Posts from Awesome Folks #13

Author

Emily Webber
June 03, 2022

Hello!

We are in the midst of a double long weekend in the UK, with two extra public holiday days. I hope you are all out enjoying the sun, rather than reading newsletters, either way here are a few links for when you get back to it.

This week is heavy on posts about people and culture, from salary, retention and quitting over return to office policies.

Happy reading

Emily

People and culture

The Transparent Salary Playbook: Creating a Compensation Model connected to Growth

Back in 2013, I shared my salary publicly for the first time. Not just with my team or some close friends but with everyone on the internet. đź‘€

Why Didn't Apple's Employee Retention Work?

Apple failed with retaining people. As the company struggles in the face of its competition, especially Meta, Apple’s attempt to keep its talent in-house didn’t go as expected. Here's why.

The workers quitting over return-to-office policies

Throughout the pandemic, many workers have said they'd quit if employers forced them back to the office. In March, Robert Half, a global recruiting firm, released a survey that revealed 50% of US workers would rather resign than be forced back to the office full-time.

Research Concludes: We Waste Our Time At Work

"[W]e found that employee productivity was 71% higher when meetings were reduced by 40%. Rather than a schedule being the boss, [employees] owned their to-do lists and held themselves accountable, which consequently increased their satisfaction by 52%." But wait, there's more...

The digital now

According to Brian Kropp and Emily Rose McRae in their article “11 Trends that Will Shape Work in 2022 and Beyond”, one fact became clear by the close of 2021: the disruption of the status quo due to the pandemic and the far-reaching shifts in the global workforce would be a lasting one.

How to maintain a winning company culture as you grow

Whether you define culture as a reflection of core values, the way you recruit, even the incentives you offer, building and then preserving a good one means a lot of listening, learning, and engagement from the top level.

TBM 24/52: Your Head Hurts. But Why?

In my experience, people are generally good at sensing dissonance. They may not know the exact cause of that dissonance—and they might not actually care—but they sense something isn't adding up. A leader makes a statement to her team. The statement is 90% truth, and 10% success theater.

Organisations and systems

Notes on the Service Owner role

I’ve been asked this question a lot. I was Head of Product for a large Government department in the UK from 2016-2022 so got a chance to speak with and support a lot of product managers across many Departments and Agencies.

Tools and approaches for teams

Perfect team-players: why orchestras reflect the best of us, and how they should reflect us back

When I was a young conductor stricken with impostor syndrome, my greatest fear was conducting anything by Mozart. As a child, his music had been a lifesaver; he was my confidant, my best friend.

Other things

What we learned at MTP SF+Americas

This week, thousands of product people from across the world came together both in-person and online for #mtpcon SF+Americas 2022. After a three-year hiatus of in-person events in the US, it was our first hybrid conference experience in San Francisco.

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