Work Behavior

There are two kinds of managers in the world, those who have supervised non-team players and those who will. Those who have had this experience know how a non-team player can single-handedly kill a team’s productivity, focus, and morale. Most managers are woefully unprepared to work through these situations but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Do games hold the secret to better productivity? If you’ve ever found yourself engrossed in Angry Birds, Call of Duty, or a plain old crossword puzzle when you should have been doing something more productive, you know how easily games hold our attention. Hardcore gamers have spent the equivalent of 5.93 million years playing World of Warcraft while the world collectively devotes about 5 million hours per day to Angry Birds. A colossal waste of time? Perhaps. But what if and use it for more creative and valuable pursuits?

As Covid has receded, companies such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, and Twitter have severely restricted, or even eliminated remote work. Ditto for countless, less iconic firms and small businesses. At a high level, executives and managers at these organizations are trying to turn back the clock to 2019. There's just one problem. For a bevy of reasons, they won’t succeed.

The way we work is broken. It takes forever to get anything done. Meetings and emails are incessant. Bureaucracy stifles talent and creativity. After decades of management theory and multiple waves of technological and societal change, is this really the best we can do? Aaron Dignan teaches companies how to eliminate red tape, tap in to collective intelligence and rethink long-held traditions that no longer make sense. In Brave New Work, he shows you how to revolutionize the way your company works forever.

Whether you believe it or not, the quantum world is real! Quantum physics discovers the behavior of energy and matter at the nuclear, atomic, molecular, and even smaller levels. This book will make such a complicated subject simple to comprehend. It avoids the complicated math and jumps right into all the implications, thought experiments, paradoxes, and concepts that make quantum physics so intriguing to people out there.

While most of us would like to think we generally behave in a positive way, especially at work, everyone has the potential to slip into negative behaviors that can have a damaging impact on our colleagues, morale, and the organization we are part of. This useful guide by Anna Eliatamby looks at the different types of positive and negative work behaviors people fall into and why. Your own toxic work behaviors will help you recognize and acknowledge your own problematic behaviors in the workplace.

Everyone has a "schmuck" in their office - a difficult, disruptive person who upsets the workplace, confuses their coworkers, and causes concern. No one is safe from a schmuck. They come in many sizes and shapes. In her new audiobook, Dr. Jody Foster explains the entire spectrum of schmucks and how they can decrease productivity and generally make everyone else unhappy.

Many think the future of work is about better technology. In Work Smart: Use Your Brain and Behavior to Master the Future of Work, Dr. Jennie Byrne will convince you that the future of work is about being a better human. You will learn a little science about how human brains and behavior work, and you will learn a lot about how the workplace can be better.

Making Work Work is Julie Morgenstern's most important book yet. Through the mastery of brand-new strategies, Morgenstern shows you how small changes in your thinking and behavior will help you achieve the seemingly impossible, boost your value, increase your job security, and afford you the time to still have a life.

To achieve efficiency, productivity, and significant results, you need to make the best use of the resources available to you. Productivity expert Maura Thomas helps you nurture the crucial resource that is your work culture and build productive habits for yourself and your team, without letting work take over your life. Everyone Wants to Work Here empowers you to define what productivity means for your team and to create conditions that support your own productivity. Starting with yourself, Thomas's holistic advice will help you develop productive strategies for your whole team.

Conventional product development focuses on the solution. Empathy is a mindset that focuses on people, helping you to understand their thinking patterns and perspectives. Practical Empathy will show you how to gather and compare these patterns to make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.

For many organizations, workplace culture is now as important as strategy and execution—many would argue it's even more important, since it drives everything from employee productivity to customer retention. But where do you start, and how do you know if it's working? There's a surprisingly simple answer, and it's work anniversaries. Because unlike other paths to improving workplace culture, work anniversaries are (1) visible, (2) measurable, and (3) easy to improve ... if you know how.

Drawing on their years of experience working at remote companies DuckDuckGo and Automattic, plus dozens of interviews with leading experts, Ali Greene and Tamara Sanderson have written the ultimate playbook for managing remote teams.

In this eye-opening, essential guidebook for the new world of work, John Winsor and Jin Paik, leaders at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, show how the massive reset of the pandemic allowed talented workers everywhere to exit their jobs without leaving the workforce. Now some are freelancing for multiple companies or starting small businesses, leaving hiring managers scratching their heads over a workforce gone AWOL. What's more, talent has more power than ever using platforms such as Freelancer.com, Fiverr, and Upwork, setting their own terms for work.

Too many people associate creativity solely with the arts, even though to be an incredible scientist, engineer, or entrepreneur requires immense creativity. Combining creativity tools and techniques with real-world stories of innovative people and businesses, this audiobook is a provocation, an inspiration, and an invitation to unleash the innate creativity that lies within each of us. It offers a more dynamic and integrative way to adapt and innovate, one that allows us the freedom to access our full human selves.

Bosses, Coworkers, and Building Great Work Relationships is filled with practical advice from HBR experts who can help you answer questions like: What's the best way to have a tough conversation with my boss? How do I connect with people and make real friends at work? When should I opt into (or out of) office politics? How can I build a strong professional network?

With the unprecedented rise in remote work due to the pandemic, many businesses have struggled with how to effectively transition to a distributed format. Meanwhile, companies who had always been remote-first had a unique advantage: a highly scalable set of work processes, a unique communication style, and the proper “async mindset” required to succeed without an office.

Wouldn't it be nice if work stopped being something you dread and instead something you enjoy? If you're stressed and unhappy because of problems with a boss or colleague, you pay a price. Not only can your mental and physical health suffer, your nearest and dearest get sick of hearing about it.

Fun is the secret sauce every business needs to better engage and motivate its employees today. Work Made Fun Gets Done! gives listeners simple, practical ideas for instantly bringing fun into their work and workplace. Based on examples from scores of companies like Zoom, Pinterest, Bank of America, Zappos, Honda, Microsoft, and many more, this book provides clear examples of exactly what managers and employees alike can do to lighten the tone in the work environment and allow employees to have more fun at work.

Night after night chefs and their crews are able to multitask and produce in a way that puts deskbound workers to shame. In Work Clean, Dan Charnas uncovers their secret: mise-en-place - the organizational system that transforms the lives of its practitioners through focus and self-discipline.