Work Behavior

Every year America becomes more diverse, but change in the makeup of the management ranks has stalled. The problem has become an urgent matter of national debate. How do we fix it? Arguing that it's time to focus on changing systems rather than individuals, two of the world's leading experts on workplace diversity show us a better way in the first comprehensive, data-driven analysis of what succeeds and what fails. The surprising results will change how America works.

As a workplace strategist and business coach, Erica Keswin has spent over 20 years working with top business leaders and executives to build successful organizations that honor relationships. Featuring case studies from top brands such as, Lyft, Starbucks, Mogul, and SoulCycle, to name a few, Bring Your Human to Work distills the key practices of the most human companies into applicable advice that any business leader can use to build a “human workplace”.

Why do some team members not get along? What is the best way to get new teams and ad-hoc teams to maximize their performance in the least amount of time? How can meetings be designed to achieve useful outcomes? Teams are the source of problem-solving and innovation that today’s organizations need to survive and thrive in an increasingly complex and challenging marketplace. Teamwork is hard because there is no magic formula or step-by-step procedure to ensure results.

Work has recently undergone profound changes, not all for the better. Workplace expert Jennifer Moss, author of The Burnout Epidemic, takes listeners to the front lines of this historic shift. Through extensive interviews, she uncovers why work has changed and highlights the leaders and organizations who have managed to build cultures that everyone really wants.

If you have ever been part of a great team, you will know it is exponentially better than being part of a mediocre team. Teams are at the heart of working in complex domains and are essential to the success of agile approaches yet relatively few teams achieve greatness. Agile and leadership coach Geoff Watts has pulled together his many years of experience with all sorts of teams from software to product development, from medical teams to sports teams and has identified five common characteristics of great teams:

In Get Better: 15 Proven Practices to Build Effective Relationships, FranklinCovey's chief people officer, Todd Davis, explains that an organization's greatest asset isn't its people; rather, it's the relationships between its people that is the greatest predictor of personal effectiveness. In the end, employees' ability to build and sustain great relationships is an organization's ultimate competitive advantage.

The iconic Sydney to Hobart Race, a 723-mile deepwater challenge - often called the “Everest” of offshore ocean racing - is considered one of the toughest in the world. Unpredictable weather and seas make each race demanding, but in 1998, an unexpected “weather bomb” hit the fleet, creating 80-foot waves and 100-mile-per-hour winds. Many bigger, better-equipped boats tried to maneuver around the storm, but the crew of the AFR Midnight Rambler chose to head directly into its path.

How well do we really know dogs? People may enjoy thinking about them as "man's best friend", but what actually drives the things they do? What is going on in their fur-covered heads as they look at us with their big, expressive eyes? Raymond Coppinger and Mark Feinstein know something about these questions, and with How Dogs Work, they're ready to share; this is their guide to understanding your dog and its behavior.

Americans love a hard worker. The employee who toils eighteen-hour days and eats meals on the run between appointments is usually viewed with a combination of respect and awe. But for many, this lifestyle leads to family problems, a decline in work productivity, and, ultimately, physical and mental burnout. Chained to the Desk in a Hybrid World provides an inside look at the impact of work stress on those who live and work with workaholics—partners, spouses, children, and colleagues—as well as the appropriate techniques for clinicians who treat them.

Managing a call center presents numerous challenges for leaders, including meeting stringent KPIs, maintaining employee motivation, and handling high call volumes. Achieving performance metrics such as average handle time, first call resolution, and customer satisfaction requires meticulous planning and constant monitoring. Simultaneously, leaders must keep their teams motivated in a high-pressure environment, often characterized by repetitive tasks and demanding customers.

This audiobook narrated by Zeb Soanes offers a pioneering account of the surging global tide of market power and how it stifles workers around the world.

One of the most important reasons people today choose to stay—or leave—a job is the culture of the company. As people become more socially conscious; focus more on wellness, self-care, and work-life balance; and seek jobs where they feel a real connection, it’s more important than ever to think about the elements of a job between the work itself. But how do you create a culture that people enjoy while staying productive and successful? In Happy at Work, you’ll first learn a bit more about why a happy workplace is so important and how it can benefit both employees and the company as a whole.

Imagine a company where everyone loves to work, where employees feel not just "satisfied" but truly cared for, respected, and energized. Think of the impact this would have on recruitment, retention, customer satisfaction, innovation, and overall performance. Aron Ain, the award-winning CEO of Kronos, a global provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions, believes that anything is possible when people are inspired.

Drawing on their years of experience working at remote companies DuckDuckGo and Automattic, plus dozens of interviews with leading experts, Ali Greene and Tamara Sanderson have written the ultimate playbook for managing remote teams.

There’s a message getting a lot of airtime these days. It says to be successful, you have to step into the spotlight, climb the ladder, become the boss, or chase whatever version of success that’s been dangled in front of you.

An entertaining and accessible listen with profound implications for the future, Teeming takes us on a journey through nature’s most ancient and successful R&D labs, and gives practical prescriptions for redesigning organizations to flourish far into the future. Evolutionary biologist and anthropologist Dr. Woolley-Barker weaves poetic vision and deep scientific expertise to illustrate how flat, agile, and adaptive societies like ants, termites, and underground fungal networks self-organize for resilience and value.

Remote and hybrid workplaces are here to stay, and they pose formidable obstacles that complicate managing projects and launching new products. Against this backdrop arrives Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace. In his inimitable style, Simon adeptly fuses critical research and concepts from a slew of diverse and seemingly unrelated fields, including Agile software development, human resources, supply-chain management, organizational behavior, cognitive psychology, and labor economics. Brimming with case studies, insights, and practical advice, the book is a tour de force.

Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley deliver a guidebook for leaders navigating the uncertainty of a post pandemic world in this sequel to The Adaptation Advantage. Leaders today must acknowledge and respond to the fundamental shifts that lay the foundation for effective leadership: From managing people to enabling success, from viewing peers as competitors to seeing them as collaborators, from applying extrinsic pressure on workers to unlocking intrinsic motivation, and from driving productivity with unquestioned authority to inspiring value creation by leading with empathy.

Mindfulness isn't anything that we think; it's what we don't think. Mindfulness isn't something that other people do; it's something that we all do. Mindfulness is an ancient, life-enhancing, healing technique that can help us remember our natural state of happiness and health, even if we think we are too modern and too busy to prioritize what's really important--being fully alive and fully alive to our full life potential.

In this fascinating and empowering book, King outlines the invisible barriers that hold women back at all stages of their careers, and provides readers with a clear set of takeaways to thrive despite the sexist workplace, as they fight for change from within. Gender equality is not about women, and it is not about men - it is about making workplaces work for everyone. Together, we can fix work, not women.