Decision Making – Page 17 – mardihumphreys.com

Filling in the Gaps

I love to see people thriving in second act careers. There are plenty of reasons for someone to work beyond the age that the Social Security Administration dictates: The novelty of retirement has worn off. Your children have grown and flown. You served twenty years in the military. You can’t afford to retire. Traditionally, the older you got the less opportunity knocked. Enter COVID-19 ushering in the Great Resignation. Companies are now forced to get creative in hiring. If you are an elder job hunter (a forty-year-old employee is considered old in America, btw) now is the time to act. One way to differentiate yourself from other candidates is to offer your services as a mentern.

What’s a Mentern?

A mentern is an employee who simultaneously teaches and learns, combining the characteristics of a mentor and an intern. Usually over 50 years old with about 25 years of experience in the workforce, a mentern wants to teach skills, like emotional intelligence, while learning skills, like digital intelligence. For more information, the book Wisdom @ Work by Chip Conley is the story of the birth of a mentern, and the movie The Intern is an example of the concept in action.

Why Would Companies Want Them?

Technology disrupts every industry. It is a huge fault in logic to assume that digital natives (Millenials and Gen Z) have an indisputable advantage over their elders (Boomers and Gen X) when it comes to IT skills. Technology changes at a speed that can give you whiplash. New software comes online every day. Every employee has to learn, use, unlearn, rinse, and repeat with each upgrade. Menterns have years of experience refining and iterating processes based on experimentation and feedback. This knowledge can be transferred to a digital native open to learning from other people’s wisdom. When digital natives are promoted to managers, they are habitually promoted for their technical skills and not their people skills. They are left to fend for themselves to figure out how to coach a team. A mentern has years of practice communicating, problem-solving, collaborating, and leading. Pairing a mentern with a digital native can fill in the gaps of both. This is how sustainable companies are built.

How Do You Become One?

If you are a good leader, you already have an inclination to both learn and serve. If you are also humble and curious, then you have the makings of a successful mentern. Your goal is to share your wisdom, experience, and network with a coworker two generations younger than you while also listening and learning how to use the tools you need to successfully navigate emerging business processes. It’s work to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory skills, but the ability to do so is the secret to a successful menternship. As with most skills it becomes easier with practice.

Elders and digital natives both want the same things: opportunity, income, and flexibility. If each generation starts on their side of the gap and then starts building a bridge to cross it, imagine the resulting exponential growth in productivity. Interested in becoming a mentern? Here’s a website you should check out.

How would your company benefit from menterns? Please share your experience with the concept in the comments.

It Can Be Tricky

Photo by Rasa Kasparaviciene from Pexels

The approaching holiday has you all up in your thankful feels, but you’re worried about inadvertently offending instead of appreciating. When it comes to acknowledging your managers, remote teammates, clients, coworkers, volunteers, board members, mentors (Wow. You have a ginormous sphere of influence.), if you express your gratitude sincerely, specifically, and sensitively, then it has the best chance of being received well. Here are some examples of what not to do followed by a better way.

Sincere

DON’T: You stop at your teammate’s cubicle and see they are out to lunch. You leave a blank envelope containing a five-dollar gift card to their favorite local coffeehouse on their desk, then you go out to lunch. Your teammate returns and finds the random gift. Instead of feeling appreciated, they are creeped out.

DO: Wait for an opportunity to see them in person so you can look them in the eye and tell them why you’re giving them this gift. How did their recent action positively affect you? Simply saying, “I appreciate you having my back in the report-out meeting last month. Please have a cup of coffee on me at your convenience.” Will not only prevent them from being creeped out, it should also ensure their future support.

Specific

DON’T: You just gave your direct report a glowing performance review. At the end of the meeting, you say, “Great job last year. Keep it up. Have a good rest of your day,” then leave the video conference.

DO: You have to go through the standard on-a-scale-of-one-to-five form for HR, but if you want to retain this employee, you also need to draw a little deeper from the appreciation well. There are probably several instances when they made your life easier last year. Choose one and expound on it. For example, “Thank you for putting the Powerpoint presentation together last July for the contract renewal meeting. It took a lot of time to shepherd all the departments involved, fact check the slides, and incorporate everyone’s notes. Would you please write a report with your suggestions on how we can improve that process?” Not only does that express your gratitude for their mad follow-up skills, it also validates their work, lets them know they have a future with the organization, and encourages them to take on more responsibility.

Sensitive

DON’T: Once a year you give an award to the individual contributor that received the most positive feedback for customer service. This year’s recipient is known throughout the organization as an extreme introvert. You present the award to them in front of the whole company and their plus ones at the annual holiday lunch. Instead of feeling honored, they are embarrassed.

DO: Is it necessary to announce the award winner at the holiday lunch? If so, don’t force the extreme introvert to walk up in from of everyone to accept it. An award of appreciation should be thoughtful, creative, and personal. An announcement in the company newsletter and a handwritten note thanking them for the good care they took of your customers last year is more appropriate for an extreme introvert.

Thirty percent of employees quit their jobs due to lack of appreciation. Maybe your New Year’s resolution could be finding one thing to sincerely appreciate about one person every day. A daily gratitude habit can be contagious. You could revolutionize your workplace.

How often do you intentionally thank those around you? Please share in the comments.

Help Me Help You

You don’t get a raise because you need the extra money. You get a raise because you’ve made a positive impact on the bottom line and the company anticipates you’ll contribute in the future. If you executed duties above your job description, brought in revenue, and/or saved the company money, then you deserve a raise.

It’s Work

If you don’t have a “Brag File” yet, start one. Right. Now. Populate a new folder on your desktop with complimentary emails from both clients and coworkers, the link to your recommendations page on LinkedIn, awards, and any other evidence of the great job you did over the past 365 days. With this research, write a report quantifying your value to the company using explicit data to empower your case. For example, “I saved the company $19,800 in training expenses through my network connections and research.” Practice talking about how what you’re currently working on will benefit the company in the near future. Check out websites like salary.com to find out what others with your job title make. All these things pulled together enable you to enter the meeting knowing your worth.

It’s Scary

Your goal is to make you, your manager, and your company successful. You did your due diligence and have every reason to be optimistic, but it’s natural to feel nervous. Set a positive tone when you walk into the room. After greetings and small talk, use your curiosity to dive into your agenda. Ask your manager what their priority is right now. Follow up their answer with what you did this past year to help them get closer to their goal by pulling that report from your Brag File. Thank them for their insight. Tell them you’ll use it to further refine your process to assist them in achieving their priority. Of course, that means you will take on more responsibility and you anticipate that more compensation accompanies that effort. Say that with a poker face. Take the emotion out of the conversation. Report what you did to further the company’s success last year, demonstrate how you intend to keep doing it next year, and put a dollar amount on what the company should invest in your time, energy, and attention. It’s more scary to not get the raise you could’ve received if you’d simply asked for it.

It’s Worth It

Seventy percent of employees who ask for a raise get one. You may be told no even though you performed your job above and beyond its description. COVID-19 decimated our economy and your employer may not have the funds to give you a pay increase right now. Ask if the company is open to other forms of compensation (e.g., flexible schedule). If your requests are rejected, schedule a meeting for six months from now to revisit the possibility. Ask what KPIs your manager would like to see you hit in the interim. Keep your manager updated on your progress either through scheduled 1:1s or an end-of-week emailed report showing that your work is aligned with both your manager’s and the company’s goals.

If the compensation conversation intimidates you, reframe your fear as excitement. You’re anxious to share the good news of how you’ve improved both yourself and the company during the past year. If your enthusiasm is welcomed by your manager, then that’s a good sign you have a future with the company. If it isn’t, well, that tells you something too.

What do you do to build up your confidence to ask for a raise? Please share in the comments.

Purposeful Procrastination

Here in the Digital Age where business moves at the speed of data traveling through fiber, if I’m not productive every minute I’m at work, I fear that I’m being lazy. Since emails are tasks someone wants us to do and they arrive 24/7/365, it seems I’m not the only one with boundary issues. In terms of time management, we put off completing a task because we have other tasks that are either more urgent or more important. Or, we put it off because we don’t want to do it. But what if we use procrastination as a tool to preserve our boundaries?

If/Then

If we restrain ourselves from replying all to a group email asking for volunteers to organize the office holiday party, then are we lazy or are we allowing someone else to step into leadership?
If we proofread the slide deck for tomorrow’s weekly team meeting because the team member assigned to do so hasn’t done it yet, then are we being helpful or are we doing their job for them?
If we accomplish a last-minute errand for a co-worker, do we then set ourselves up for accomplishing more last-minute tasks for this co-worker in the future?

This is Not the Admin You’re Looking For

For example, sixty-three minutes before my team was scheduled for a video conference with a client, the account manager emailed me saying that the client needed to reschedule. He tasked me with:

Notifying the other team members that the meeting was postponed
Checking their availability for the new meeting time the client proposed
Rescheduling the meeting on our video conferencing platform
Updating the meeting calendar invitation

When this task arrived in my inbox, I was preparing for a different video conference huddle that was only fifteen minutes away. I had time to send a quick group email, but I chose to ignore the account manager’s request and prepare for my imminent meeting.

Sixty-eight minutes later, the emails from my teammates flew, reply-all style. The account manager ended up completing all the tasks he attempted to assign to me.

Confession: I intentionally procrastinated.

Sorry (Not Sorry)

It was hard to restrain myself. I felt bad for not preventing my teammates’ confusion and for using them to force the account manager to do his own administration. But apparently, I did not feel bad enough to go ahead and do the account manager’s administration. I prioritized my boundary above everyone else’s convenience.

Proceed With Caution

Having said (and done) that, please remember that we should exercise good judgement when evaluating such situations. Using restraint to enforce boundaries can look like procrastination and can be detrimental to our brand. We need to examine who may be impacted and how negatively before we intentionally delay action. In the above example, three people were inconvenienced for a relatively short period of time and my brand was positively impacted because I’m not the team’s administrator. I used the passage of time to help me hold that boundary. Hours after the incident, I replied to the account manager’s original email. I suggested that it’s probably not a best practice to rely on me to complete last-minute tasks as evidenced by this incident. I have not received another last-minute task from him since.

Have you ever intentionally put off work? Why? Please share in the comments.

Your Network Is Your Net Worth

You have a job you love and you wouldn’t even dream of leaving it. But what if it leaves you? COVID-19 protocols spotlighted not only how fragile businesses are, but also the importance of maintaining a professional network even when you aren’t actively seeking employment. Change comes whether you’re expecting it or not. Best practice is to build your network when you don’t need it.

Use LinkedIn Robustly

95% of recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates. To attract people you want to connect with, audit your profile. Search for your job title, identify profiles you like, then use them as inspiration to update yours. Pay attention to their headlines and use the same keywords they do so that colleagues can find you. Do you need to upload a new headshot? When you show up to a meeting looking 10 years older than your profile picture, that does not help you make a good impression. Remember that LinkedIn is a conversation. Don’t just spruce up your profile and wait. Connect with people at companies you want to partner with, follow their companies’ pages, and promote them on your timeline.

Personally Connect

The best way to get a job at a company you want to work for is to have a personal connection there. Recruiting employees is expensive for companies. When hiring, managers both approach people they know and get recommendations from their peers because it mitigates their risk of a bad hire. As we continue to recover from the pandemic, now is a great time to reach out to your weak ties (acquaintances, people you worked with briefly or a long time ago and lost touch with, met through a friend, etc). Ask them how they are doing and offer to catch up. You may be surprised at how many people you know that fall into this category. It’s simple and doesn’t have to take a lot of your T.E.A.M. Make time to connect over in-person or virtual coffee. Add value to your warm connections when you can. A positive comment on a decision maker’s Facebook page, a like on their company’s Instagram post, sharing their LinkedIn article; these are easy ways you can pay it forward and stay top of mind.

Give and Take

New possibilities can take you by surprise. They come along when you’re doing your job well and your network notices. Be open to unexpected opportunities and explore them. A broad and diverse network not only propels your own career growth, but it also allows you to intelligently recommend other people. You feel good when you are able to supply people with opportunities. It’s likely at least one of your associates is looking for employment. You can tap your network to help them. Connecting good people to good jobs benefits everyone involved in the interaction. The employer gets a good hire, the seeker gets a good job, and you get to be the hero who introduced them.

Is networking scary for you, not just at Halloween, but all the time? How do you nurture your professional network? Please share in the comments.

Cultural Competency

Feedback is a gift. It’s usually one I want to return. But a few days ago I received feedback that I want to keep. I had the privilege of finding out how privileged I am by spending the day in diversity and inclusion training. When I tell people this, they usually wince and ask, “How did THAT go?” I get it. While mentally preparing for the day I braced for difficult conversations, sore toes, and conflict. What I experienced was respectful dialogue, open minds, and advocacy.

It had a great deal to do with the intentional way the day was facilitated. (Shout out to Dr. Karen. If your organization wants help with diversity education, contact her at DrKaren@DrKarenTownsend.com). Dr. Karen both coached and invited us to co-facilitate the learning with her. There was a rhythm of a truth presented, illustrated, a question asked about it, then discussed amongst the group. For example: What would the world look like if it was a village of 100 people? Here is a summary:

Nationalities: 61 Asians (of the 61, 20 would be Chinese and 17 would be Indian), 13 Africans, 12 Europeans, 9 Latin or South Americans, 5 North Americans (Missing: Australia, Oceana, and Antarctica)
Gender: 50 male, 50 female
Age: 26 would be under 15 years old, 74 would be adults – 8 of whom would be over 64 years old
Health: 1 would have AIDS, 26 would smoke, 14 would be obese
Living Conditions: 87 villagers would have access to safe drinking water; 13 villagers would not. 77 people would have shelter to live in; 23 would not
Religion: 33 people would be Christian, 20 would be Islamic, 13 would be Hindus, 6 would be Buddhists, 2 would be atheists, 12 would be non-religious, and 14 would be other religions
Education: 1 villager would have a college degree while 18 people would be illiterate
Technology: 33 villagers would have cell phones, 18 would have cars, 16 would have computers
Employment: 28 would work in Agriculture, 14 would work for Industry, 28 would have service jobs, and 30 would be unemployed
Income: 53 people would live on less than $2 (US currency) a day

The world is big and interconnected. You want everyone in it to use your product or service. You have a better chance of appealing to customers of various ages, races, genders, sexual orientation, military service, physical abilities, and religions if your staff represents those demographics. The trick is, you can’t stop at just hiring for diversity. You also have to promote diversity up the organizational chart. You have to fairly compensate every employee for their work. You have to be inclusive by listening to, and being influenced by, diverse viewpoints.You have to intentionally create a culture where all employees feel safe to share their experiences and backgrounds.Your staff needs to be both seen and heard in order to reap the benefits of both employee retention and market expansion.

How do you foster a welcoming and supportive environment at your business? Please share in the comments.

Old Money

You spend your whole life working hard, saving aggressively, and accumulating good credit. Your reward for that high net worth? A big target on your back. In the United States, elder fraud is estimated at $3 billion annually. You want to be polite to strangers and lead with trust, but if you are duped, you could lose your entire life’s savings.

Why Seniors

As of 2019, 34 million baby boomers are retired. This provides fraudsters with a wealth of opportunity. Society often portrays people over 65 years old as naive, lonely, and gullible. When popular schemes become widely publicized, they quickly change tactics. Once a fraudster has your money, it’s almost impossible to it get back.

Current Scams

Fraudsters prey on the target’s emotions. They approach with either overly sympathetic and friendly or overly pushy and threatening behavior. For example:

Romance – offers companionship
Caregiver – you employ them to work around the house, but they accept the job to steal
Grandparent – informs you that a grandchild is in trouble and you need to send the fraudster money to help your grandchild
Government Imposter – threatens arrest unless you pay them
Medicare – claims they are a Medicare representative and asks to verify your number. They use it to bill Medicare for fake services then keep the money. By the way, Medicare will never (and I don’t throw that word around) contact you for your number unless you have previously given them permission
Foreign Sweepstakes/Lottery – asks you to pay a fee to win a fake contest
Charity – a fake non-profit requests a donation
Home Repair – claims your home needs a repair, charges in advance, never provides service
Tech Support – offers to remotely fix non-existent computer problems
Media – fake ad for non-existent services like a reverse mortgage or prescription drugs
Investment – offers a guaranteed high return on your investment but only if you send the money to the fraudster right now
Zoom Account Suspension – an official-looking email saying you can’t use their service arrives with a malicious link to click so they can collect your Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
Vaccine Card – if you posted a selfie on social media with your vaccination card revealing your PII, fraudsters can capture your information to steal your identity

Be Proactive

Stay up-to-date on the current scams and refuse outreach from strangers. When tempted by an offer that seems too good to be true, verify the seller’s credentials, consult someone you trust, and/or research the offer online. Other people have probably already been approached and have insight on it.
Be suspicious of anyone who wants you to make a quick decision and keep it a secret. If someone contacts you claiming you, or someone you love, is in danger, write down their instructions: What do they want you to do (e.g., wire funds, send a gift card)? Where do they want you to send it (phone number, email address, website, financial institution, name, and account number)? Then call the police and give them the information you recorded.
Refuse unsolicited phone calls, mailings, door-to-door services, emails, and texts.
Do not give or send PII or valuables to strangers.
Be mindful online. Use reputable anti-virus software and keep it updated. Enable your computer browser’s pop up blocker. Do not download, open attachments, nor click on links in messages sent from strangers. If you receive an email from someone you don’t know, then the best practice is to delete it without opening it.

What do you do to protect yourself from fraud? Please share in the comments.

Going off the Rails

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln

How do you know when the axe is sharp enough? Overthinking is a pattern of behavior where your thoughts swirl in an endless negative loop. These thoughts produce fear that clouds your judgement. Instead of preparing you for positive next steps, you get stuck. How thin is the line between preparation and overthinking?

Why It’s Bad

Your brain is trying to reduce the anxiety caused by your situation’s uncertainty, but overthinking typically just produces more questions to worry about.
It may deter you from making rash decisions, but as a habit, overthinking is a gateway to excessive worry which can lead to stress, anxiety, depression, OCD, and/or PTSD.
Pondering all the possible outcomes to a decision is fine, but when it prevents you from choosing one of them, that’s a problem.
Do not confuse overthinking with self-reflection. Self-reflection results in learning, insight, and gaining perspective. Overthinking results in dwelling on everything you don’t have control over and feeling bad about it.
Overthinking projects that are on a deadline gives you less time to complete the project. For example: taking so much time deciding what you’re going to wear to your client presentation that you run out of time to adequately rehearse the presentation.
If you are busy overthinking a situation, then you are too distracted to notice new opportunities.

What It Feels Like

You lose sleep because of the repeated negative thoughts of how you feel about the problem instead of how you’re going to solve it.
You have trouble making easy decisions (e.g., where to go for lunch).
You second guess your decisions (e.g., I should have known in the interview that Joe Sixpack was a bad hire).

How To Stop

Distract Yourself: Your brain will come up with possible solutions when you leave it alone for a while. Take a break and listen to a few minutes of your favorite podcast.
Journal: Stop and write down what triggered the overthink. After a week, read what you wrote. Do you see any patterns? Make a plan to deactivate the trigger the next time it happens.
The Practical Test: When you are spiraling, ask yourself, “What evidence are these thoughts based on? Is it legitimate? Is there someone I trust that I can ask?” If your thoughts are illogical, unreasonable or impractical, they are overthink.
Change Your Environment: Enlist your endorphins in the battle. Get outside and go for a run or walk the dog or ride your bike.
Worry Time: Schedule a recurring weekly appointment on your calendar for worrying and limit it to fifteen minutes. This accomplishes three things: you control when you allow the worried thoughts, you limit the time you allow yourself to worry, and by the time the appointment comes, you may no longer have anything to worry about. Begin your worry time with this question, “Can I do anything to change this situation in the next twenty-four hours?” If yes, then stop thinking and take action. If no, then put the thought on the agenda for the next scheduled worry appointment.

If you can’t stop ruminating on your own, it can damage your mental health. A trained therapist can give you exercises and accountability to pull yourself out of the overthinking doom loop. Learning how to flip your negative, repetitive thoughts into positive ones is a skill worth developing.

What do you do to pull yourself out of overthinking? Please share in the comments.

Sleep On It

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” is the hustler’s motto. There are at least a couple of movies and a couple of songs with that statement as the title. It implies that strong people don’t need sleep. In reality, getting adequate sleep not only makes us stronger, but also smarter, and not getting enough sleep can eventually kill you.

How Much is Enough?

A recent study by the CDC found that 41 million Americans in the workforce are sleep deprived. How many hours an adult needs varies by person; it can be anywhere between six and ten. When you don’t get enough, you accumulate a sleep debt that sooner or later your body will force you to pay. If you feel moody, are making more mistakes than usual, or falling asleep in meetings, then you aren’t getting enough. That lack of sleep can lead to poor decision-making, depression, and/or burnout. If you deny your brain the time it needs to recharge, then it will punish you with poor functioning, like trouble focusing on tasks, misunderstanding communication with your team, and difficulty controlling stress. These indicators can manifest in as few as three consecutive nights of sleeping six hours or less.

Why is it Important?

You need to be physically healthy to do your best work, and getting enough sleep is key to your physical health. Your body repairs its tissues, manufactures hormones to fight infections and viruses, and lowers your blood pressure while you sleep. Also during sleep, your brain constructs and reinforces neural pathways that help you remember things you’ve learned, which strengthens your ability to solve complex challenges at work.

Best Practices

Get on a schedule. Go to bed and wake up at the same times every day. Then, before bedtime:

Three hours: Finish eating, and drinking caffeine and/or alcohol
90 minutes: Finish vigorous exercise
60 minutes: Turn off the TV, cell phone, and laptop. Read a real book, listen to soothing music, or meditate instead
At bedtime: Eliminate light and noise and adjust the room temperature; cooler is more conducive to sleeping

Damage Control

After a sleepless night:

Try to begin your day with exercise, outside if possible. You could go for a run or ride your bike, but a brisk walk through nature while breathing in fresh morning air and listening to your favorite songs followed by gentle stretching will also put you in a good mindset to face the day.
Your body may try to rest at an inopportune time later in the day. If that happens, it’s more productive to take a 15-30 minute break to let your brain rest than to keep plowing through your to-do list.
Caffeine may get you through the morning, but the crash could have you zoning out during your afternoon Zooms. If you can’t grab a 15 minute nap, then take 10 minutes to either meditate or eat a healthy snack and chase it with a glass of water while watching an uplifting video; maybe this one. If you don’t have 10 minutes, then take one or two minutes to either stretch or take a few deep breaths.

Many of us have trouble sleeping since the advent of COVID-19. What are some things you do to get a good night’s sleep? Please share in the comments.

It’s About Time

When did the United States know it was time to bring workers from the fields to the factories? Who decided working eight hours a day for five days in a row was the best schedule for optimum productivity? The 40-hour workweek became a law in the United States in 1940. If we haven’t thought about how long it should be since then, may we please use COVID-19 as the trigger for redefining how long it is now?

Not News

How long both the workweek and the workday should be is not a new conversation. One of my favorite thinkers is organizational psychologist Adam Grant. He has lobbied for the death of the five-day workweek for at least a couple of years. There is plenty of evidence to support his position from respected sources like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The Huffington Post.

Mother Knows Best

The catch is, if employees spend less time on the job, isn’t it logical that the job should pay less? Mothers have struggled with this prevalent employer attitude for years. In Mika Brzezinski’s book, Know Your Value: Women, Money, and Getting What You’re Worth, Carol Smith, former publisher of Elle magazine told Mika, “I love hiring women (for) four days a week because they actually will produce at least five days’ worth of work for four days’ worth of pay.” As an employer that’s a benefit to her, but as a woman, it is a detriment. Her story in the book goes on to note that the moms of young children who work for her are willing to do anything to have a four-day workweek including accepting 60% of their salary.

Proof of Concept

Of course, employees do not want to make less money, but why should employers shorten the week without also shortening the paycheck? Here are two examples. This article talks about a four-day-workweek-no-pay-reduction experiment the company Buffer offered its employees. To shorten their workweek, they cut back on meetings and social events, sped up the pace of their day, and improved their focus (e.g., employees reported spending 35% less time surfing the web). The experiment was so successful, it’s still running. Buffer made $21 million in revenue in 2020. Also, American businesses should vet the plan Iceland commissioned from Alda (Association for Sustainable Democracy), an Icelandic non-profit, and Autonomy, a British think tank, to condense the workweek. These two organizations partnered to run two large-scale trials of a four-day workweek from 2015-2019. They published their results in June 2021. In addition to productivity remaining the same or improving in their test-subject companies, the study also concluded that employee welfare markedly increased (e.g., less burnout). Even if employers prioritize revenue over employee well-being, these studies prove a four-day workweek is profitable.

Life always holds an element of uncertainty. Did we really need a pandemic to remind us of what our priorities should be and how far we’ve strayed from them? Let’s rethink the current workweek model and consider what compensation for productivity could look like in 2022.

Would you rather be paid for your time or your productivity? Please share in the comments.