 |
|
|
|||||
How can you measure productivity you cant see? When we try to evaluate whether someone is killing it in their role simply by hearing them mansplain their digital transformation strategy or their AI-powered journey of innovation, its hard to disentangle facts from fiction, competence from confidence, and talent from, well, BS.The harder it is to decipher what someone is doing, the easier it is to fake it. Ironically, this means that the more you get paid for doing what you dobecause specialized skills and in-demand jobs tend to involve operating in abstract, intellectual, and symbolic processes rather than visible, tangible, observable workthe harder it is to know if you are any good at it. Welcome to the modern workplace, where the line between working and pretending to work is not just thin, its vanishing. This is particularly true with the advent of AI, which produces content indistinguishable from what humans produce, if not better. If knowledge workers are merely promptly AI and instructing the AI agents to work for them, are humans still working? When work became hard to see One of the great historical transitions in the knowledge economy is that as work became more “intellectual,” it also became less visible. Unlike a farmers harvest or a blacksmiths horseshoe, knowledge work is abstract. You cant see a PowerPoint decks impact (if we could, we would probably not devote so many hours in our life to create slides), or touch a well-formatted spreadsheet (though we can admire it, sure). And when results are ambiguous, evaluations become subjective. More importantly, the connection between the behaviors people perform or display (typing, thinking, reading, writing) and the desirable work or organizational outcomes (growth, productivity, innovation, performance) is invisible, which allows people to brag about their apparent accomplishments on LinkedIn and their resumés: during my tenure we increased profits by 25% . . .. because of you, despite you, or coincidentally while you were there? The modern office was once thought to be a factory of ideas, but more often, it is a theater of activity. Slack pings, emails sent at 11:47 p.m., and meetings scheduled for no good reason serve as proxies for productivity. As psychologist Adam Grant noted, we confuse responsiveness with competence. Presencewhether physical or digitalis misread as performance, or even talent. Even performance reviews have become more performative than evaluative. As my colleagues and I have shown, most managers are bad at assessing performancebiased by recent events, likability, and self-confidence. The upshot? Its easier to reward those who are good at appearing to work than those who are actually working. And our notion of adding value is conflated with being rewarding to deal with. Confidence over competence It gets worse. As work becomes more cerebral, we also become better at gaming the system. Impression management has become a meta-skill: not the work itself, but the ability to make others believe that we are working, and working well. This isn’t just anecdotal. Psychological studies repeatedly show that people are poor judges of competence, often mistaking confidence for ability. One study shows that speaking more than others in group settings predicts being selected as leader to that group: Yes, there is an ROI to mansplaining! In fact, in a world where perception trumps reality, those who can tell a compelling story about their work often outperform those who quietly produce real results. This explains why buzzwords thrive in business: leveraging synergies sounds more important than talking to another department. And therein lies the tragedy: The more time you devote to pretending to work, which by definition decreases the time you can devote to actually working, the more successful you may be in an organizational setting. As our skills evolved to navigate complex knowledge ecosystems, so did our capacity to appear productive. This is a uniquely modern skill, honed through LinkedIn updates, Zoom facial expressions, and the subtle art of replying-all. For all the talks of authenticity and being yourself at work, as my upcoming book documents, there is hardly ever a reward for being honest and transparent when you are up against masters of deceptions and deception eclipses reality. Those who confess that they prefer to have their achievements speak for themselves are no doubt noble and ethicalbut they will generally go unnoticed compared to people who proactively engaged in politics, self-promotion, and sucking up to their boss. The rise of meaningless work In Bullshit Jobs, the late anthropologist David Graeber describes a category of work so pointless that even the people doing it cant justify its existence. Entire industriescorporate compliance, middle management, strategic communicationsare filled with people who arent sure what their job is for, but are sure it requires a calendar full of meetings. Consider the following real-but-ridiculous tasks: Creating decks to summarize meetings that summarized other decks. Emailing to circle back on a thread that no one cared about in the first place. Editing internal mission statements for tone. Filling out time-tracking software to account for the time spent filling it out. These are not edge casesthey are routine. In a 2015 YouGov poll in the UK, 37% of workers said their job makes no meaningful contribution to the world. Thats not burnoutits existential despair. So, why do these jobs persist? Because they look like work. And if your boss can’t measure your output, theyll settle for being impressed by your process.
Category:
E-Commerce
If it werent for Signal, Venmo might be the most infamous app of the Trump administrationand maybe the most beloved among journalists covering this White House. Thats not because of any Trump staffers clumsiness, like the one that led national security advisor Mike Waltz to accidentally add Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat group set up to discuss military strikes against Houthi terrorists. With the PayPal-owned payments app, the blame (or credit) goes to its default setting of making users friends lists public. Vice President JD Vance ran afoul of that in July, when Wired identified the Venmo account of then-Sen. Vance (R-Ohio) and found 211 names on his friends list: a mix of tech executives, politicians, and journalists. Wired repeated the exercise in March for Waltz and found 328 Venmo friends covering a similar range of Washington society. And on Tuesday, NOTUS reported that among more than 50 current lawmakers, more than 20 former members of Congress, and more than three dozen current Trump administration officials and nominees whose Venmo accounts the site identified over a week of research, almost everyone had their friends lists open to the public. It just keeps happening, says Sara Collins, director of government affairs at the Washington-based digital-rights group Public Knowledge. Who does this serve? Venmo has historically defended this default as part of its social nature, much like it once made transactions public by default, despite vocal criticism. That payment publicity persisted even after Venmo settled a Federal Trade Commission investigation into that and other alleged deceptive conduct. Venmo didnt remove the public transactions feed until 2021. PayPal spokesperson Erin Mackey responded to Fast Company with a statement similar to what the company has offered in previous stories about Venmo privacy. The privacy and safety of Venmo users are top priorities, she wrote. Venmo provides in-app education and easy-to-use privacy settings to put users in control of who their friends lists are shared with or whether they appear in other users lists at all. Her statement ended with a line that departs slightly from prior responses: Were always listening to our customers to strengthen and evolve the Venmo platform while staying true to the social aspects theyve come to know and love. Privacy advocates find Venmos public friends-list default nearly as troubling as the old public transactions feed. Its not a good practice, says Collins. I have no idea whose interest it serves to be publicexcept, she adds, for law enforcement and national-security investigators, who could find it hugely useful. The Trump administrations immigration crackdownone that has targeted politically active students here on visasmay give government investigators even more reasons to inspect public Venmo data. I can think of a million ways, but I also don’t want to give them a million ideas about how to use this data, says Reem Suleiman, U.S. advocacy lead with the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit behind the Firefox browser that has published multiple critiques of Venmos privacy settings. Venmos overall utility to government investigations remains unclear because PayPal has yet to follow the practice of other tech firmseven X, after a lapse following Elon Musks purchase of what was then Twitterby publishing a transparency report documenting its responses to government queries. Any company that holds sensitive user data should publish a thorough transparency report, says Gennie Gebhart, managing director of technology at the San Francisco-based digital-liberties nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. Users deserve a basic level of insight into how the company handles government requests for that kind of information. A setting thats not obvious to surface The setting can be easy to overlook because other payment apps dont make your social graph public. Collins calls Venmo a kind of strange outlier in that respect. To check this in your own account: Open Venmos mobile app (the web interface doesnt present this setting), tap the Me button at bottom right, tap the gear icon at top right, tap Privacy, tap Friends List, and select Private. Venmo didnt even offer that privacy option for years; EFF called out the company for its absence in 2019, and only added it in 2021 after BuzzFeed News identified former president Joe Bidens account. You can also choose not to appear in the friends lists of people who havent changed this default (and who may have only added you because they accepted Venmos invitation to import their entire contacts list). To do that, deselect Appear in other users friends lists beneath the friends-list publicity setting. This last privacy option is also less than self-evident, Suleiman admits: I didn’t know that until I saw your questions. Venmo did not answer a question about how many of its users have changed their friends-list defaults. If public figures and elected officials with security teams can’t figure out Venmo’s settings, then we know that regular people just trying to pay for everything from rent to medical treatments are vulnerable, too, says Gebhart. Icky but not illegal But while all of these experts judged Venmos conduct distasteful and unhelpful, they also suggested it wasnt the makings of a legal case. Is it bad in the legal sense? No, says Collins. You put it in the terms of service, technically theyre notified. In late November, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized a rule that would empower the agency to supervise digital-payment appsincluding how they protect the privacy of thei customers data. But Republicans in Congress are moving quickly to quash that rule under the Congressional Review Act. The Senate has already voted to scrap it, with the House set to do so soon. Outside Washington, the California Consumer Privacy Act provides much stronger privacy protections. But Collins says its provisions mainly focus on companies sending your data elsewhere. The California law is very concerned about selling data without your consent, or transferring data without your consent, she explains. There is no transfer here. The California Privacy Protection Agency, tasked with enforcing the CCPA, says it cant comment on potential or ongoing investigations. But in any case, state-level privacy laws offer no help to people living in other states. Which means Venmos lax defaults also expose a larger defect in the U.S.the continued inability of Congress to pass a comprehensive federal privacy law, no matter how many examples surface to show one might help. To say that Venmo isn’t breaking the law here isn’t saying much, generally speaking, in the U.S., says Suleiman.
Category:
E-Commerce
Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture. For years, Target wore the halo among big-box retail brands: It may not have been the cheapest, but Tar-zhay offered solid value, often through collaborations with top designers, while enjoying a forward-looking and enlightened reputation. But its become increasingly clear that for many shoppers, the halo has been passedto Costco. And its paying off for the big-box club chain. The proximate cause of this divergence seems clear enough. Decisions made by Target to pull back on diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, which included efforts to explicitly support Black-owned brands and welcome LGBTQ+ consumers, alienated some of its regulars. Meanwhile, Costco reaffirmed its own DEI commitments as simply good for business and while that sparked some boycott chatter in the anti-woke mob, it didnt amount to much. Simultaneously, the big-box club chain has put a fresh emphasis on putting higher-end in its bargain mix, including literal gold bars. Targets initial announcement that it was paring back DEI initiatives sparked immediate complaints and boycott vowsand a notable chunk of those disaffected consumers seem to be sticking to their guns. In a recent report on DEI cuts impact on retail, analytics firm Numerator estimated that Target drew almost 5 million fewer store visits in a four-week stretch ending in February compared to the year before. Costco, in contrast, enjoyed 7.7 million more visits in the same stretch. The report pointed out that DEI-sensitive groups were a notable contributor to the trend. Latino shoppers, for example, made up about a third of Costcos gains. Placer.ai data found that Target overall foot traffic dropped 9% in February and 6.5% in March; and it appears to be continuing to fall. A Forbes report citing data from analytics firm Similarweb found that a February 28 economic blackout aimed at boycotting major retailers and consumer companies that have signaled less commitment to DEI caused Targets web traffic to drop a reported 9%with Costcos rising 22%. A group of Black faith leaders even called for a Target shopping fast for the entirety of Lent. (Target, which did not respond to an inquiry from Fast Company, has been muted in its response; it has pointed to fourth quarter 2024 results claiming a slight uptick in online and foot traffic, and has emphasized ongoing efforts to foster inclusive work and guest environments that welcome all.) While Walmart has also been a boycott target, these reports have so far found that there’s been less impact on Walmart from its own plans to scale back DEI efforts, and that may be because it never experienced a social-values halo. Walmart, instead, has always aligned its brand strictly with low prices. Similarly, Amazons price-and-convenience identity doesnt seem to have suffered from its own DEI pullback. So perhaps it’s not that Target is less progressive than those rivals, but that it was perceived, by design, as having promised to do more. Its also now been hit from both sides: first, criticized by the anti-diversity crowd for its Pride-friendly merch and now, by shoppers who perceive it as having backed down. Theres certainly anecdotal evidence to back the idea that Costco has benefitted from embracing DEI while others have backed off. In one Reddit thread on the subject, a veteran Costco shopper reports the lines for new member sign-up were 10-15 people deep. I’ve never seen more than 2 or 3 people signing up at a time. Another agreesand proceeds to complain about the resulting paucity of parking spaces, and to suggest that Costco up its membership fee. As for Target, while it might be seen as backtracking on diversity, its sticking with other elements of its established brand, like those designer team-ups. A line of Kate Spade clothing, bags, and accessories for Target drops this weekend, aiming squarely at the chains stylish bargain sweet spot. It could prove a test of some shoppers boycott commitment. Costco hasnt hinted at any plans to match that strategy, but it has cultivated its reputation for offering comparative bargains on luxe goods including Rolex watches, Dom Pérignon, 10-carat diamonds, as the companys board chair recently said. But even this is positioned as an extension of Costcos longstanding find-a-deal treasure hunt image, with discount prices at its core. With tariffmageddon looming over the American shopping sceneand causing Walmart and other retailers to gird themselves for uncertaintythats the brand attribute thats likely to mean the most to Costco and its shoppers. And if a reputation for sticking to its principles gets thrown in too, well, thats an even better bargain.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||