammering out systems that save you real time and/or money).

The next time you’re tempted to add a meeting to everyone’s calendars, keep the following 8 guidelines in mind:

1. Be mindful of the real time expenditure. If you schedule a one-hour meeting for eight people, you are devoting eight total hours of your company’s time to it – an entire business day. What you’re planning to cover may in fact be worth it – but it may not.

2. Watch out for “but it’s what we’ve always done!” thinking. Just because you’ve always had, say, a one-hour weekly staff meeting doesn’t mean you need to continue to do so.

Is there a solid reason, other than tradition, to continue having it? Would a group email serve just as well? Or could you have the meeting just once a month –  or even once every other month – instead of once a week? Is it possible that maybe the meeting doesn’t need to happen at all?

3. Limit the number of participants. In general, there are just a few key people who truly need to be at any given meeting; the other attendees are there on an FYI basis. If someone can be adequately filled in after the fact, do that instead and let them off the meeting hook.

4. Beware of meeting creep. Meetings, like almost everything else in life, will expand to fill the time allotted. If you schedule a one-hour meeting, it will invariably take an hour and then some. Try cutting it down to half an hour – and get ruthless about both starting and ending on time. You’ll be surprised how much you can fit in when you’re watching the clock.

5. Have a clear, written agenda – and stick to it. It’s amazing how many meetings are scheduled “just because,” with no clear sense of what they’re meant to convey or accomplish. The person calling the meeting should also be in charge of providing a written agenda to all participants in advance, and making sure that people don’t get off topic.

6. Establish next steps. The last few minutes of any meeting should be devoted to clarifying next steps and nailing down who’s doing what, when. If there are no actionable next steps, that’s a meeting fail.

7.  Ditch the minutes. Unless you’re required to keep minutes of a given meeting for legal or other reasons, don’t bother. Hold individual participants accountable for writing down the parts of the meeting that directly affect them.

8. Remember that meetings are not bonding time. There’s always a temptation to hold meetings for the purpose of “touching base” or creating a sense of group cohesion. But most of the time, meetings are not the best vehicle for this. Have an occasional staff dinner or fun weekend activity offsite (make these optional, or paid time if they’re mandatory) if you want people to bond; just don’t frame it under the guise of a meeting. Your team will thank you for it.

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Filed Under: Best Practices, Employee Engagement, Time Management

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Jennifer Carsen
890 Woodbury Ave.
Portsmouth, NH  03801

jennifer@hrcontentwriter.com
(603) 340-1854

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