Mike McBride Online

Mental Health

Stories Can Help Eliminate Mental Health Stigma, But Is The Workplace A Safe Place to Share Yours?
ByMike McBride December 7, 2023December 6, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

Bosses, ask yourself the question. Is this a safe place for people to talk about their mental health? If it’s not, what can you do to change that? The article above has some advice for you. Maybe it all comes down to the kind of people who work for you and the behavior that you tolerate. If someone is honest about their mental health struggles and then you allow them to be stigmatized by others, it’s not a safe place.

And if it’s not a safe place, your wellbeing program doesn’t matter.

Read More Stories Can Help Eliminate Mental Health Stigma, But Is The Workplace A Safe Place to Share Yours?
Security

Linked – AI and Mass Spying
ByMike McBride December 6, 2023December 7, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

Imagine, if you will, your smart TV or home assistant listening in on conversations you’ve been having about layoffs in your industry, and that data is shared with a financial institution that then decides that you’re not a good credit risk. The AI took that conversation and combined it with a ton of financial information from other people who work in your industry and made that call. Is it accurate? Probably not, but when you start grabbing data from all over the place and building these huge algorithmic models, things can get a little messy. You become less of an individual and more of a conglomeration of all the people who do things like you, and when you add in a little spying, that can lead to all sorts of disastrous consequences.

Do we want governments and corporations to have that much power? No, but as Bruce rightly points out, we haven’t done much of anything to stop them from taking it so far.

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Microsoft

Beware Those Claiming Expertise with Copilot for M365
ByMike McBride November 30, 2023November 29, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

I’ve seen the same thing Loryan has seen, though. Microsoft partners and consulting companies are offering up “expertise” on Copilot that I don’t believe they have. If you’re looking for guidance to help you navigate the Copilot waters, I also recommend vetting the folks who claim to be able to do that.

Read More Beware Those Claiming Expertise with Copilot for M365
Career

Linked – The wrong way to define productivity
ByMike McBride November 29, 2023November 29, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

As the article mentions, this is a big reason why return-to-office mandates have destroyed the trust between management and employees. When I’m happily working remotely, finishing all of my tasks and projects on time, connecting with the people I need to collaborate with just fine, and reporting on the status of my work using the tools available, and you turn around and tell me that I need to be in the office to be more productive, I quickly see that for what it is. Despite the results, you don’t trust people to do their jobs.

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Career

Work Can Be Many Things But It Is Also Transactional
ByMike McBride November 21, 2023November 20, 2023 Reading Time: 3 minutes

When I hear people talking about how much more effective employees are when they make friends at work, it makes my hair stand on end a bit. Because the benefits of having good friendships don’t exist solely to make us better workers. We’re more than our work. Our work is a transaction that we take part in every day. We do work, our employer pays us. We shouldn’t let any kind of friendship or supposed loyalty blind us to that fact either. When our employers don’t consider the money they pay to be worth the work that we are doing, for whatever reason they have to think that, they have shown an uncanny willingness to let us go. There is no loyalty from that end of things and so no loyalty is deserved from the other end of the transaction either.

Read More Work Can Be Many Things But It Is Also Transactional
LawFirms

Linked – For ‘Unhappy’ Law Firms, There’s Little Recourse From Fast Rising Legal Tech Prices
ByMike McBride November 16, 2023November 15, 2023 Reading Time: 2 minutes

With all the announcements from Microsoft Ignite about Teams Premium, SharePoint Premium, CoPilot, etc. these subscription costs are about to get even higher if firms want to keep up with technological changes.

And this will remain a massive problem:

Read More Linked – For ‘Unhappy’ Law Firms, There’s Little Recourse From Fast Rising Legal Tech Prices