What defines a friend? Two actual friends have asked me recently and it’s a question that, rightly, we agonise over from a young age. Remember being stood around in the playground asking if someone was friends with so and so and deciding that because so and so was friends with so and so, we were […]
What exactly makes us friends anyway? Read More »
Recently, I went on a walk around the Victorian-era park near to my home, a place that I love and have walked in for decades. I realised, as I passed each couple or family or group, the window I had into the lives of strangers. Through the window, I could hear a few words as
Happened to Overhear: “Like, An Uber For 2 Bus-stops Home!” Read More »
Dealing with being middle-aged, brown and a woman I’ve found myself in a place where I never imagined myself, which, in itself, is odd because of course, if I carried on being alive, I was going to be middle-aged and still brown and (probably) still a woman. Yes, I know that I could identify as
I looked in the mirror today and I am older Read More »
No respect: changing attitudes to hierarchy at work. Society is built around hierarchies. Families comprise hierarchies. Organisations definitely are organised around hierarchies. Without the acceptance that some people call the shots and therefore are inherently more ‘valuable’ than others, there would be anarchy according to most accepted wisdom. Just as there needs to be order
No respect: changing attitudes to hierarchy at work. Read More »
Listen to the Nowsville discussion! We talked about the report that made a link between following misogynist influencers like Tate and mainstream extremist thinking. In the first episode we talked about the attraction of Tate. For those not versed in his rhetoric, Tom reads out part of the Tate manifesto of women needing to spend
Andrew Tate. Part 1 Read More »
In an era characterised by conflict, it’s increasingly challenging to compartmentalise personal concerns about world events from professional responsibilities. Senior people in particular, often find themselves grappling with the tension between their deeply held values and the expectation of maintaining a neutral stance within their organisations. How can one effectively balance these two seemingly conflicting
Staying Focused at Work Despite Global Conflict Read More »
Whilst Covid is becoming a distant memory (or rather a new, less intense background feature for most people) the post-Covid age is marked by the harsh reality that organisations have limits to how far they can accommodate the wishes of their employees. In addition, the age-old lack of understanding between different groups of people still
What does this mean for organisations? Read More »
Not many people working now were also working thirty years ago, but, for those that were, work has changed beyond recognition. Virtually gone are whole industries and sectors (for example coal mining, shorthand typists or textile production), replaced by waves of different roles in technology and the service sectors in the UK. As industries shrank
So what’s changed about work? Read More »
Introduction Welcome to the brave new world of work. ‘What’s Happening to Work?’ is a collection of observations about work, society and individuals, and how workplaces are stumbling through the most rapid evolution in living memory. In the not-so-distant past, the office was a land of cubicles, where coffee breaks were sacred and water cooler
What’s Happening to Work? Part 1 Read More »
Covid lockdowns enabled the great remote working experiments of 2020/21 around the world. 60% of the adult working population worked remotely at some point during the first lockdown in the UK, a total of over 8 million people or a quarter of the population working remotely, as opposed to half that figure in 2019 according
Remote work; how should we handle it? Read More »