fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
A meeting is the wrong time to take care of the relationship
By: Daniele Catalanotto
Tags: Service Design, Workplace, Meetings, Workplace Culture

Good meetings are often the place where new services and products are imagined and planned by teams. These are important moments for any service designer or service owner or worker.

The other day a very dear friend said to me this:

I really need to spend more time with the team in order to know that our relationship is where I want it to be, so that during the meetings I can really focus on making the stuff go forward.

I thought this was a brillant take on what is needed to make work meetings work.

When there is no time for relationship meeting suck

If you have never time to build relationships at work it’s normal that this will then take place in meetings that weren’t designed for it. It feels to me as if as humans we have such a strong need for connection that if we don’t get it elsewhere we will disrupt meetings so that we can create those missing bonds.

Separate the mindsets, once again

Those who know me, know that I often say that you should separate the mindsets. Like separating divergent thinking from convergent thinking. This inspiring sentence from the beginning pushes me to think that we could do the same with work meetings:

Separate bonding moments from getting shit done moments so that none of these pollutes the other.

Side notes

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not preaching for work meeting without emotions and care, I’m rather saying that you should take extra time outside of work meetings to really do that seriously.
Shame
By: Suntonu Bhadra
Tags: Poem, Self, Vulnerability, Poetry, Workplace

A fiction story

Vulnerability changes people; it affects our mentality too. During the same period, if you are working with a person having a psychic pleasure of hurting people working under him, it becomes more challenging to cope. When you are putting more and more effort than ever asked for by the organization, it is becoming more evident that people like him deserve a different place other than leading a team.

I was more surprised later on.

In the afternoon, I learned that my revenue numbers & performance parameters were among the top performers within our organization in Canada (and yes, it is a big country). In contrast, he was hanging just onto the bottom, about to be the last in the year-end.

It’s funny how people talk about performance when they don’t know what that means exactly.

The fiction story ended here; if you find any resemblance with any person or character, dead or alive, it was unintentional!
Thanks for the article.
By: Rodney Shearing
Tags: Workplace

Thanks for the article. There’s a lot of negative mindsets out there when it comes to employing older people that doesn’t help when you feel like changing jobs and /or careers. Hopefully this will change or else there will be a lot of jobs not being filled and then we have more calls for migrants while oldies go jobless
【職場日常】設計主管的第一週待辦事項
By: Mark Liang
Tags: Manager, New Career, Learning, Workplace, To Do List

Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more

Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore
Don’t get caught out at the company Christmas Party.
By: Fiona Dobson
Tags: Work Culture, Workplace, LGBTQ

Advice from a crossdressing Account Executive for the company Christmas Party.

I am always pleased to help out my members and keep them on the right track. With this in mind the following list of thoughts has been compiled from the experiences and suggestions of some of my valued members.

It is no longer acceptable to sit on the photocopier during the Christmas Party photocopying your bum and handing out prints saying it’s another memo from the accounts department. When sitting on the photocopier (see #1) do not make the mistake of scanning your bottom and posting it to the company Instagram Account. Taking a co-worker to the Christmas Party does not count as a first date. Don’t sleep with the head of Human Resources on the first date (see #3). Line ups at the STD Clinic are generally shorter during the holiday period. When asked what you were thinking (See #4), replying “Everyone else has,” is not considered a good reason. It’s no fun being on antibiotics through the Christmas period.

If you have Christmas Party suggestions please make a point of sharing them below.

😊

Fiona Dobson

http://FionaDobson.com
Here’s why I loved my first G2G at Kissflow
By: Vishal Vibhaker
Tags: Culture, Worklife, Workplace Culture, Onboarding, Workplace

Most of us Millennials associate the onboarding and induction process with a never-ending list of meetings. There’s so much to run through and it’s easy to get lost in the labyrinth of policy sessions, hierarchy discussions, and the dos and don’ts of the new worklife.

So it surprised me when my first week at Kissflow was a refreshing take on the mundane. My second day in, I was invited to the policy session that was to take place the very next day with six other new recruits.

The policy session lasted just under an hour and simply highlighted what we needed to know (I like it when Human Resources treats us like intelligent humans). Susan, the People Ops manager encouraged us to ask as many questions as we needed and took the time to diligently answer every one of them.

We were also briefed about a G2G (Good to Great) session, an all-hands meeting of sorts, that would take place on Friday that week. It would give us the forum to acquaint ourselves with the rest of the team and get to know each other better.

Abhishek, the Culture Shepherd doled out specific instructions on how we should go about introducing ourselves. We were to stay clear of our professional lives and highlight things that make us unique. And we had to make it as memorable as possible.

The stage was set

As we got on the link, we were greeted by a sense of familiarity and inclusiveness with the righteous sprinkle of snappy comments. It seemed informal and open.

It’s not always that you come face to face with a CEO like Suresh. CEOs are rarely active in forums like this but then again, who can blame them? They have a lot to do. But here he was, a broad smile taped on his face, actively snapping back and bantering others on the group. This was refreshing.

Soon, it came time to introduce ourselves. Abhishek did the honor of hosting and calling out new comrades, the feeling almost reminiscent of Rafiki showing Simba off to the world.

And we were the heroes

We took a couple of minutes each, telling the other members of the team what made us ‘us’. Here’s a quick look at what we came up with:

Naresh (The man with the serious face)
What should I prioritize when selecting a cofounder?
By: Index Ventures
Tags: Friendship, Entrepreneurship, Founders, Workplace, Startup

Illustration by Jago Silver

Mark Fiorentino, principal at Index Ventures: When you’re starting out, you’ll want to ask similar questions of your potential co-founders as you’d ask of potential investors. The key criteria, obviously, is whether you get along.

Don’t underestimate this. They might be the most qualified person on paper, but does their personality align with what you see as your mission and vision? If not, your idea will be dead in the water before it even gets started. You could be setting yourself up for failure two to three years from now.

You also need to think about skills, and how you might balance out weaknesses or complement each other. If you are technically strong, it would be ideal if they were strong on design or biz dev. Or if you’re strong on front end engineering, someone with experience at a hyper-growth startup would be very useful.

Maybe you find a founder that worked in a similar industry in a company that grew from 50 to 1,000 people, so you could apply that framework to your business.
How to Choose the Right Fire Extinguisher For Your Office
By: America'S Fire Shield
Tags: Workplace, Emergency, Fire, Extinguisher

Did you know that 1,318,500 workplace fires occurred in the United States in the last year?

Choosing the right type of fire extinguisher for your workplace can make a huge difference between life and death. Each type of fire extinguisher on the market has a different class, which means that different types of fires will require different types of fire extinguishers.

Are you interested in learning about how to choose the right fire extinguisher for your office? In this guide, you’ll learn about the different types of fire extinguishers and how to choose the right types for your office. Keep reading to learn more!

What Are the Different Classes of Fire Extinguishers?

There are six different types of categories fire extinguishers. These categories include:

ABC Fire extinguishers

ABC fire extinguishers are the most common type of fire extinguishers. They can be used for general purpose in most situations and have the least amount of damage. They are also most likely to be used on service vehicles.

CO2 Fire Extinguisher

A CO2 fire extinguisher should be used in boiler rooms and places where there’s a lot of mechanical equipment in small places.

Halotron Fire Extinguishers

Any fire that is caused by electrical equipment should be put out with a fire extinguisher that’s marked with an electric spark symbol. They’re very useful in keeping the damage to electrical equipment to a minimum that’s in places like data centers.

Class K Fire Extinguishers

A Class K fire extinguisher should be used on cooking oils and fats. They’re very useful in places like restaurants, cafeterias and food trucks.

What Are the Different Types of Fire Extinguishers?

In addition to there being different classes of fire extinguishers, there are also different types of fire extinguishers.

The different types of fire extinguishers are:

● Water fire extinguishers

● Water mist fire Extinguishers

● Water spray fire extinguishers

● Foam fire extinguishers

● Dry powder fire extinguisher

● Carbon dioxide fire extinguisher

● Wet chemical fire extinguishers

The type of fire extinguisher that you should purchase for your office will depend on what class of fires your workplace could potentially be exposed to. For example, if you work in an office that doesn’t handle any hazardous chemicals, you shouldn’t worry about purchasing a wet chemical fire extinguisher.
The State of Work 2020 by Paul Millerd
By: Sajid Salih
Tags: Work From Home, Twitter Chat, Work Life Balance, Workplace, Entrepreneur

Topic: The State of Work 2020

I’m going to give you a short intro of why I care then I’ll just throw out 1-opinion / 1-like style takes. I imagine this will get a little unhinged towards the end.

A little background. I studied org change, complexity, systems dynamics, supply chain, leadership & other fun stuff in 10+ years working in consulting and a MS/MBA ops program at MIT.

I left my job to my job to make sense of an increasingly confusing world of work.

After I went back into consulting after MBA I started to noticed that almost no one cared how organizations worked. The people that studied organizations had fancy frameworks but they were rarely predictive. They mostly made people feel good.

I became obsessed with how to design an environment around fundamental principles. Build environments & cultures that:

- cultivate learning

- DON’T stifle motivation

- Don’t kill emergent experimentation

I realized this was counter to all individual career incentives.

Over time I realized a lot of this tinkering in consulting and initiatives in the corporate world were just part of the performance of work. no one seemed to care if any of it worked.

Most of the big “impact” was finance, M&A, and government affairs were a better ROI.
A Subconscious Mind Searching For Conscious Answers
Tags: Subconscious Mind, Small Business, Space, Workplace, Startup

I want to understand the myths behind the infinite information to form a conscious understanding of who am I
5 Sure-fire Ways to Grow Workplace Leadership in 2021
By: Careers In Gov.
Tags: Work, Work Life Balance, Leadership, Management, Workplace

Public sector workplace leadership and staff will literally be receiving a shot in the arm. 2021 will be the year where we worry less, get together as teams and family once again, and grow our business with confidence. This is fantastic news. Stress levels will decrease, businesses will be able to operate at full capacity and handshakes/hugs will be returning en masse.
【職場日常】新工作的到職前準備
By: Mark Liang
Tags: Manager, Personal Development, New Career, Workplace, Career Change

Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more

Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore
Your First Job Post Grad. What They Don’t Tell You.
By: Danielle Cara
Tags: Jobs, Workplace, Stress

Uncertainty, stress and insecurity. A few of the emotions I experienced at my first real marketing job.

At the ripe age of 23, I was nearing completion of my Strategic Relationship Marketing program at George Brown College in Toronto, Ontario. I was eager to start working the second I graduated and make money. Weeks before graduating I jumped on Indeed, LinkedIn and Workopolis to start looking for jobs.

I didn’t have an idea of a specific company I wanted to work for, I just kept my search for entry level Marketing Coordinator and Assistant jobs. After weeks of interviews, I had finally landed a job at a marketing agency. I was extremely grateful that I was hired somewhere and given the chance to start my career.

The process was an easy transition, I was trained by my predecessor for a couple days before I took over completely. I was mainly responsible for managing deadlines, uploading ads and pulling statistics. It seemed like a fair workload, and to make things better, all of the employees were extremely welcoming.
Why Don’t You Miss Your Office?
By: Thejus Chakravarthy
Tags: Health, Work, Wellness, Workplace, Wellbeing

After a year or so of Covid-y goodness, I doubt there are a lot of people who remember their offices fondly. Oh sure, you miss your coworkers, you miss the camaraderie, you miss the stability of having physical separations between your work and your personal life, and so on.

But missing the actual office? The actual four walls and drop ceilings and carpet? The times you could tell someone was microwaving Thai leftovers? The way your eyes stung if you went to the bathroom too early in the morning?

a dreary, horrible, yet common office

What about the one sad, abused Brita pitcher in the fridge? The one that someone brought in years ago that everyone uses but it seems like you’re the only one who refills? Or that Keurig machine that still tastes like hazelnut because it wasn’t cleaned out correctly?

What about that conference room? You know, the one where you can hear every conversation down the hall? Or the open floor plan that makes sure you have to wear headphones to focus? Or that high pitched whine you can hear no matter what you do?

What about your chair and desk? I mean, now that you finally got the good chair and managed to get a second monitor from IT. You probably miss that, don’t you? I mean, it still isn’t as comfy as the setup you have at home, but it’s pretty good, right?

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

If your office was built to the WELL standard, I can guarantee you’d miss the hell out of it.

With the WELL standard, the air in the office would be the perfect temperature, with a gradient across the room so you could move to where you were the most comfortable. Any smells from the kitchen or bathroom would be imperceptible. Heck, you wouldn’t even notice if either room was recently cleaned!

You wouldn’t hear any noise from outside, and any inside noise would be so quiet that you’d have to strain to hear it. The open workspaces would be balanced out by closed ones for when you needed to take a call.

Photo by Alvin Engler on Unsplash

There would be water fountains providing filtered water and healthy snacks in the pantry, regardless of your dietary restrictions. There would be plenty of space in the fridge for anything you brought from home. There would be a wide array of food options, from snacks to meals to catered meetings, all with labels for nutritional information and allergy notifications.

Your desk would be configurable for sitting or standing, and even options for a treadmill or pedals. It would be well lit and free of any glare from the overheads or the outside.

There’d even be a gym, with showers and lockers. There’d be a place to park your bike, right next to the garden or park with a jungle gym, and benches to eat outside.

An office that meets the WELL standard would be something you missed, even if going back means no more morning meetings in your pajamas. And that would be something to look forward to, when all this Covid-y goodness finally runs its course.
The pandemic will revolutionize the future of work.
By: Rebecca Sealfon
Tags: Remote Working, Future Of Work, Workplace Culture, Covid 19 Crisis, Workplace

The pandemic will revolutionize the future of work. This piece by Ryan Holmes describes the results of a survey of employees, revealing that many would like to work from home more and tend to save time and be productive when they do. Many have also switched to freelancing. A part-time office arrangement is a common preference.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
Thank You & Work Insights: Week 50
By: Alice Greschkow
Tags: Remote Working, Work, Productivity, Meetings, Workplace

Photo by Kevin Bhagat on Unsplash

Dear readers of Work Today,

work is as essential part of the lives of million people. Most can’t just decide not to work — they have to make ends meet in their families or dream of climbing the social ladder.

Work has always been a vehicle with different functions: It allows you social mobility, facilitates integration into new groups, grows your skills and knowledge — and if you’re really lucky — it might be a place of fulfillment.

Work is called work for a reason: It’s not an easy thing to do and most jobs contain at least a small share of annoying tasks. But spending a large chunk of your time working, work should at least become more bearable, humane and productive.

To find ideas, visions and hacks to create better work, I started “Work Today” one week ago. I dream of it becoming the home for writers who question the status quo of work-life and have valuable insights for a better work life.

The first week has been an interesting ride: I found contributors with original ideas and a creative mind. Here’s what you should definitely read:

2. Kristi Pelzel analyzes the quality of videoconferencing tools in terms of quality and security — ‘Safety vs. Convenience in Video Conferencing Apps’:

3. Adam Prescott teaches you how to get most of your one-on-one meetings — ‘Do One-on-Ones, Like a Boss’:

4. Mike Curtis has some valuable insights on how to be extraordinary at work — ‘How to Be Extraordinary at Work in 2021 and Beyond (Part 1)’:

5. Catherine Syme shares how she applied a growth mindset to public speaking — ‘What I Learned from (Finally) Applying a Growth Mindset to Public Speaking’:

6. Kasinatha Rao asks you to stop wasting time on too many meetings — ‘Too many meetings, and no time to get sh*t done’:

7. Victoria A. Fraser has a practical tipp for your writing work — ‘How Using an Outline Can Improve Your Writing’

Thank you all for those contribution and making the start of “Work Today” so pleasant and exciting!

Want more ideas?

I’m a firm believer that good ideas are everywhere and I want to use this newsletter to shine light on my favorite pieces from other publications which were published last week:

4. Nir Eyal published a bright piece about how jobs have been changing — ‘Are You a Wage Slave?’
Work smarter not harder!
By: Andrea Paola
Tags: Productivity, Management, Task Management, Workplace, Self Improvement

Work smarter not harder!

Happy Sunday!

Sometimes, we let others manage our days. We let everyone add tasks to our to-do list as if we didn’t have enough work on our plates already. But that behavior needs to end now.

We tend to confuse being busy with being productive. The larger our to-do list, the better employees we think we are. That’s a mistaken belief.

Rather, productivity is about gaining control of the decisions you make, the apps you use, and the time you spend on each task. It means tackling priorities in a smarter and more effective way.

In each of today’s articles, you’ll be able to learn a new tip, trick, or hack that will make you achieve more by doing less.

Hope you enjoy,

Steve.
Employees need mentorship, not dictatorship
By: Pint Salt
Tags: Corporate Culture, Workplace

I have seen from my experience in the industry that a leader that lacks empathy is the worse. People work not only for $$$, but also for respect and relationship.

No mentorship

Some bosses just keep working on “his/her” things without spending time on developing the skills of his/her employees. S/he fails to understand that s/he is as good as his/her team. Without any direction or mentorship, the team becomes dysfunctional within a short time.

Unbalanced feedback

Some bosses doesn’t provide feedback at all. Some bosses provide feedback too much. Some bosses only provide negative feedback. All of these are bad. There should be a balance on the feedback. Nobody likes to be judged all the time or hear only negative things.
In an organization, information can be shared across teams and even across organizations.
By: Rebecca Sealfon
Tags: Freelancing, Workplace Culture, Organizational Culture, Workplace, Organizational Change

In an organization, information can be shared across teams and even across organizations. The cross-pollination of ideas needs to be incentivized. One of my projects, Organic Recruitment, involves developing such an incentive system.

Workplaces have few incentives and little structure for people who are not full-time employees. Part-time jobs, for example, are often hard to come by. An individual who was rejected in the hiring process might also be the best in a very specific way, that is valuable but might not have been requisitioned. Technology companies provide food and other small gifts for these classes of workers, but they are still not recognized as workers or given a more formal incentive system. Their lack of recognition creates barriers to their involvement.
The scary part of time off!. A lot of us spend our day in some…
By: Manu Satsangi
Tags: Work, Self Love, Holidays, Workplace, Vacation

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

A lot of us spend our day in some social setting or other, where we interact with others and get work done. (Think a workplace or a school). But when we are on time-off, we are really on our own. There is no one giving us directions or wishes (think boss). We have to design our own time and this is where it gets really scary for many.

If we spend our worktime mostly on someone’s directions or wishes, we find it really difficult to make our own decisions on spending time-off!! Simple.. because we are not used to thinking for ourselves! This is like suddenly given the sheering wheel when you have never really driven a car!

The worst part is that while time-off is supposed to be relaxing and enjoyable, many of us end up worrying trying to relax and enjoy ourselves. A manifestation of this is when you spend hours deciding which movie to watch and end up not watching any in exhaustion!

Where are we getting to?

It is really important to have our own agenda too at the workplace. That is how we can learn to self-regulate and design our lives! That is the best form of self-love!
The Truth About Crisis and its Multiple Facets
By: Dentsu World Services India
Tags: Human Resources, Emotional Intelligence, Resilience, Covid 19 Crisis, Workplace

The Truth about Crisis and its Multiple Facets

The COVID-19 crisis has given an additional push to re-evaluate every situation, most of which need to be balanced by being resilient.

During times of disturbance or chaos, sometimes people hurry to try to solve or to overcome the stress of the crisis. However, the idea of resilience is to first identify whether it is a ‘stress,’ ‘pressure,’ ‘burden’ or ‘a crisis that can be handled.’

You must have read, heard or realised that — hasty decisions are often wrong decisions! More often than not, we find ourselves in situations where we are tempted to decide or react almost on a REFLEX. Decisions are either made by evaluating the situation or the circumstances, which may be or may not be in our control.

While taking decisions, at times it is wise to consider a balancing act and juggle between our urge to “want” and “have”. The circumference of “want” is big but “have” encompasses a bigger radius. For instance, even during the lockdown, I want to travel for a holiday. On the other hand, I have to pay attention to my health and wellbeing first. I feel a reframing technique is one of the best tools to be resilient. A robust method to control thoughts in the mind is the goal of winning the crisis. Arriving at such a stage of resilience is a journey and there is no quick fix.

Consider another case, the pandemic has shifted the parameters by which companies are evaluated. They not only have to turn over a profit in their businesses but now their performance is assessed on a vast range of criteria, which include employee morale, motivation level, empathy and inclusiveness, wellbeing, support and flexibility, resilience and so on. In other words, companies no longer have to be only equated on financial numbers but also foundational levels like Supportive Leadership, an INVOLVING & ACCEPTANCE CULTURE (IAC) and empower teams on decision making capability.

IAC always promotes mutual respect, togetherness and diverse perspectives and helps an employee reflect upon themselves to achieve the best in their highs and lows. Companies play a major role in promoting building resilience at the workplace and cultivating mental agility. This is a learning we’ve experienced with our team at dentsu World Services during the past few months as the pandemic engulfed the world.

As a Human Resource professional, I have immense regard for leaders and organizations that operate from a zone of high emotional intelligence (EI) and strengthen the cultural fabric and morale of the teams. This year onwards, let’s pledge our contribution towards building a resilient workplace to empower our workforce for future challenges.

Author: Priyanka Dutta, Head — Human Resources, dentsu World Services.
When I was coming into the workforce, early 90s, every employer just assumed all black women were angry, that was the pervasive stereotype, and it justified locking us in lower-level positions…
By: Chira Lois
Tags: Gender, Employement, Sexism, Racism, Workplace

…e navigating predominately White and male IT workplaces, I was acutely aware of my race and gender. As I looked for ways to advance my IT career, I was mindful to use my “White voice” when I talked with my colleagues, to always smile, and to remain vigilant of my arm and body movements so that my colleagues never perceived me as angry (the angry Black woman stereotype). I also made sure that my hair aligned with the company’s perceptions of professionalism. I hoped th…
Εκφοβισμός στον εργασιακό χώρο — Ένας απλός οδηγός αναγνώρισης ανάρμοστων συμπεριφορών
By: Efstratios Papanis
Tags: Colleagues, Workplace Mobbing, Guidelines, Bullying, Workplace

in Change Becomes You
What is it you say you do here?
Tags: Annual Review, Mental Health, Way Of The Badger, Office Space, Workplace

It’s that time, y’all … the year is winding down and those of us in the corporate world are (or will be) starting the annual review process. Something significant dawned on me from topics in the 1:1 I had with my manager this past week … why do we not provide reviews to our bosses/leaders?

Recently, my 3 up boss stated that he thought my current (major) project is “a lot smaller than” a similar one this summer, because “there are fewer users”. At the same time, he talks and acts like there are 2 additional, identical clones of the Badger. (scary, innit?) Neither of those are true, however … size of users does not directly dictate the size of a project, and there are not 3 of me.

Why can’t I provide him a review?

That is a crazy thought, but “walk” with me. The avenues to leadership feedback are usually limited, maybe there’s an “regular” survey on corporate culture or maybe you have a leader who asks directly for feedback. Otherwise — nothing is available. The more I think on this, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

There should be a 2-way street to providing feedback up and down the corporate ranks. I’m not going to have much feedback about the C-Suite, but I can speak to how leadership in my department functions, from my perspective. If it’s seen as helpful to point out “areas of improvement” for an employee, then I should be able to return that feedback. If I feel I’m not being listened to or taken seriously, I should be able to share that openly with leadership — to work towards growth.

Instead, it’s often mistaken for angst or dismissed as complaints … and they wonder why good people leave employers.
How To Create A Better Work Environment
Tags: Masculine, Feminine, Psychological Science, Androgyny, Workplace

Psychological Androgyny in the Workplace.

There are three gender roles which are masculinity, femininity, and psychological androgyny.

Psychological androgyny is a person’s ability to possess both masculine and feminine traits such as ‘aggressive and nurturant’, ‘dominant and submissive’. It is thought to be the most desirable gender role when it comes to the modern workplace because psychologically androgynous people “have high emotional intelligence, and they’re especially effective at adjusting their behaviour to address the demands of a particular situation,” (Collaborative Journeys).

The workplace is a male-dominated environment and often leaves little to no room for the female role, even though women occupy half of the workforce. An androgynous leadership style makes the workplace more inclusive.

What are the benefits of psychological androgyny in the workplace?

People who are psychologically androgynous have “mental health advantages, higher self-esteem, and report feeling little pressure for gender differentiation. Androgyny has also been shown to have an effect on communication skills later in life. Someone who has androgynous characteristics tends to be able to communicate with people of the opposite sex better in social and professional settings,” (Communicating Psychological Science).

Imagine working with someone who understands you completely, it’s a refreshing feeling. Leaders in the workplace contribute to the well-being of their workers. Adopting an androgynous work style or by hiring psychologically androgynous people, creates a well-balanced work environment.

How can psychological androgyny be measured?

Sandra Bem, a leading feminine psychologist on gender studies (1944–2014), invented the Bem Sex Role Inventory test or BSRI for short. She believed androgyny sustained a healthy balance of masculine and feminine personality traits which gives a person the freedom not to be strictly either-or (Good Therapy).

The BSRI is a 60 question personality test that measures which gender role you most identify with psychologically. It has endured some criticism that questioned its validity but its still a popular test (Psytoolkit.org).

After searching through a plethora of tests, I finally took a 36 question Gender Role Test from IDRLabs that was inspired by the BSRI and I scored as Casually Feminine (50% masculine, 69% feminine). I assume that means sometimes I’m feminine and sometimes I’m not which is about right.

In conclusion, psychological androgyny is better for the workplace because it creates a healthy balance for the well-being of others. It can be measured through a variety of personality and gender tests so a person can get a sense of which role they identify the most with.

Lastly, psychological androgyny pays off in the long-run by affording a healthy level of mental health advantages such as high self-esteem and effective communication. It would be worthwhile to adopt this trait into a workplace environment.
My Top Employment Commandments
By: Ryan Rafferty
Tags: Tech, Workplace, HR, Office Life

Go where the people respect you the most

where it’s not a blame culture

where your manager talks to you the way he would want to be spoken to

where they embrace working from home

where you can find a mentor

where you can be around people who want the best for you and each other

where it’s a positive environment

where they embrace new and fresh ideas

where they’re not afraid of testing in a production environment.
73% of CEOs are Prioritizing Flexible Work Models…Are You?
Tags: Workplace, Hybridworkplace, Digitized Workplace, Hybrid Work

A Mint-Bain India CEO survey revelation, this number shows that most Indian CXOs are wanting to opt for flexible work models, or commonly known as the hybrid workplace model.

The past few years have witnessed a growth in the concept of remote working. As pandemic related lockdowns ensued, organizations adopted this model extensively. However, with 65% of Indians wanting to return to the office, the future is hybrid as to anybody’s guess. Salesforce survey revealed that out of 3500 respondents, 45% wanted to start working from their office. And a BCG report quoted that 37% of companies are expecting 25% of their employees to work in a hybrid model.

While the idea of adopting a hybrid workplace might seem appealing to most, implementation takes planning and coordination across multiple teams and employees. Some of the major challenges of implementing a hybrid workplace model include:

Identifying the employees working on-site and working from home

Complying with COVID-19 regulatory and social distancing norms

Optimizing office assets to easily accommodate employee rotation

Maintaining employee productivity

So, how can organizations overcome these challenges? We know that technology will play a pivotal role in digitizing workplaces. But what else does the future hold? To know this and more, read here https://bit.ly/3oEhsKg.
BECOMING A MORE INCLUSIVE LEADE
By: Russ Ewell
Tags: Inclusion, Diversity, Leadership, Russ Ewell, Workplace

Being an inclusive leader is one of the most effective ways to help your company succeed. When implemented consistently, inclusivity boosts employee productivity and morale. Inclusive leaders from every sector of business have proven that the approach nurtures an environment of connection, respect, and involvement. Here are five practices to use when you are working towards being a more inclusive leader.

Acknowledge Unconscious Bias

As with personal relationships, you will find that each of your employees has norms, rituals, values, and beliefs that are integrated into every facet of their work. To be an inclusive leader, take note of any biases that you have about your employees as you observe their behaviors. Challenging these thought patterns helps you get to know your employees as real people and unlocks potential for growth and overcoming challenges in your business.

Leave No Rules to Chance

You set the tone and norms for your business, and you need to make sure that your employees are on the same page. To be an inclusive leader, write down rules that reflect how you expect your employees to interact with each other and your customers. Even the most fundamental rules should be clearly written and referred to as needed. In an inclusive work environment, you will bring together people from different backgrounds and cultures that may define what is considered cultural norms outside the workplace. Thriving in an inclusive company means that everyone knows what is expected and follows through on those expectations.

Hold People Accountable

An important practice that is used by inclusive leaders is to hold all staff to the rules and norms that you outline for your business. Even the smallest misstep should be addressed quickly and appropriately. You not only clarify expectations to the individual but also let your staff know that you are willing to maintain an environment that is safe and comfortable for everyone.

Understand Diverse Perspectives

Being a more inclusive leader means that you take the time to consider everyone’s perspective. Culture, gender, race, religious beliefs, and many other socioeconomic factors influence an individual’s perception, thoughts, ideas, and comfort level. Overcome your assumptions that everyone has the same comfort level as you or other staff in any given situation.

Value Differences

Differences in ideas, approaches, beliefs, and other aspects can be the root of conflict within any business environment. Teach yourself and your employees to value differences because they help to define comprehensive strategies and solutions. Model behavior that respects and encourages differences in your company if you want to be an inclusive leader.

Originally published on Russ Ewell’s website.
Gradient Descend’e adım adım…
By: Hasan Doğukan İnce
Tags: Derivatives, Limits, Differential Equations, Gradient Descent

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Loss explosion while training a custom model 💨
By: Parth Lathiya
Tags: Object Detection, Gradient Descent, TensorFlow, Artificial Intelligence, Neural Networks

Detailed Intuition with Explanation

One of a few great articles providing base to this content is Exploding gradients in neural networks.

So, if you’ve already started training your network/model, you must know about loss .

It’s mainly numerical form of saying that the model’s predictions varied by ‘x’ amount of value. And this is the loss. And loss functions can be a variety of them, choose what suits your data .

So,

Now,

Loss explosion can happen due to two events:

Number of classes conflict in .config file and labelmap.pb file

Either it has made a prediction that is not present in training data i.e., it is very far from actual data. That means in your label map (provided reference in training .config file) has less number of classes than described in .config file. So model will be trained to identify 80 classes for example from the dataset that contains say 1 object/class.

Therefore model will predict [1–99] predictions but every-time during back propagation, it receives higher loss from optimisers for [2–99] values and only feasible loss to [1] class.

That’s why loss adds up exponentially for all 98 classes hence explodes.

Graphically, it looks like

Instead of

Here the Gradient term is referred to by how much the weight values should be modified and in which direction to match the ground truth class/value.

2. The Optimiser gets confused

If training learning rate is too much according the the dataset.

Say if your data is simple like identifying MNIST dataset. We’ll require very low learning rate so that our optimiser can come up with gradients that’ll bring the predictions towards the global minima. And if larger learning rate is provided, on the next prediction, the weights are going to take decision towards the higher values pre-assigned and it learned false information.

On the next iteration, it again crosses the minima and to the other side.

Graphically,

We are following the yellow line.

Here is another useful graphical in-detail intuition and here is a great machine learning course where you can also learn about debugging your model.

Implementation,

Before:

learning_rate_base: 0.800000011920929

warmup_learning_rate: 0.13333000242710114

After:

learning_rate_base: .008

warmup_learning_rate: 0.0013333

Here is my reply in official issue

That’s all. See you in the next post 🤩
Batch Gradient Ascent and Logistic Regression
By: Albert Um
Tags: Gradient Descent, Logistic Regression

Photo by Giuseppe Famiani on Unsplash

For this blog, I will explain logistic regression and how the beta values can be calculated through gradient ascent of the maximum log-likelihood.

Logistic regression is widely used for binary classifications where the dependant variables are limited to be either 0 or 1. Therefore, our predicted values should also range between 0 and 1 with a 50% threshold. This is to say, if the model returns a value greater than or equal to 50% then it will be classified as 1, and if less than 50, classified as 0.

Logistic regression is very similar to linear regression as they are both additive models. However, the values output values should range from [0, 1]. A common way to return this value is to utilize a sigmoid function.

The probability of y to be 1 given x variables parameterized by the theta(feature) values will then equal h_{\theta}(x). And because y can only be 0 or 1 the probability of y to be 0 given x variables parameterized by theta will equal 1 — h_{\theta}(x).

The likelihood of the theta(all parameters, variables) is the product of the probability of the data.

The objective is to now choose theta values that will maximize the log-likelihood. Very similarly to gradient descent, I will update each beta values simultaneously by taking the partial derivative. However, since I am now trying to climb to the top I will add the partial derivative of the log-likelihood instead of subtracting.

I hope this was helpful in understanding gradient ascent and its application to logistic regression.
11 — Mean Square Error Gradient Descent
By: Meeraj Kanaparthi
Tags: Mean Squared Error, Gradient Descent Python, Gradient Descent, Stochastic Gradient, Machine Learning

In statistics, the mean squared error (MSE)[1][2] or mean squared deviation (MSD) of an estimator (of a procedure for estimating an unobserved quantity) measures the average of the squares of the errors — that is, the average squared difference between the estimated values and the actual value. MSE is a risk function, corresponding to the expected value of the squared error loss. The fact that MSE is almost always strictly positive (and not zero) is because of randomness or because the estimator does not account for information that could produce a more accurate estimate

Below is the demo in English, हिंदी (Hindi), తెలుగు(Telugu)

English:

हिंदी (Hindi)

తెలుగు (Telugu)

Code:

Medium: https://kmeeraj.medium.com/11-mean-square-error-gradient-descent-ae9bdb33548f

github : https://github.com/kmeeraj/machinelearning/tree/develop

Github Demo : https://github.com/kmeeraj/machinelearning/blob/develop/algorithms/Mean%20Square%20Error/Mean%20Square%20Error%20Gradient%20Descent.ipynb

colab: https://colab.research.google.com/gist/kmeeraj/64be04af2bec608270aa3d57ca018b08/11-mean-square-error-gradient-descent.ipynb

Gist: https://gist.github.com/kmeeraj/64be04af2bec608270aa3d57ca018b08

Mean squared error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_squared_error

Reference : https://towardsdatascience.com/gradient-descent-from-scratch-e8b75fa986cc

Stochastic Gradient Descent: https://towardsdatascience.com/stochastic-gradient-descent-clearly-explained-53d239905d31

Social Media:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/meeraj-k-69ba76189/

https://facebook.com/meeraj.k.35

https://www.instagram.com/meeraj.kanaparthi1/
Epoch, Batch size, Iteration, Learning Rate
By: Ken Huang
Tags: Epoch, Batch Size, Gradient Descent, Iteration, Machine Learning

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Gradient Descent Update rule for Multiclass Logistic Regression
By: Adam Dhalla
Tags: Logistic Regression, Gradient Descent, AI, Mathematics, Neural Networks

Gradient Descent Update rule for Multiclass Logistic Regression

This is continuing off of my Logistic Regression on CIFAR-10 article, so skim that for some details —especially the intuition on cross-entropy and softmax.

Here are a few details about the CIFAR-10 image dataset this article is being written in the context of.

CIFAR-10 has ten possible classes.

CIFAR-10 has 3072 features per example (color pixel values in an image)

I’d recommend a good knowledge of derivatives and simple neural network functions, like backpropagation for this part. Even if you do know those things, you won’t understand just from reading this. Work through the problem yourself, and solve the problems you encounter.

A second disclaimer — out of simplicity, all of this will be assuming a single training example.

To derive the update rules of the parameters, it helps to think of logistic regression as a simple neural network, with zero hidden layers.

Much of this proof is from this fantastic lecture:
How to implement an Adam Optimizer from Scratch
By: Enoch Kan
Tags: Python, Gradient Descent, Deep Learning, Adam Optimizer, Neural Networks

It’s not as hard as you think!

Tl;dr if you want to skip the tutorial. Here is the notebook I created.

Adam is algorithm the optimizes stochastic objective functions based on adaptive estimates of moments. The update rule of Adam is a combination of momentum and the RMSProp optimizer.

The rules are simple. Code Adam from scratch without the help of any external ML libraries such as PyTorch, Keras, Chainer or Tensorflow. Only libraries we are allowed to use are numpy and math .

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Step 1: Understand how Adam works

The easiest way to learn how Adam’s works is to watch Andrew Ng’s video. Alternatively, you can read Adam’s original paper to get a better understanding of the motivation and intuition behind it.

Two values that Adam depend on are β₁ and β₂. β₁ is the exponential decay of the rate for the first moment estimates, and its literature value is 0.9. β₂ is the exponential decay rate for the second-moment estimates, and its literature value is 0.999. Both literature values work well with most datasets.

Calculation of moving averages using parameters β1 and β2

On a given iteration t, we can calculate the moving averages based on parameters β₁, β₂, and gradient gt. Since most algorithms that depend on moving averages such as SGD and RMSProp are biased, we need an extra step to correct the bias. This is known as the bias correction step:

Bias correction of the moving averages

Finally, we can update the parameters (weights and biases) based on the calculated moving averages with a step size η:

Step 2: Implement Adam in Python

To summarize, we need to define several variables: 1st-order exponential decay β₁, 2nd-order exponential decay β₂, step size η and a small value ε to prevent zero-division. Additionally, we define m_dw , v_dw , m_db and v_db as the mean and uncentered variance from the previous time step of the gradients of weights and biases dw and db .

Recall that Adam relies on two important moments: a 1st-order moment estimate of the mean and the 2nd-order moment estimate of the variance. Using these moment estimates we can update the weights and biases given an appropriate step size.

Step 3: Testing the implementation

To test our implementation, we will first need to define a loss function and its respective gradient function. A gradient function can be obtained by simply taking the derivative of the loss function. For example:

Note that we also define an additional function to check the convergence based on the fact that weights will not change when convergence is reached. Finally, we can iteratively update the weights and biases using our constructed Adam optimizer and see if they converge:

Looking at the results, convergence is reached under 750 iterations. Great success!

Feel free to check out my other stories and github projects. Have a good day!