Working Humans

AI is one of the world’s fastest growing industries in 2024, predicted to grow 38% until 2030[i]. But in this exciting space with room to expand, why are only 22% of AI employees female? Like many things, the imbalance is due to a complex combination of societal, educational and workplace forces.

Designed to make sure Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used safely and ethically across Europe, the EU AI Act like a rulebook for AI development and use. AI is a powerful tool, but it can also be risky. What’s the EU Act all about, and what do you need to know? The basics in plain Human language.

If you work in a diverse, complex, international organization, chances are a portion of your working community will be practicing Muslims. This means, for an entire month starting in the spring (depending on the moon), those who practice will refrain from eating or drinking from sunrise to sundown. A few small actions state loud-and-clear that your culture is one of curiosity, respect and celebration of diversity. Five tiny, easy ways to make Ramadan great for everyone.

READ the article: https://www.postcovidhandbook.com/read/2023/ramadan

WATCH the video: https://youtu.be/9Hds3Riszpw

Thank you for listening to Working Humans! Don't forget to rate, review and share. Your engagement is greatly appreciated.

For teams who hear the words “urgent” and “crisis” too often, the word begins to lose its meaning and eventually, starts to get tuned out. If everything is urgent and all things need to happen “yesterday”, then something further up the chain is going wrong. Five ways to manage urgency and lower the temperature.

Often, our top-level leaders live in another world; they work at the same company with the same goals, vision and share the same elevators, but are invisible to the community working for them. How can leaders increase their presence, visibility, and interaction with the people making the company run, and still meet the needs of other stakeholders, clients, partners and board members? Six easy ways to start.

Thank you for listening to Working Humans! Don't forget to rate, review and share. Your engagement is greatly appreciated.

OpenAI’s GPT Builder allows premium users to build their own version of the foundational model that provide specific information based on the instructions, data and reference material you provide. These babies are multimodal, easy to build and wildly popular with the experts among us. What they are, why you might want one, and how to get started.

If you’re working at a company, AI will likely transform your role, rather than eliminate it. But if you’re a freelancer who takes on certain creative tasks for organizations, your Human skills may soon be redundant. How to tell if your role is at risk and how to re-invent yourself to fit into an AI-Powered environment.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE:

Whether by layoff, reorg or attrition, many businesses underestimate the true cost of losing talent, which goes beyond the obvious visible, “hard” expenses of payouts, fees, recruiting and training new employees. The “soft”, unseen costs are dips in productivity, customer service, morale and the depreciation of culture. Move to a more efficient model of re-use, re-purpose and re-skill.

READ the article: https://www.postcovidhandbook.com/?p=3444

WATCH the video: https://youtu.be/5bsQliMxJQI

Thank you for listening to Working Humans! Don't forget to rate, review and share. Your engagement is greatly appreciated.

Fiona Passantino is a corporate Engagement, Culture and Communication Specialist, helping leaders and teams be their best at work. She assists with effective AI integration, Leadership Visibility and Professional Content Creation.

We suffer from a use-once-and-throw-away mindset. This goes for both plastics and people. Companies exhale and inhale staff on an annual cycle, but nothing ever truly disappears. The plastic particles from a single-use bottle come back into our drinking water, our soil and our air, and the discarded employee will soon be working for your supplier, your client or… your competition. Learn how to reuse, recycle and reduce for sustainable cost cutting and a truly people-first culture. 

READ THE ARTICLE: https://www.postcovidhandbook.com/read/2023/recycle

WATCH THE VIDEO:

https://youtu.be/QkPVCHk14Mk

Thank you for listening to Working Humans! Don't forget to rate, review and share. Your engagement is greatly appreciated.

As our world becomes ever more complicated and process-oriented, we find lives becoming very small – our digital spaces, the constant distractions and the noise of our media landscape. We need big stories of adventure, heroes and villains, guides and demons. Insurmountable obstacles. Undying love, loyalty and determination. This speaks to our Human core, and we can use the tools of the Epic to deliver information, to inspire, to align and to remind us of who we are. Five tools of the great storytellers.

Coaching increases our job satisfaction and productivity, improves our efficiency, soft skills and makes us better leaders. With more employees demanding professional development, organizations are introducing in-house coaching teams, which are more affordable, sustainable and rewarding. What an in-house coaching team needs and five steps for setting it up.

We all have one. The brash, high-performer with the big mouth. A fountain of radical ideas, constantly pushing back against the status quo. He bends the rules, ignores advice and does things his own way. Emotional, intense and stubborn, he takes your time and upsets others. You secretly wish he would just quit.

But Creative Rebels bring something special to the workplace and are a fountain of energy, ideas and passion that can be positively channeled into your most loyal supporter. Eight ways to unlock the value in your Rebel. 

For many multinationals, internal communication is split between the office workers and those on the factory floor. Plant and field workers have some of the hardest jobs and provide core value for the company. Yet this group shows low engagement and often feels out of touch with the organization. Who are these workers, and what do they need? Learn about the secret weapon to inform, engage and connect this group. 

A two-minute audio clip is all you need to clone a voice; before you know it, you are listening to yourself reciting poetry in French or asking where to find a reliable cat café in Japanese. Voice AI has the potential to give so many more of us the ability to be heard in a uniquely Human mode; voice is intimate and emotive, which is also why it is so powerful.

Don't forget to rate, review and share. Your engagement is greatly appreciated.

/imagine… an AI application that generates stunning, original art with the same ease as ChatGPT does for copy. Today’s content creators need visuals as much as they need words to improve just about every form of messaging. A brief guide to Midjourney; what it is, how to get started, and how to prompt like a pro.

Speakers’ Pools are a great way to jump-start the process of fattening the leadership pipeline; taking very fresh voices and training them for very high-profile public speaking roles from a very early age. It’s a triple win: engagement goes up across the board, employer marketing gets a boost and it feels like a cool place to work for everyone. The CEOs are happy; one less thing to do. And the MCs? Engaged for life.

Engagement Managers are often measured by how they move the needle on employee net promoter scores or attrition rates. But in fact, it’s all about the details. Conveying the feeling of being heard, seen, valued and respected in the workplace, and allowing for empowerment, inspiration and joy. Impossible-to-measure measurements for success.

In the post-Covid world, we define our values as an organization, collectively. We brainstorm together, in real-time, with enormous, collaborative co-creation sessions that weave together all voices of the community, to define our culture, our rules, vision and mission. The new Town Hall: the ‘Co-CreaPalooza’. 

Future Mapping is, in many ways, the opposite of succession planning. Rather than planning for gaps in the current org chart, imagining the future state of the organisation and asking which individuals' vision, values and ideas align with that future. What tools, training and experience will she need to get there. Six ways to start.

During the pandemic we saved time commuting, found our focus and got stuff done. Productivity levels increased 5%. When we return to the office, we’re back in traffic again, chatting with colleagues, subject to unplanned interruptions and new impromptu mini-projects. Our office days stretch well into the evening as we catch up on missed mails. Is the next step a conscious workload reduction as we return to work?

What are the many ways of going to work in our post-Covid world? Are we scaling down our physical spaces, operating on a "Hubs-and-Spokes" Model? Are we going back to the way things were or re-investing, with a "Build it and they will come" approach? Understand the trends that are shaping our ways back to work; hybrid, remote, physical and back again.

Hiring managers have likely worked for a company for longer than three years. If so, they were onboarded in the light, which meant being there physically, going to an office, having predecessors to shadow, a digital services department to visit on the fifth floor and the IT department to ask for help setting up on the second. Onboarding in a hybrid context means mapping hundreds of stakeholders, interests, departments in your head, in two dimensions. Seven ways to get it right when new talent has choices. 

Life at work now is hybrid, and it's here to stay. We are still negotiating the expectations and rules around the physical return to the office. Our tooling landscape as well as a scarcity of talent forces us to be flexible about how we define the physical workspace; whether we are full-time in the office or fully remote and all things in between, how we form the conversation defines the overall employee experience. Understanding the Four Basic working Personas and what motivates them to come into or avoid the physical office helps us capitalize on the benefits.

Leaders today need to be highly visible. Physically, with teams and stakeholders but more and more, also digitally, producing meaningful posts and thought leadership content for internal and external audiences. When words are needed, ChatGPT can help. When refined for accuracy, voice and coherence, it’s a tool that can help raise your profile and get your message out.

AI is intimidating. Here are a few facts you need to know. Five easy ways to use it and five best practices to make AI your b*tch.

"Radical Listening" means taking every opportunity to ask your workplace community what they want across a variety of channels and delivering results within 48 hours. In some cases done with the small, technically meaningless “Listen and Deliver” tight loops, and in some cases long and in-depth, "Deep Listen" cultural dives. And don't forget Bean Voting.

All these listening channels have very different goals, deliver different data but together form a more accurate picture of the current state of engagement and helps build trust in the process of data collection. The point is to maximally listen and quickly deliver for your community to build trust for when it counts: the engagement surveys.

What's a "workation" and what does it mean for the future of work? A "workation" is the act of leaving one’s city or country for an extended period of time, and working fully remotely using the video conferencing and visual collaboration tools that the pandemic brought us. Turns out it's a thing. A very big thing.

Understanding Flow

During Covid, we all grew used to the erosion of work-life boundaries and the 5% productivity increase. We do more, take on more, work more hours, deliver more. We “engage” by suggesting mindfulness courses or yoga, which we join to be a team player. But the key to post-Covid engagement is conscious workload reduction: creating space for quality results, more creativity and joy that only time can allow. A few easy ways to lighten the load.