A couple weeks ago LinkedIn announced a new feature offering people a new way to “explain” a career break or other gap in their resume.

According to the Adweek story linked above, the “Career Break” feature was driven in part by the pandemic and the large number of people who were either laid off or quit their jobs because of illness or the need to take care of loved ones who got sick. It solves the problem of having an extended period of time between actual jobs, something that often comes up during job interviews to the detriment of the interviewee.

It’s a noble idea, but it’s rooted in the idea that a career gap is something that needs to be rationalized, or at least be spun and presented in the most upbeat possible manner.

If the goal is truly to remove some of the negative connotations traditionally associated with these sorts of gaps in work experience, the burden falls on the company doing the hiring, not the applicant hoping to be hired.

Just because someone chose or was required because of circumstances to take an extended period of time off doesn’t automatically mean they are inherently less qualified for a position or job.

And that’s not even mentioning the people who quit, as many did in 2021, for work-related reasons such as palpable lack of advancement opportunity, low pay or lack of general respect in the workplace.

Unless there’s some hint of an actual problem – embezzlement, theft, fraud or something similar – why an individual left their last job and what they’ve been doing in the meantime should be of no importance to the company interviewing that individual.

No matter what the answer is it opens the door to some form of subjective, even moral, judgment being made. If they left because of a hostile work environment or because they weren’t being promoted, they could be labeled as “difficult” and not hired. If they left because they lacked alternatives for child or parent care, they could be seen as “not sufficiently committed to work success” and not hired.

broader applicant pools

LinkedIn’s new feature comes about a month after a study was released finding employers are in the midst of a recalibration of their hiring criteria, one that emphasizes skills over a degree requirement. That comes after two decades (or more) of “degree inflation” where very specific degrees were the thing companies were looking for, excluding those without them from consideration. Now a tight labor market has them broadening their search of applicants.

That raises the question: Why were they being so restrictive in the first place?

From the HBR recap of the report:

Perhaps because they believe that college graduates possess more-refined social, or “soft,” skills — the ability to work in groups, say, or to communicate efficiently in real-time, or to prioritize tasks. These skills are far harder to assess, and our analysis strongly suggests that as a result many employers are using college degrees as a proxy for them. Employers who eliminated degree requirements, we found, frequently added more-detailed soft-skills requirements in their postings.

Here we go again with “soft” skills, which isn’t a thing and has never been a thing but which continues to linger like a fart in a small conference room.

hiring is looking for the wrong things

In my experience, the hiring and interviewing process is focused on three things:

• Skills
• Experience
• Degree or certification

All of that is how the application-submissions systems filter out the applicants who don’t have the right keywords in their resume.

None of those, though, focus on what it seems companies should actually be looking for, which is the ability to creatively solve problems.

Creativity is constantly cited as the skill companies most want in their current and future employees. But If they’re just looking at the three categories above, they’re missing out on finding people who can actually find new and innovative ways to achieve corporate goals.

In fact, the kind of creativity companies say they want is often the kind that’s not welcome in the workplace because it has a tendency to question the status quo a bit to frequently, wonders why it can’t install a piece of software on their company-issued machine and generally ruffles feathers.

It’s the creative individual, though, who could come in and point out a unique and unprecedented path to achieving a goal or finishing a project.

And that kind of creativity often comes from those who have been out of the workforce for a period of time. They may have had to figure out new ways to balance childcare and visiting elderly parents and how to revise a budget when the household income has been halved or overcome some other significant problem.

don’t worry, though, because none of this matters

All of this, as well as other stories in the last few months about job searches and related topics, doesn’t actually matter, though. That’s because, according to a recent Department of the Treasury report, individuals have little power when it comes to the labor market as well as how they’re compensated once they have a job.

Mergers, non-compete clauses and other tactics whose use has accelerated in the last 20 years or so have depressed wages by an estimated 15-25%, according to the report.

Anticompetitive practices thrive when there are fewer competitors. If workers have many potential employers, they might still agree to sign a noncompete clause, but they could demand a pay increase to compensate.

So, in short, you *have* to adequately explain why you were out of the job market for X months, or face the consequences for not doing so. And you *have* to fit nicely in the corporate box. And you *have* to return to the office when your employer says it’s mandatory, even if your productivity and quality of life have improved since you went remote. Because you have little to no power in the conversation.

All of this is yet another reminder that the burden to make improvements, explanations or adjustments almost always falls on the individual, not the corporation. That’s backwards.

There are certainly bigger things going on in the world right now, but something media-related caught my eye a couple weeks ago.

Specifically, the Associated Press, as part of its new NFT sales program, promoted an offer to purchase an NFT of refugees on a boat in the Mediterranean.

The AP has since taken down the Tweet with the offer but reportedly will still make the NFT available to purchase. It also said it will review its process for deciding which NFTs to mint going forward.

Understandably, the criticism of this was swift and harsh. After all, a news organization appearing to profit off an image of suffering is not a good look.

I don’t want to pile on that criticism, but it is a moment to once again consider how something like this happened in the first place.

Without knowing all the details of the workflow leading up to this NFT being minted and offered, it’s safe to assume that there was either A) no pushback internally, or B) the pushback that did emerge was ignored or overruled.

hiring has changed…it needs to keep changing

A recent HBR study indicated companies are putting less emphasis on degree completion and other “paper” qualifications when considering job applicants and looking more at an individual’s experience and skillset.

That’s good (though it makes me wonder why skills and experiences weren’t more important going forward) and is, according to the report, in part a result of a tight job market, so the hiring company has to be slightly less selective given fewer people coming in the door.

While skills and experience are clearly important, the AP incident – and countless others like it – indicate that there are other skills that still need to be more prevalent within organizations.

Specifically: “Are you now or have you ever been a fan of ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000?’”

What you’re getting when you hire someone who automatically thinks “Even his name sounds like ‘Hey, is that a beer?”” when introduced to someone named Mitchell is someone who will, in the room where things are being discussed and decided, come up with the most awful take and perspective on a proposal.

This is incredibly important in a day and age where the finished products will be subjected to the most abject ridicule and hot takes.

If the idea can survive the riffing that takes place in the room with an “MST3K” acolyte who’s unafraid to offer their unfiltered opinion on something, the odds of it being torn apart after it’s publicly revealed or released decrease substantially.

Of course that feedback should be offered constructively, but still from the perspective of having as much fun with an idea as possible.

Keep in mind that “MST3K” isn’t the same thing as more recent video formats like CinemaSins and others like it. It’s not about poking holes in an idea or story just for the lulz. Instead it’s more about seeing all the ridiculousness in a concept and having a good laugh.

Make these people – and those like them – part of your decision-making team today and see the number of times you have to “immediately reevaluate your process” go down dramatically.

Last week marked my two-year anniversary as Director, Content Programming at GoNoodle.

For those unfamiliar with GoNoodle, we offer hundreds of videos designed for kids – especially younger kids – to help them get active, learn to manage their emotions, explore creativity and more.

In those two years there have been a lot of ups and downs and, most notably, a distinct lack of what might be called a “normal” period.

That’s in part because, if you do the calendar math, my first month or so at the company coincided with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, which had a massive impact on the schools where GoNoodle is widely popular, teachers being a core audience of the videos we produce.

So almost immediately many of the standard operating procedures that had been in place and assumptions everyone had been working under were thrown out the proverbial window.

Which worked out nicely since, if you’re familiar with my work style, I thoroughly enjoy throwing assumptions out the window, or at least questioning them and making sure they are still applicable.

As with just about every job I’ve held over the years, there has been a lot I’ve learned from my time here, sometimes because I find myself in a “well…this needs to happen, so let’s dig in and figure it out” situation, which has been a common theme over the course of my career.

Most of all, the job has been incredibly rewarding. I truly believe that GoNoodle’s mission of helping teachers and engaging kids is a worthwhile one. Every week as I consider what videos and activities will be programmed to the front page of the sites and apps under my management I consider whether that’s what those audiences will be looking for at that moment.

That’s a tough hill to climb sometimes, but when I see or hear that it’s worked out there’s nothing better.

Here’s to even more good times ahead.

As you likely know, Facebook – along with other apps owned by the company including Instagram and Whatsapp – were offline yesterday for a bit over six hours right smack dab in the middle of the day.

Thankfully my day-to-day responsibilities no longer involve publishing to, engaging on or otherwise managing a page or other presence on Facebook. Still, with my experience doing so for many years I can’t help but have a few thoughts not only on what happened but also what it means and what kind of impact it should have.

So, in no particular order:

It certainly renewed the idea that building your home on rented land is not a great idea. That is to say, if your primary online marketing and promotional presence is on a platform that you don’t own you’re setting yourself up for problems. While a web host or other service can go down at anytime, if you at least own the site where the majority of your engagement and transactions happen you can make fixes, change to another host, reconfigure servers etc when problems crop up.

This doesn’t mean it’s an all-or-nothing game, it just means that Facebook and other managed networks should be offshoots of your online strategy, not the central hub.

It should make everyone question exactly what value they’re getting out of Facebook. Specifically, what’s the ROI of your marketing efforts there? While it’s been a few years since I actively managed a Facebook publishing program, that was a question I was asking even then, and had been asking for a couple years already.

Ever since the introduction of the News Feed in 2006 publishers of all kinds have been looking to find out how much of their audience is actually being reached, and that number has steadily gone down even as their total potential audience has gone up. Instead of reaching 50% of the people that follow a page, publishers gradually saw that go down to 20%, then 10%, then 5%. It got to the point that 2% organic reach was considered incredibly successful.

Really as soon as Facebook made it clear publishers could only reach a significant percentage of their audience through paid post promotion everyone should have run for the hills. But by then we were well into the sunk cost fallacy, with companies unwilling to abandon the site because they’d already put so much effort into it, even if the prospects for future value seemed dim.

Facebook is clearly a single point of failure for a significant portion not only of the U.S. economy but also the world’s information ecosystem. That’s a dangerous position for any company to be in, which is why so many trusts were busted in the early decades of the 20th century.

Just 40 years ago AT&T had to breakup the Bell Operating Companies because federal regulators understood one company controlling so much of the market was bad for consumers and the economy as a whole. The same should absolutely be done to Facebook, but it’s more likely that nothing will happen because too many Senators are still confused by Hotmail and others are too beholden to other interests to act.

Not only that but it’s clear now that Facebook’s continued insistence that Instagram and Whatsapp are separate companies is buffalo biscuits.

By far the most disturbing part of what happened were the stories of Facebook employees not able to enter the building or turn on lights because their IoT-connected badges and tools couldn’t function with the site down. It certainly reinforced my personal determination to never buy a single IoT device or appliance.

Even putting aside the fact these devices are incredibly easy to hack and have a tendency to leak personal data across any virtual beachfront they encounter, imagine not being able to get into your home until Facebook – or any other login manager – is back up.

The basic premise – that the responsibilities usually covered under that title have certainly evolved and now play a major role in the organizations where they work – isn’t wrong. But that doesn’t mean it’s wholly correct, either.

In no particular order:

What’s the ROI in this situation? Masters degrees like the one offered by USC Annenberg are, I’m assuming, expensive undertakings. But the average salary for a “social media manager” job according to PayScale is a little above $52,000/year. What you’re actually paid, though, is likely to be well below that, as most job listings I’ve come across in the last few years are looking for someone to start around $35,000/year. That makes me think you’re going to be hobbled with debt for a graduate degree that doesn’t actually make a difference to hiring managers. To that point..

It gives the advantage to those who can afford the degree. One of the major factors in how upward economic mobility has been hampered in the last 40-50 years is the rise in jobs that require a college degree, not to mention a graduate degree or other accreditation. Even jobs that would once be considered “entry level” now list a degree and several years of experience as needed for consideration. So those who can’t afford such a degree for any of a number of completely legitimate reasons are locked out of an entire category and field.

That evolution took place a decade or more ago. Look, I know a lot of journalists and others like to joke about how it’s always the intern managing social media. So the emergence of degrees like this gives them an excuse to trot that canard back out even while saying it may no longer be applicable.

The reality is that any company that turned its social media marketing over to an intern was committing a form of corporate negligence. At the very least, even if an intern was responsible for actually hitting the “publish/post” button, there should have been an experienced manager or two with program oversight and who was ultimately the owner of the program. It’s exactly the kind of situation that might be found in any other part of the communications and marketing team, where the senior members actually draft the press release but the interns are the ones who submit it to PRNewswire.

Too often companies and agencies equated “youth” with “expertise” when the reality was closer to “familiarity.” Because recent college-grads were younger and had adopted these tools earlier in their development, they were assumed to be better at them. That may have been true in some cases, but it was also true that someone who made their bones in traditional PR or even the early days of blogs, wikis and RSS had the insights needed to create strategies for those platforms, even if they leaned on younger folks for insights and execution.

Regardless, no one ever should have given an intern the keys to social media without any form of senior-level oversight.

The balance between degree and experience is skewed. Who would you rather have managing your corporate social media program: Someone with a degree but little hands-on experience or someone with 15 years of experience but no degree? They both may have pros and cons, but the latter will likely have additional skills that have been built up over the course of their career which gives them the advantage, especially when crisis time comes and they need to think on their feet or offer expert guidance.

How up to date is that curricula? Building off an earlier point, there were times in my career as a social media marketing professional that new tools and features were being added weekly. It was next to impossible to keep up with the new functionality for existing platforms as well as the other things launching, all of which were relevant to the job.

It’s hard to imagine a masters degree course remaining relevant with what is still an industry that measures product launch cycles in days, not months. More to the point, it’s hard to imagine the accumulated learning being *exactly* what executives are looking for when someone graduates. Some of the broader insights and learnings will be applicable, but likely to the same extent that an MBA in marketing and communications would be at a far less expensive price point.

It misses the point of what’s really needed for social media managers. Specifically two things:

• A career path: Social media management in my experience has been extremely siloed from other marketing and communications departments, despite the fact that all of them are extremely intertwined and interdependent. This siloing means that someone from the “Social Media” practice area is frequently overlooked when it comes to positions that oversee the whole group. New hires at any level in the social media department should be
• Emotional health support: I speak from experience when I say that being the lead on a social media marketing program can be a physically and emotionally-draining experience. Not only are you by default on-call 24/7 but you’re often the first to be exposed to the worst of the internet’s commenting culture. Even if it isn’t aimed directly at you but at the brand you manage, it’s hard to not be overwhelmed by the vitriol of the feedback at times.

Offering those two things would help not only attract but retain talent, meaning companies wouldn’t have to turn over staff as regularly, which helps create a more consistent program.

Don’t forget the olds…

On top of all that, let’s not forget that the original batch of social media managers were put into that position so long ago that they had dial-up internet connections in the college computer lab. They got their degrees in actual things and then applied those and other skills to the emerging world of online marketing in a number of forms. While things have certainly evolved since then, many of the best practices developed on the fly in those early days are still in place, even if they didn’t come at their jobs with a masters degree in an what is still an ephemeral practice area.

But my RSS usage didn’t begin with Reader, nor did it end there. Prior to Reader there was Newsgator and before that there was Bloglines. After Reader’s demise there was Digg Reader and Feedly, the latter of which I continue to use today.

Because I spend so much of each day with my nose in my RSS feeds, I have a few thoughts on what kind of features might be attractive were some company interested in evolving what has, over the last several years, been a relatively static product.

Mute Topics: There are certain things I never need to read about. Listing them here would likely sound exclusionary and pretentious, but that’s the truth. Sometimes those stories come from sites that I want to continue reading, published more out of fear of losing web traffic than any actual editorial direction. Similar to how you can mute keywords on Twitter, it would be nice just to occasionally add to, remove from or edit a list of keywords I’m uninterested in within the RSS ecosystem.

Note that this is not the same as the suggestion some people have made over the years to remove duplicate stories. I’m alright seeing two different takes on the same story, but want to specifically exclude a topic or two now and again.

Feed Suspended Alerts: Sometimes I realize “Huh…It’s been a minute since I saw a story from X outlet” only to dive in and realize nothing has been published to that feed for eight months or so. Maybe they just changed feeds, maybe they stopped pushing to RSS entirely.

A notification system that calls out when a feed hasn’t published for an extended period of time — let’s say 90 days — would be helpful. With that information I could either check to see if something has changed or just make sure to unfollow and keep my subscriptions nice and tidy.

In-App Drafting/Notes: Right now my process involves keeping a Text Edit document on my desktop where I draft posts or notes related to some of the stories I’ve come across if I’ve found them interesting enough. But that seems…wonky…and would love to have something right within the RSS window with a simple rich text editor. Think Evernote’s “quick notes” box, or even Google Keep.

What I’m looking for is an in-browser tool that will let me write while still having the story I’m referencing visible in the browser window.

Read Later: This one is simple: I want something better than the current “star” or “highlight” stories functionality, something closer to what I get in Pocket, but within the same RSS app. Basically, I don’t want to have to go to two places for a split experience.

Thoughts?

The series’ debut caused me to realize it was almost exactly a year ago I first encountered the comics it’s based on.

In summer 2011, Voce Communications, where I worked at the time, had just been signed as social media agency for DC Entertainment, an account I was going to be daily lead on. Leading up to that I flew out to Voce’s Sunnyvale, CA headquarters to discuss how we were going to kick things off. San Diego Comic-Con, a couple short months away in July, was our primary focus, as was the launch of DC Comics The New 52, scheduled for the end of August.

Sitting in my boss’ office was a box of graphic novels and merch DCE had sent to help us become familiar with the various properties we’d be encountering. Sitting there among the Batman, Superman and Green Lantern items was the first trade paperback collection of Sweet Tooth, something I knew nothing about. Lemire’s cover, though, immediately grabbed my attention and I pulled the softcover trade out.

The story Lemire wove through the first several issues had me hooked, and I later went on to read the rest of the original run, anxious to see how the gentle hybrid Gus would fare through his various travels and travails. It’s highly recommended and I look forward to reading his new comic series and watching the Netflix show in the near future.

But there are two Sweet Tooth-specific memories I’m compelled to share:

First: Lemire was always one of the nicest writers/artists to work with at the various conventions I staffed on behalf of DC and Vertigo. Always accommodating to the sometimes odd and almost always specific requests my team and I would make for social media. Watching him interact with fans — whether it was on a panel, in the show booth or just on the floor — was also fun as he was clearly having fun and was humbly appreciative of their enthusiasm.

Second: Speaking of those fans, it was at New York Comic-Con in October 2011 that I was walking the show floor between events and saw a couple cosplayers, one with big deer horns and the other with a pig snout. I probably passed them at least twice and looked at them for a while, trying to place why their costumes looked familiar. Finally I realized they were dressed as Gus and Wendy from Sweet Tooth and approached them, hoping to take their picture and share it on social.

There’s no big lesson to share here, no takeaways that will guarantee you make your content marketing program a success. It’s simply a fond memory I come back to often and share here as a reminder gentle, original art that inspires people is a powerful force in the world, something that should be celebrated.

Over the last few weeks a bruhaha has been bubbling around Substack, the hot new email publishing tool that allows writers to charge subscription fees to readers. The substance of that is nicely summarized by Annalee Newitz:

Substack is not merely an app. It’s actually a publication. Why do I say that? Because Substack’s leadership pays a secret, select group of people to write for the platform. They call this group of writers the “Substack Pro” group, and they are rewarded with “advances” that Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie calls “an upfront sum to cover their first year on the platform [that’s] more attractive to a writer than a salary, so they don’t have to stay in a job (or take one) that’s less interesting to them than being independent.” In other words, it’s enough money to quit their day jobs. They also get exposure through Substack’s now-considerable online reach.

Many writers in the last year or so have proactively exited publications to take their talents to Substack. In some high-profile cases, the rationale offered has included a desire to free themselves from editorial oversight, get back to their blogging roots or something similar.

Newitz is correct in calling Substack’s policy of paying a select group of high-profile names to publish on its platform an editorial choice, in much the same way The New York Times’ choice of who to include among its op-ed columnists and who to exclude from that group is an editorial choice. Substack then has a vested interest in promoting those writers in order to see an ROI on that investment and attract others.

(Oh, and there’s also the little issue of Substack seeming to attract a bunch of writers with a history of anti-trans opinions and positions.)

what are you..you you, you you

It’s a similar approach taken at various times by the blogging platform Medium, which has pivoted more since it was founded in 2012 than Disneyland’s Mad Tea Party. Years ago one of those pivots included offering publishers enhanced revenue opportunities to move their websites to that platform. It has also periodically started up its own publications, including hiring writers and editors to produce and manage them. Other platform companies like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube have paid “influencers” to create solely or primarily on their network as a way to attract users.

As Peter Kafka points out, Substack is the latest company unable to answer whether it’s a platform, publisher or something else. The key difference between the two is that a platform is egalitarian, open to anyone, while a publisher actively curates an editorial team as well as the content produced by that team.

Meanwhile, Facebook is making an active appeal to publishers with a Substack alternative as well as a report that compares their current mobile web revenue to what they might potentially earn if they migrated to the company’s Instant Articles format.

medium uncool

Medium itself is, in its latest shift of focus, deciding it’s no longer interested in funding journalism or investing in publication brands. That became clear when earlier this week – and just a short while after the journalists it had hired overwhelmingly voted to unionize – founder Ev Williams told everyone not interested in following it down this new path to gtfo.

The one thing both Medium and Substack have in common is they are both heavily funded by venture capital investors. So they have people breathing down their necks in anticipation of a profitable exit. In fact, Williams seems to have hung the idea that VCs would be less willing to fund the company if it was unionized. That’s just the latest media (or at least media-related) company to make a major change – up to and including going out of business – after employees vote to join a union.

Just earlier this month there was a terrible one-two punch when The Huffington Post laid off 47 employees after it was acquired by Buzzfeed, with those layoffs coming mere hours before news broke that Buzzfeed was exploring ways to go public through a special purpose acquisition company.

a whole lot of problems

I can’t really put it more succinctly than Ella Dawson does here, but let me offer a few thoughts on all these recent developments and how they fit together.

First, editors are invaluable. I’ve yet to come across a working writer (meaning someone who isn’t a big name columnist) who doesn’t believe their writing is better for having gone through an editor’s review. I’m inclined to agree with Spencer Ackerman in that editors and copyeditors should receive billing on articles alongside the writer/s. Most articles and pieces are a group effort and should be labeled as such.

Second, go back to blogging if you feel like you need to get back to your blogging roots. But remember that one of the original core tenets of blogging was linking out as part of an ongoing conversation, not just one-way publishing. But a return to “blogging roots” hasn’t really been the point of the current conversation. Instead it’s been about freeing one’s self from any sort of team environment where other people have different opinions and occasionally want to hold one accountable for one’s actions.

Third, you can tell how good an idea unions are by how hard some people fight against them. This is true in every industry.

Fourth, companies are simply avoiding accountability by claiming they’re not a media company when they clearly are. Any choice made by the owners or managers of a company regarding who gets paid and who doesn’t for editorial content, as well as what content is produced, is a media company. Similarly, if you are choosing to highlight X content on your front page or other discovery site, you’re making an editorial choice, something a media company does.

Fifth, avoiding editors wasn’t the goal of the early 2000s blogging movement. It was to add additional voices and perspectives to those that were part of the media establishment. Often those voices were from important groups and demographics who were under-represented in the existing dialogue and we were richer for those contributions. Self-publishing allowed anyone to be part of the conversation and while it still plays that role, the rise of algorithmic curation by social networks has stifled it significantly along with how blogging (and now email) became so insular. Human curation has also hurt things, making the discovery page of an app or website similar to the eye-level shelf at a grocery store, something big players pay lots of money to appear on while smaller independents are pushed to harder-to-find spots.

Finally, let’s dispel the notion of Silicon Valley being liberal and agree it’s actually conservative to libertarian on the political spectrum. A truly liberal industry wouldn’t spend so much time, energy and money busting union drives and probably wouldn’t leave its “shadow workforce” out to dry as it shifts away from massive corporate campuses. Instead, most of what’s passed for innovation in the last 20 years or so has come from companies that skirt or outright ignore labor laws and treat people as expendable “human capital.”

First, let’s acknowledge that the U.S. labor market is still a complete disaster.

U.S. employers added 49,000 jobs in January, after a revised drop of 227,000 the month before. Unemployment fell to 6.3%, from 6.7% in December, as hundreds of thousands of people left the workforce.

That last part is key: That the unemployment rate fell not because of jobs being created or companies rehiring workers, but because people opted out of the workforce.

With that being said, it’s a good time to check in on how this whole “future of work” situation is going, given that we’re coming up on a year since the world got turned on its ear.

Remote May Be the New Reality

If you’ve been watching the headlines, you may think working from home is here to stay, regardless of what the future might bring for the economy or the healthcare landscape. Not only are people thrilled with not having to commute long distances, but they’re enjoying no longer being subjected to the demands of Big Pants. In short they’re out there and they’re loving it. Remote work is expected to dramatically increase, thanks in part to new, more welcoming attitudes toward technology among employers.

Companies are embracing this idea or remote work, attracted not only by the increased productivity of the staff but also at the idea that they could unload some of the expensive downtown real estate they’ve been leasing. In fact, white collar companies last year seemed to be competing to set “return” dates that are farther out if they’re not going ahead and saying people can work remotely for the foreseeable future if they so choose.

Research from Bain & Company (via Harvard Business Review) found companies have benefited from how finding and retaining talent has become easier because, with remote work now in place, location isn’t as much of an issue as it once was. People no longer have to be within driving distance of an office to be considered, and productivity has increased as a result.

A Gartner study reported that roughly three-quarters of employees who are new to the remote work world say work culture for them has improved with the emergence of remote or hybrid models. The positive changes in culture and engagement cited by Gartner indicate those companies are among the “best” as categorized in the Bain research, while others have had a harder time maintaining productivity, something that’s significantly influenced by employee engagement.

I’m willing to bet that many of the “best” companies – those who have seen productivity rise – have adapted in part by focusing less on employees being present for the traditional 9-to-5 workday and more on whether or not the work is being done and being done well. Doing so relieves a great deal of the pressure employees who also happen to be parents or other caregivers feel, giving them a measure of flexibility to holistically manage their life. It remains to be seen if changes to the five-day workweek are next or if that’s too much for us to handle right now.

Who Will Return to the Office?

It might be more than a little hyperbolic to say that the office as we know it – and have known it for a century or more – is over, but that doesn’t mean significant changes haven’t and won’t continue to happen.

Work from home isn’t for everyone, of course. Nor is it even an option for everyone. A PricewaterhouseCooper study found younger, newer workers are more likely to prefer the in-person environment than those who are older, likely because younger folks have fewer at-home responsibilities to manage and because they believe face-to-face is better for networking and building up a reputation.

Who returns to the office and who doesn’t could be dictated by who has or hasn’t received the Covid-19 vaccine, with the EEOC releasing guidelines saying companies can keep people who haven’t received the shot/s from coming back. Most importantly, that differentiation doesn’t, according to the EEOC, count as discrimination. An individual being able to prove they’ve received the vaccine, then, becomes important for everyone, despite the very real concerns such identification can cause other problems.

Right now most layoffs have happened among the elderly, women, black, Hispanic, women and low wage workers, including those who live in poverty-heavy neighborhoods. In short, it’s those outside the billionaires who are getting richer because of the stock market and other factors. Based on recent unemployment reports, it’s unclear if or when those people will be rehired, much less be in a position to decide whether or not they want to be in the office or not.

But What About Productivity?

Part of the Bain study shows differences in productivity between companies have widened, with top companies getting farther out in front and others being left further behind. That’s similar to how big companies have gotten bigger during the pandemic while smaller companies have had a hard time because they lack necessary infrastructure and other tools.

We estimate that the best companies … have grown 5% to 8% more productive over the last 12 months. Most organizations, however, have experienced a net reduction in productivity of 3% to 6% (or more) due to inefficient collaboration, wasteful ways of working, and an overall decline in employee engagement.

The short version is that companies successfully keeping employee productivity high before 2020 made a decent transition to work-from-home realities, while companies that weren’t doing well on that front had a harder time.

The companies that are the very best at managing scarce time, talent and energy — that is, the average of the top quartile of companies in our research — are 40% more productive than the rest (the average of the remaining three quartiles). This enormous productivity gap is a key source of competitive advantage for the very best companies.

Not only does talent acquisition and engagement influence productivity, according to Bain, but the study showed the number of meetings being held during the era of remote work increased by 13%, as did the number of people in those meetings. The only good news is that the average length of the meetings dropped.

Those numbers would seem to correlate to how many companies and managers have spent much of the last year wringing their hands over the loss of “watercooler moments,” decrying remote work because it removes the serendipity that supposedly occurs when two coworkers just happen to run into each other in the hallway and come up with a great idea. Because those weren’t happening, the number of meetings had to increase, apparently.

At the end, it seems each company will have to carve out its own future, deciding what kind of arrangement works best for the organization as a whole and the individuals it employs. In an ideal situation, those individuals have the same sort of freedom to make their own choices to adapt to a very different situation than was in place just over one year ago.

Last Friday, for reasons unclear to me, everyone started sharing their own Harsh Writing Advice on Twitter.

Inspired by some of the helpful, ironic and flat-out funny advice that crossed my timeline, I thought I would round up some great writing advice from movies, TV series and the writers of both. This is, of course, by no means a comprehensive list – there are countless movies and shows about writers and the writing process – but are some of my favorite bits.

“Thirty-Two…”

Even if it’s not something that will be performed, it helps if you sound it out and you still find it funny.

“Good writers borrow; great writers steal outright.”

Don’t plagiarize, but don’t be afraid to be overly- and overtly-influenced.

“Buy the premise, buy the bit.”

Even non-comedic material needs the audience to quickly understand the situation they’re being thrown into in order for everything that follows to work.

“I’m having a little trouble getting started…”

Always be truthful with your editors, they’re there to help you out.

“Well everyone knows Custer died at Little Big Horn…”

Don’t be afraid to go with that first big idea you have, you never know when you too might earn a sudden, unexpected literary celebrity.