Smart Workers, Smart Work


Book Description




Work Smart Now


Book Description

From one of the top HR specialists in the world comes this much-needed guide to help people maximize productivity and increase revenue. Whether it’s in corporate America or in our own living rooms, people are wasting time. From the minute we wake up and check our Facebook page or emails—before we even crawl out of bed—to late at night when we stay up longer than we should, watching our favorite show. There’s a precise moment that falls between working enough hours to be productive and working too many hours, yielding a diminishing marginal return. The difference between the person able to master this and most Americans that fail miserably at it is quality of life! If one continues to work past this moment, a negative return will ensue, and that negative return produces guilt. It lowers the amount of time for recreational activities and spending time with family. We’ve siloed productivity to our work life, however; the impact on our personal life is often loss. An alarming 39% of workers in high-tech companies believe they are depressed, as reported by PC Magazine in December 2018. 72% of people who have daily stress and anxiety say it interferes with their lives—anxiety and stress alone have reduced productivity by 56%. More than 80% of people have experienced some form of anxiety, stress, or depression in the workplace. People are spending more time at work than at home or with their loved ones; or, if they are at home, they are working. They are always “on.” As a result of this disparity, people are not fully living their lives. And the “work-life balance” marketed by some HR consulting firms and employers simply does not work. It’s all work and no life! Studies have also proven that when people are unhappy in their personal lives or careers, their productivity goes down and everything and everyone around them suffers. This causes a domino effect, which trickles into every area of their lives. Previous generations used to say, “Work harder,” but we’ve now learned we must “work smarter.” Polak has practiced and tested his methods in hundreds of opportunities and has been paid millions by the largest corporations in the world to share these tools. He feels that every individual and business should have these tools, and will share them with us here.




Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines


Book Description

A public policy leader addresses how artificial intelligence is transforming the future of labor—and what we can do to protect the role of workers. As computer technology advances with dizzying speed, human workers face an ever-increasing threat of obsolescence. In Human Work In the Age of Smart Machines, Jamie Merisotis argues that we can—and must—rise to this challenge by preparing to work alongside smart machines doing that which only humans can: thinking critically, reasoning ethically, interacting interpersonally, and serving others with empathy. The president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, Merisotis offers a roadmap for the large-scale, radical changes we must make in order to find abundant and meaningful work for ourselves in the 21st century. His vision centers on developing our unique capabilities as humans through learning opportunities that deliver fair results and offer a broad range of credentials. By challenging long-held assumptions and expanding our concept of work, Merisotis argues that we can harness the population’s potential, encourage a deeper sense of community, and erase a centuries-long system of inequality.




The Ideal Team Player


Book Description

In his classic book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni laid out a groundbreaking approach for tackling the perilous group behaviors that destroy teamwork. Here he turns his focus to the individual, revealing the three indispensable virtues of an ideal team player. In The Ideal Team Player, Lencioni tells the story of Jeff Shanley, a leader desperate to save his uncle’s company by restoring its cultural commitment to teamwork. Jeff must crack the code on the virtues that real team players possess, and then build a culture of hiring and development around those virtues. Beyond the fable, Lencioni presents a practical framework and actionable tools for identifying, hiring, and developing ideal team players. Whether you’re a leader trying to create a culture around teamwork, a staffing professional looking to hire real team players, or a team player wanting to improve yourself, this book will prove to be as useful as it is compelling.




Smart Work


Book Description

Organise your way to renewed focus and calm Smart Work is the busy professional's guide to getting organised in the digital workplace. Are you drowning in constant emails, phone calls, paperwork, interruptions and meeting actions? This book throws you a lifeline by showing you how to take advantage of your digital tools to reprioritise, refocus and get back to doing the important work. You may already have the latest technology, but if you're still swamped, you're not using it to your advantage. This useful guide shows you how to leverage the technology you have to centralise your work into one integrated tool. You'll develop a simple and sustainable productivity system to organise your actions, manage your inputs and achieve your outcomes. The highly visual nature of the book helps you quickly grasp the ideas you need most. Like most professionals, you want to do great work and achieve great things. But when half your day is spent on emails, phone calls and 'extra' duties, you rarely get a chance to shine. This book changes that. Get back in control so you can start performing like a star. Get organised, focused and proactive Conquer the daily incoming deluge Spend more time on important work Leverage your desktop and mobile technology When work is coming at you from every direction, it's difficult to focus and prioritise. Things get lost in the shuffle. But when you channel everything into a single stream, you settle into a flow and get more accomplished in less time. Smart Work is your guide to finding your flow— and the bottom of your inbox.




Smart Work (2nd Edition)


Book Description

Freedman demonstrates to today's corporate managers and high-tech professionals that the seemingly chaotic world of corporate communication actually has a structure and that the structure, or syntax, can be decoded and used to one's advantage.




Smart Machines and Service Work


Book Description

In recent decades digital devices have reshaped daily life, while tech companies’ stock prices have thrust them to the forefront of the business world. In this rapid, global development, the promise of a new machine age has been accompanied by worries about accelerated joblessness thanks to new forms of automation. Jason E. Smith looks behind the techno-hype to lay out the realities of a period of economic slowdown and expanding debt: low growth rates and an increase of labor-intensive jobs at the bottom of the service sector. He shows how increasing inequality and poor working conditions have led to new forms of workers’ struggles. Ours is less an age of automation, Smith contends, than one in which stagnation is intertwined with class conflict.




100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings


Book Description

Funny because it's true. From the creator of the viral sensation "10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings" comes the must-have book you never knew you needed, 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings. In it, you will learn how to appear smart in less than half the time it takes to actually learn anything. You know those subtle tricks your coworkers are all guilty of? The constant nodding, pretend concentration, useless rhetorical questions? These tricks make them seem like they know what they’re doing when in fact they have no clue. This behavior is so ingrained, so subtle, and so often mistaken for true intelligence that identifying it, calling it out, or compiling it into an exhaustive digest has never been attempted. Until now. Complete with illustrated tips, examples, and scenarios, 100 Tricks gives you actionable ways to use words like “actionable,” in order to sound smart. Every type of meeting is covered, from general meetings where you stopped paying attention almost immediately, to one-on-one meetings you zoned out on, to impromptu meetings you were painfully subjected to at the last minute. It’s all here. Open this book to any page and find an easy-to-digest trick with an even easier-to-digest illustration, guiding you on: how to nail the big meeting by pacing and nodding most effective ways to listen to your coworkers while still completely ignoring them the key to making your presentations “interactive.” If you hadn’t noticed these behaviors before, you will see them now—from your colleagues, your managers, and soon yourself. Each trick is a mirror to the reality of what happens in meetings, told in the form of hilariously bad advice—advice that you might just want to take. But probably not. But maybe.




Training for a Smart Workforce


Book Description

A fresh, challenging, international perspective on the issues involved in building a smart workforce. Written by leading analysts and practitioners from Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and the USA, issues of competence and expertise are considered.




Working in Digital and Smart Organizations


Book Description

Contributing to recent debate on the emergence of digital and agile work, this book explores the implications for labour and employment relations within and beyond organizational boundaries. Taking a multidisciplinary approach to the key issues and challenges of digitalization, this collection covers topics such as the gig economy, crowdworking and Industry 4.0. Theory and analysis are combined as the authors examine the impact of digital and smart work on organization, HRM and labour law. With comprehensive empirical evidence for those interested in understanding the more complex trajectories of today’s transforming work relationships, this book will not only appeal to students and academics but also to policy-makers, trade unionists and employers’ organizations.