Welcome to Fun Friday Links, a weekly collection of interesting discoveries about innovation, crowdsourcing, ideas, and business from all corners of the internet. Most of the time, the goal is to get you thinking differently about innovating, business culture, and life in general. Other times, we may toss an infographic or fun video your way. Submissions are welcome, and you can send them to conspire@mindjet.com for consideration.
Five Company Policies That Scream ‘We Hate Our Employees’
Long story short: today’s talented knowledge workers have no time for your outdated corporate practices, and they won’t stand for them, anyway. From Forbes:
“Corporations are run more like day-labor outfits now. No one has any job security. In some jobs, like the head of marketing or the CIO, the average tenure in the role is under three years. Non-leadership employees can be cut from the payroll at any moment.
Why would working people put up with stupid rules at work these days? Anybody with an ounce of self-esteem is going to look for a better job when they’re treated badly at work. Can we blame them?
These five crusty and outdated HR policies have no place in the modern working world, yet they hang on. Does your company follow any of these five talent-repelling policies?”
How To Answer Nasty, Scathing Emails
It’s hard to get a sense of someone’s tone, voice — and often, needs — when all you have to work with is text. In other words, it’s easy to sound rude, so if you’re actually trying to convey frustration? You could end up doing some real damage. Also from Forbes:
“By the time he died, Lincoln had amassed stacks of flaming letters that verbally shredded his rivals and subordinates for their bone-headed mistakes. However, Lincoln never sent them. He vented his frustration on paper, and then stuffed that sheet away in a drawer. The following day, the full intensity of his emotions having subsided, Lincoln wrote and sent a much more congenial and conciliatory letter.
We can all benefit from learning to do the same with email. Your emotions are a valid representation of how you feel—no matter how intense— but that doesn’t mean that acting on them in the moment serves you well. Go ahead and vent—tap out your anger and frustration on the keyboard. Save the draft and come back to it later when you’ve cooled down. By then you’ll be rational enough to edit the message and pare down the parts that burn, or—even better—rewrite the kind of message that you want to be remembered by.”
How to Turn Crowdsourced Ideas Into Innovative Results
As crowdsourcing becomes common practice, it will inevitably become more of a buzzword for some companies than an actionable strategy. Here’s how to prevent that from happening. From Inc.:
“Crowdsourcing generates lots of ideas, but the important question now, especially in the tech world, is how do we turn our crowd-generated ideas into business value? Any startup can benefit from innovative thinking and open-source tools, but a tech team can spend a lot of time collaborating or run a crowdsourcing campaign and get very little done.
The key is to know when and how to use these ideas, and be creative enough to combine the generated ideas to deliver value. This isn’t crowdsourcing; this is connectional intelligence. In my new book Get Big Things Done co-authored by Saj-nicole Joni, we define connectional intelligence as the ability to combine knowledge, ambition and human capital, forging connections from around the world to create unprecedented value and meaning.
Simply put, using connectional intelligence is how to turn crowdsourced ideas into results.”
The post Fun Friday Links: Show Your Employees You Hate Them, Email Like Lincoln, and Crowdsourced Results appeared first on via @Mindjet's Conspire #ideasquad.