As continued challenges remain for employees and employers dealing with the impact of COVID-19, AMMA has sourced a number insightful articles focusing on how workplaces are adapting.
We have to stop misusing the word ‘resilience’
It’s not toughness, it’s not grit, it’s not even just an individual characteristic.
Resilience is commonly referred to as a character trait. You either have it or you don’t. But that’s exactly the wrong way to think about it, says Girard Dorney in this HRM Online article.
While we can probably all agree on a definition for it that sounds something like “the ability to withstand and recover from adversity” you can tease out how complicated this can get with a few hypotheticals:
- Who is more resilient, the paramedic who faces trauma and does not experience post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or the paramedic who experiences PTSD but overcomes it?
- Does someone who works through a dozen career setbacks and makes it to the top of their field remain resilient if they take a year off because they are overwhelmed by their divorce, and return to work in a different career?
- Imagine two children who suffer a similar trauma when they are five. One becomes a successful lecturer in their early twenties and the other spends many years unemployed before finally securing steady work in a grocery store in their middle age. Who is more resilient? Does the answer change if the first one lived in a society with a social safety net (robust protective services for children, free healthcare and affordable tertiary education) and the other didn’t?
Click here to read the article in full.
Contact data and consent: There’s no such thing as a free lunch
In this article written by Deloitte’s Privacy Partner David Batch, he explores why business owners have an obligation to use effective, legal, and ethical means to collect contact tracing data.
He outlines how many are exposing customers’ personal details.
“I was in a café at the weekend, and as is the new norm, I had to provide my details for contact tracing,” the article states.
“In this case, I used a QR code. Intrigued, I took a screenshot of the page the code landed me on to enter my details. There was nothing there telling me how my data would be used. No T&Cs. No privacy statement. Nothing for me or other diners to educate ourselves on how our data would be collected and used.
Make no mistake, this is entirely at odds with some of the most basic privacy principles.”
But he said there was worse to come.
“When I dug deeper, by putting the provider name into a search engine, I found that the business behind this ‘free service for cafes and bars’ was a data company that was all about providing marketing services to its customers,” he writes.
“When I had a look at their privacy policy I was gob-smacked to see that they reserved the right to share your data with ‘related or associated companies, marketing and advertising agencies, third parties with whom they had a relationship’ and the list went on.. Now I can’t be sure that they were actually doing any of this with the tracing data they were collecting, but I had to wonder…do cafes and bar owners genuinely want to be exposing their customers to the potential of this type of creepy privacy invasion?”
Read the article in full here.
The negative impact of an urgent culture
Unproductive urgency, and the resultant reactivity it creates has become an acute and chronic issue in many modern organisations, according to Dermot Crowley, director of Adapt Productivity.
In an article published in HCA Mag, it paints the picture of how we all seem to be moving at a million miles an hour, running from meeting to meeting, and dealing with email after email. When did everything get so busy, and become so damn urgent?
Crowley, who is also author of Urgent!, Smart Work and Smart Teams, said that urgency is a reality in our workplaces, but it is important we do not become victims of it.
Read the article in full here.
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