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Innovation doesn’t happen in silos: it happens in systems. And yet many companies still rely on lone heroes to ignite transformation. They recruit visionary thinkers, celebrate bold ideas, and preach agility, but beneath the surface, their structures reward predictability and punish deviation. As a result, the very people most capable of driving innovation—fast-moving, future-oriented changemakers known as catalysts—are often left isolated, misunderstood, and burned out.
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) will come into force on 28 June 2025. It introduces standardised accessibility requirements for a range of products and services across European Union member states. Its advocates suggest that it will transform workplace inclusion across the EU. The act applies to digital and physical services including websites, mobile apps, e-commerce platforms, banking services, ticketing machines and ATMs.
Traditionally, sending personalized emails to multiple recipients meant setting up a mail merge using Word and Excel. While effective, it required switching between apps, preparing data sources, and dealing with formatting issues, a process that was often time-consuming and prone to errors. This posed a challenge for IT admins sending security alerts, HR teams sharing policy updates, or managers coordinating events all needing a quick and reliable way to send individualized emails at scale.
For office professionals and customer-facing teams, placing a caller on hold is often necessary, but how it’s done can make or break the customer experience. While “please hold” is a […] The post Beyond “Please Hold”: Mastering Effective Hold Techniques and Customer Communication appeared first on Office Skills Training.
Forgetfulness is costing you time, money, and a ton of missed opportunities. In the age of automation, it’s easy to underestimate the power of a well-trained human mind. But memory isn’t just a parlor trick, it's a strategic edge. Human memory is one of the most underrated business skills. Whether you’re managing people, leading sessions, or having high-stakes conversations, remembering names, details, and concepts can be transformative in building trust, absorbing knowledge, and driving perform
A new report from audio brand Jabra, in collaboration with The Happiness Research Institute, claims that daily users of artificial intelligence tools are more likely to report higher levels of job satisfaction and optimism about their working lives. The study, Work and Wellbeing in the Age of AI [registration] is based on a survey of over 3,700 knowledge workers across 11 countries, including 360 in the UK.
A CEO I recently worked with had become obsessed with speed and staying ahead of disruption. He launched an internal rapid response “tiger team”—a small group of leaders and managers from a cross-section of departments—to accelerate innovation. Within a quarter, they launched pilots, restructured teams, and redesigned workflows with promising early results.
After years of remote and hybrid routines, many organizations are asking employees to come back to the office - some gently, others more forcefully. Yet one thing is clear: anxiety around return-to-office (RTO) mandates is widespread, complex, and often underestimated.
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After years of remote and hybrid routines, many organizations are asking employees to come back to the office - some gently, others more forcefully. Yet one thing is clear: anxiety around return-to-office (RTO) mandates is widespread, complex, and often underestimated.
As artificial intelligence continues to reshape the world of work, younger employees are taking the lead in adopting and experimenting with new tools. According to a new survey by UKG and The Harris Poll, Gen Z workers are not only the most enthusiastic users of workplace AI but also the most likely to be self-taught. The research highlights a growing generational divide.
Americans love small businesses. We dedicate a week each year to applauding them, and spend Small Business Saturday shopping locally. Yet hiding in plain sight is an enormous challenge facing small-business owners as they age: retiring with dignity and foresight. The current economic climate is making this even more difficult. As a professor who studies aging and business , I’ve long viewed small-business owners’ retirement challenges as a looming crisis.
The rise of AI meeting notetakers in 2025 has been explosive. From Google’s “take notes for me” feature, and now OpenAI’s Record Mode in ChatGPT, it’s clear that meetings are no longer just calendar events. They’re valuable, sensitive, and an increasingly central data source that impacts how organizations operate. Now, teams have the power to mine meeting transcripts for decisions and context that used to vanish the moment a call ended.
Here’s how business agility helps your organization overcome challenges and innovate. People of a certain age will remember a time when watching a movie meant driving to a brick-and-mortar store to rent a VHS tape. Today, the phrase “Be kind, rewind” is as outdated as calling collect. For organizations and their people, change is constant : adapting to emerging technologies, wavering market forces, and the introduction of an industry competitor.
Documents are the backbone of enterprise operations, but they are also a common source of inefficiency. From buried insights to manual handoffs, document-based workflows can quietly stall decision-making and drain resources. For large, complex organizations, legacy systems and siloed processes create friction that AI is uniquely positioned to resolve.
LW2: You’re describing the exact situation I experienced with a direct report (if I didn’t know differently I would’ve thought you were writing in about him!) I supervised from an office 150 miles away and the most helpful thing the employee’s colleagues did was contact me with clear, specific descriptions of his actions and how it impacted their work (safety concerns, lost equipment, incomplete projects, erratic driving, and so on).
Whether we like it or not, we live in a world that is ruthlessly optimized to reward results. Nonetheless, failure is a part of everyone’s life—and an essential part of achievement in fields ranging from sports to science. In fact, high achievers are those who fail more often —not less—than the average person. They take more risks, go outside their comfort zone, set more challenging goals, and engage more frequently and vigorously in improving their performance—and this is how they succeed.
What type of note-taking are we talking about? A proper transcript or just regular meeting minutes? Creating a full transcript or very detailed notes requires skill, but at my workplace, the note-taking (which is rotated) usually consists of very generic bullet points summarizing what was discussed and agreed upon. Sure, some people are better at it than others, but it doesn’t really matter.
Somewhere along the way, you learned how to read a room. How to anticipate what others needed before they said it. How to shape-shift just enough to stay admired, promoted , or simply safe. You became highly competent at adapting your identity, at being what the moment, the meeting, the mission demanded. And it worked. You delivered. You rose. You built a life of visible success.
In the accounting world, staying ahead means embracing the tools that allow you to work smarter, not harder. Outdated processes and disconnected systems can hold your organization back, but the right technologies can help you streamline operations, boost productivity, and improve client delivery. Dive into the strategies and innovations transforming accounting practices.
LW2 – I have to do minutes a fair amount in my Project Management adjacent role. My org seem to be more open to using AI to provide meeting summaries, after previously having a policy stating it was not permitted. I’m hopeful this becomes a challenge of the past. I struggled a lot with this earlier in my career and it even has triggered an assessment for neurodiversity because I do not process speech the same way I do written text.
What if success wasn’t about luck or talent, but was simply a positive mindset? Your perspective—half-empty or half-full—shapes your resilience, motivation and well-being. Research from Harvard suggests that optimism can extend your life by 5.4 percent—proving its profound impact on our well-being. In this article, we’ll explore the power of positive thinking, how it fuels success and how you can cultivate it.
In reply to EllenD. Sorry hit wrong key. I also wanted to say be clear on what the note/minutes need to cover. Are these formal minutes, or could they just be a list of bullet points setting out actions? Formal minutes need to record a summary of the discussion that led to a decision and the action. However, this sounds like a team meeting, where short bullet points recording decisions and actions/next steps are all that is needed.
When we hired a Gen Z marketer, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. We expected fresh perspectives and a new approach to marketing, but as an older millennial, I didn’t expect just how foreign her methods would feel. Our company is an AI-powered platform that helps small and medium-size businesses find top part-time professionals through network-based recruiting.
Leadership today involves more than holding a title or achieving short-term success. Leaders are under constant pressure to meet goals, protect reputations, and move fast. But what happens when speed comes at the cost of values or accountability? How can leaders make the right call when the facts change over.
Love ‘Em, Fear ‘Em, Meme ‘Em Whether your boss is a visionary leader, a master of passive-aggressive emails, or someone who still thinks “Let’s circle back” is an exciting call to action, one thing’s for sure: they’re meme material. Bosses inspire, frustrate, and occasionally terrify us. So what better way to celebrate their quirks than with a healthy dose of humor?
In reply to DefinitiveAnn. Teams transcription is really bad in my experience. I’ve often watched it unfold in the background of meetings and it often seems to completely change the meaning of what someone is saying, or throw in some complete gibberish because it doesn’t like someone’s accent. If you’re having a hybrid meeting, everything from the room comes up as the words of the person logged in on the main computer.
Career gaps have become commonplace in people’s work history, yet job seekers still feel the need to hide them—a strategy experts warn is likely to backfire. According to a recent survey conducted by MyPerfectResume, 47% of American workers have taken a break from work. Despite how common those breaks have become, 38% are “highly concerned” about how it will affect their future job prospects, and 30% believe employers will consider it a “major red flag.
In reply to bamcheeks. Yes – a decent chair should be pulling that kind of thing out and highlighting it as something that needs to be noted, but not everyone is good at chairing either, and it’s an opportunity for the note-taker to enhance the quality of the discussion too. I did a course on committee administration yonks ago, and the trainer made the point that minutes *shouldn’t* be a full transcription – that just makes extra work for everybody as they have to read th
S tijn Vanheule is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and professor of psychology at Ghent University. Trained in the Lacanian tradition, he has written widely on the structure of psychosis, the limits of psychiatric diagnosis, and the importance of attending to the subjective logic of mental distress. His books include The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective, Diagnosis and the DSM: A Critical Review , and most recently, Why Psychosis is Not So Craz y , which offers a reorientation
In reply to Rotating too. this is our system too: doc open on screen, people correct the notes in real-time if they care. No one care about spelling, though, so that is never corrected.
Did you make any New Year’s resolutions this year? No matter your answer, you know how a lot of resolutions go. You create a list of goals , make a few promises and start doing things with the familiar January enthusiasm. However, a few days or weeks in, promises break, excitement fades and you’re back to square one. What goes wrong? We all crave success in some form, but achieving and sustaining that success doesn’t come from sporadic efforts.
In reply to Ipsedixitism. Yes, we have rotating chair and rotating minute taker for our whole of staff meetings and some committee meetings. I will ALWAYS volunteer to be chair over minute-taker!
Fewer roles. Different roles. More roles requiring new skills. As AI upends today’s talent landscape, the watchword is “uncertainty.” What’s really going on?
In reply to allathian. Ditto, and I can actually transcribe better than I can summarize because I’m only trying to do one thing. And I lose the ability to tell who’s speaking a lot of the time and misattribute stuff. My biggest advice is to stop people whenever you lose track. Over and over again. Not unnecessarily, just make it everyone’s problem to get good notes.
Who? Trish Stratus Where? Richmond Hill, Ontario What? Trish Stratus has built a career that is as dynamic as it is influential, evolving from wrestling champion and fitness icon to TV personality and entrepreneur. A seven-time champion and trailblazer in sports entertainment, she redefined the role of women in wrestling, breaking barriers and setting records that reshaped the industry.
LW2 speculated about various potential causes for their colleague’s behaviour. I would think that when they speak to their boss, they should avoid anything like that and concentrate on the facts they have observed. The boss can work on the “why” (to the extent that it’s necessary or helpful) but they can only do that once in possession of the facts the OP can supply.
The goal of a redesign is to increase value, but failure rates are high. New research updates classic rules of redesign to help leaders flip the odds of success.
In reply to Zarniwoop. My university required us to do two different one-month internships in a relevant field in the break between the first two semesters.
Adulting now comes with a new manual. Author Gretchen Rubin breaks down the complexities of grown-up life, from self-mastery to decision-making, offering a clear path to reaching your full potential.
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