The Best of This Week

For Comprehensive Hybrid Work Plans, Don’t Overlook Social Capital Networks

Working remotely during the pandemic weakened social capital networks within organizations, making it harder for employees to maintain the same high level of productivity and for new employees to get up to speed. By strategically addressing three areas — strengthening weak ties, building social capital in new teams, and onboarding employees — leaders can help build those important ties.

Wealth Management With AI

While many organizations have challenges with production deployments of AI, wealth management is a clear exception. A number of banks and investment companies are using AI to improve their wealth management services — either to eliminate human wealth advisers altogether or, much more commonly, to augment their efforts.
 

Mental Health When the World Is On Fire

The COVID-19 pandemic offers just a tiny preview of some of the mental health and psychosocial consequences of the climate emergency. Left unaddressed, the combination of cascading disruptions to essential systems and acute disasters generated by rising temperatures will produce individual and collective psychological, emotional, and behavioral traumas at levels never before seen.

Reduce Coordination Complexity With Microservices and APIs

A monolithic, highly interdependent organization can become a modular one by turning traditional business processes — whether financial, legal, or HR-related — into microservices with application programming interfaces. APIs can help codify interactions among departments, reduce ad hoc communication, and minimize coordination complexity.

What Else We’re Reading This Week

• Front-line employees can offer essential insights to be used in strategic decision-making, yet top management teams rarely ask these employees about strategic issues (Source: MIT SMR)
• To reach Gen Z’s media-savvy digital natives, you need to change your marketing strategy (Source: MIT SMR)
• To create an effective learning environment for employees, leaders must recognize workplace hierarchies (Source: MIT SMR)

Quote of the Week:

“Motivating employees to return has less to do with top-down cajoling and much more to do with finding the influencers who can inspire their peer network to want to return. Knowing that people you respect and admire think there’s value to a hybrid work environment goes a long way toward shifting people from a position of resistance to one of looking forward to being back in the workplace when it really matters.”

— Rob Cross, the Edward A. Madden Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College, and Peter Gray, professor at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia, in “Optimizing Return-to-Office Strategies With Organizational Network Analysis”