Tag: Workplace Environment

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Companies Are Still Grappling With Their Vaccination Policies

The message from many companies to their office workers is clear. It will soon be time to shed the slippers for hard shoes and return to your desk. But many companies are still puzzling over a single quandary: What to do about vaccines. Should they require employees to get them? Encourage or cajole or bribe them?“We’re all kind of, you know, flying by the seat of our pants,” said Wayne Wager, the chief executive of Remote Medical International, a consulting firm in Seattle that is helping companies that are reopening offices. Mr. Wager said his own company had …

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The Cost of Being an ‘Interchangeable Asian’

On a recent Tuesday evening, Jully Lee and her boyfriend curled up on the couch and turned on the TV to watch the Ovation Awards, a ceremony honoring stage work in the Los Angeles area that was held virtually this year because of the coronavirus pandemic. Ms. Lee, an actor, had been nominated for her role in the play “Hannah and the Dread Gazebo,” which was in production before the pandemic.Ms. Lee, 40, had submitted a prerecorded acceptance speech in case she won. During the ceremony, each nominee’s photo was shown as his or her name was announced. When …

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TikTok’s Owner, ByteDance, Says C.E.O. Zhang Yiming Will Resign

Zhang Yiming, who helped found TikTok’s parent company, the Chinese internet conglomerate ByteDance, and turned it into a globe-straddling giant, will step down as chief executive at the end of the year to focus on long-term strategy, he wrote in a letter to employees dated Wednesday.ByteDance’s co-founder and head of human resources, Liang Rubo, will take the reins as chief executive.“After handing over my role as C.E.O., and removing myself from the responsibilities of daily management, I will have the space to explore long-term strategies, organizational culture and social responsibility, with a more objective …

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Bill Gates Had Reputation for Questionable Behavior Before Divorce

While Mr. Gates thought that brought the matter to an end, Ms. French Gates was not satisfied with the outcome, two of the people said. She called for a law firm to conduct an independent review of the woman’s allegations, and of Cascade’s culture. Mr. Larson was put on leave while the investigation was underway, but he was eventually reinstated. (It is unclear whether the investigation exonerated Mr. Larson.) He remains in charge of Cascade.A spokesman for Mr. Larson had no comment.About a year after the settlement — and less than two weeks after Ms. French Gates’ …

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After Pandemic, Shrinking Need for Office Space Could Crush Landlords

Roughly 17.3 percent of office space in Manhattan is available for lease, the most in at least three decades. Asking rents have dropped to just over $74 a square foot, from nearly $82 at the beginning of 2020, according to the real estate services company Newmark. Elsewhere, asking rents are largely flat from a year ago, including in Boston and Houston, but have climbed slightly in Chicago.The Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo, whose United States headquarters are in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, recently relocated to another building nearby, an open layout with tables designed for 130 people who will come into the office only a …

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Returning to the Office Sparks Anxiety and Dread for Some

Last fall, after some of the restrictions had eased in Germany, Trivago, a travel company based in Düsseldorf, let employees work remotely three weeks of the month and then spend one week in the office. The office weeks were designed for collaboration and were treated like celebrations, with balloons hanging from the ceilings and employees plied with coffee and muffins, said Anja Honnefelder, the chief people officer and general counsel of the company.But the experiment failed, she said. “We saw that many of the people only came back for two or three days during the week because it felt …

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How the Pandemic Changed Office Design: Hot Desks and Zoom Rooms

Since the pandemic sent workers home last year, a slew of modifications have been made to office buildings to protect against the spread of the coronavirus. Now, as companies prepare to bring workers back, experts say even more changes are on the way.Expect expanded gathering spaces and fewer personal workstations, for instance, changes that are being fueled by the success of working from home. Companies like Google, Microsoft and Walmart have already announced proposals for hybrid work models that will allow employees to continue to work remotely at least a few days a week.These new arrangements mean companies …

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It’s My Idea. She’s Taking Credit.

She may very well be thrilled by her behavior. She may not even realize she’s doing it. You could just let this go because you actually have ideas and a sense of humor. That’s why this bothers you — you want credit for who you are and how you think. I understand. But at some point, your magpie colleague will have to figure out who she is and how to express original ideas, or she will back herself into a corner of her own making. You can only hide behind the words of others for so long.I am …

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The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting

The robots are coming. Not to kill you with lasers, or beat you in chess, or even to ferry you around town in a driverless Uber.These robots are here to merge purchase orders into columns J and K of next quarter’s revenue forecast, and transfer customer data from the invoicing software to the Oracle database. They are unassuming software programs with names like “Auxiliobits — DataTable To Json String,” and they are becoming the star employees at many American companies.Some of these tools are simple apps, downloaded from online stores and installed by corporate I.T. departments, that …

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A Year Without Our Work Friends

My office at home is pretty well equipped. I have a desktop computer and a printer and whiteboards I installed with the ambitious idea that I would use them to map out projects. There are shelves holding various editions of my books, some of which I can’t read because I don’t speak Hebrew or Farsi or Turkish or Polish. There are shelves with reference books and galleys and other books related to various projects. I have a home studio for recording “Hear to Slay,” the podcast I host with Tressie McMillan Cottom.Most days are spent staring at …

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