Let’s say you had a killer crowdfunding launch for your product. Thousands of backers, smiling faces, great expectations. Against all odds, your campaign got funded and you delivered your product to your customers (mostly) on time. Now you’re thinking of turning it into a scalable business and, depending on your level of technical and marketing…Read More
Every brand is focused on moving mouses away from that dreaded black box: the rectangular “Skip Ad” option at the bottom of YouTube screens. Finding consumers that aren’t eager to click though sponsored content can be a difficult feat, which is what Culture Genesis is set out to change. The marketplace and financial hub makes…Read More
Throughout his 50-year career in menswear, George Zimmer has seen, selected and sold pretty much every variety of sport coat, from single-breasted to double, corduroy to cashmere, houndstooth to plaids to pinstripes. But despite the millions of jackets he’s looked at, there’s one he can never forget. It’s a 100% polyester number. Big lapels. In…Read More
Humans gossipped before we figured out fire, housing or farming. It’s built into our culture and possibly our DNA.
Gossip informs culture and can influence connection and hierarchies. And in many communities, it’s destructive.
If office gossip is benefitting you and the people you work with, good for you. But if office gossip is leading to stress, turnover or low satisfaction, it might be time to do something about it.
Two suggestions:
The first is a simple boundary. Don’t talk about anyone on the team unless they’re in the room.
This is simple to say and surprisingly difficult to do. Talking about people behind their back is built into the practice of management. It’s also the main sport of the water cooler and the fuel for gossip.
One boss meets with another boss to talk about an employee. And now there’s a reason to gossip and wonder.
With Zoom calls transcending space and time, there’s no longer a logistical reason to leave someone out. And you can adopt the posture that if it’s worth talking about someone, it’s worth including the person being talked about.
Once this becomes your practice, it gets more difficult to speculate about what was said, because nothing was said.
The second, which can’t work until you’ve consistently done the first, is to challenge office gossip at every turn. Thriving DM traffic on your Slack, cliques in the lunchroom–these undermine the organization you’re building. You wouldn’t tolerate people stealing petty cash or telling off your customers… the culture becomes what you tolerate.
Gossip won’t disappear. It can’t. But making it clear to the high performers that things aren’t like that around here–and meaning it–sends a message about the focus and culture of the team you’re working so hard to build.
A team of researchers at Jilin Engineering Normal University in China recently published a paper indicating they’d built an AI model capable of recognizing human facial expressions. I’m going to save you some time here: they most certainly did not. Such a thing isn’t currently possible. The ability to accurately recognize human emotions is what we here at Neural would refer to as a “deity-level” feat. The only people who truly know how you’re feeling at any given moment are you and any potential omnipotent beings out there. But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can…
This story continues at The Next Web
Gymshark, a British fitness and apparel brand with a robust social media presence, is celebrating LGBTQ+ communities beyond Pride month with a new campaign focused on their unique journeys with identity, love, struggle, successes and progress. To inspire and educate the upcoming generation of LGBTQ+ athletes looking to break into the space, Gymshark launched “Pride…Read More
When then-Facebook revealed in August 2020 that starting in October of that year, people using Oculus devices for the first time would be required to login with a Facebook account, it was not a popular decision. Meta reversed that decision Thursday. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post, “You won’t need a Facebook account…Read More
As marketers flood the metaverse with new kinds of branded experiences, it can be easy to lose sight of what makes these virtual worlds appealing to the users who spend time in them. That human element is what agency Momentum Worldwide sought to pin down in a recent survey of 4,500 consumers across seven countries….Read More
With leisure travel returning to pre-pandemic levels and travelers experiencing some headaches as a result, the industry is calling in reinforcements to smooth out the turbulence. Earlier this week, Natalie Wills announced that she’d joined Booking.com as its vp of brand. A veteran executive who’s spent more than 15 years handling brand strategy, marketing and…Read More
Within the advertising and marketing spaces, diversity attracts increasing attention. In fact, when there are practices that negatively impact people from underrepresented backgrounds, the calls for adding “diversity” become amplified. But we can’t consider issues of representation without exploring power imbalances. According to a November 2021 report, marketing is more ethnically diverse than ever at…Read More
