officehorsepony

Returning to posting after a COVID-chaos induced break.  For Stockholm Syndrome to emerge the hostage has to be believe that their captor has the power of life and death over them.  Our employers don’t threaten us with physical death, however they do hold our economic lives in their hands – and the fear of financial death … Read more

More stories (and, indeed, this book) demonstrating that a shorter working day is not only good for the individual, it can be hugely better for the organisation.  As I talk about in the case of Microsoft moving to a four day week there really shouldn’t be anything surprising about this – the research base around diminishing returns … Read more

There have been a lot of stories in the press recently about work-induced burnout.  I will delve into that subject a little more in a later post, but first want to talk about something in this story that relates to how we define ourselves though our work. In it Amber Coster says: “I was working … Read more

During the month of August 2019 Microsoft Japan closed its office every Friday and gave all members of staff special, paid, leave for those days.  The result?  Productivity increased.  This is, frankly, wholly unsurprising to me.  As I wrote in “The Long Hours Myth” There are rapidly diminishing, indeed negative, returns with increasing working hours.  Studies have … Read more

A recent report has found that there is a massive disconnect between the careers that young people in the UK aspire to have, and the opportunities that are actually available to them: The sectors that young people aspire to work in differ greatly from the jobs available. There is a disconnect between aspiration and opportunity; The … Read more

More than a decade after the events that resulted in 19 France Télécom (the named Orange) employees taking their own lives three senior managers have received jail terms for their actions.  The company went through a massive re-structuring in 2007, with the then Chief Executive, Dider Lombard, aiming to cut 22,000 jobs from the organisation. … Read more