CNBC: Employees could be heading back to the office sooner than they think. “The days of working from home may numbered. While some companies, including JPMorgan Chase, Salesforce and PricewaterhouseCoopers, are dumping office space, others are ramping up their return-to-work plans.”
Congressional Budget Office: CBO Updates Its Interactive Tool for Analyzing the Effects of Federal Minimum-Wage Increases . “Today, CBO updated its interactive tool—initially released in November 2019—that allows users to create custom policy options to examine how different approaches to changing the minimum wage would affect earnings, employment, family income, and poverty. The estimates shown in the tool were generated using the same methods underlying CBO’s most recent reports on minimum-wage increases: The Budgetary Effects of the Raise the Wage Act of 2021, published in February 2021, and The Effects on Employment and Family Income of Increasing the Federal Minimum Wage, published in July 2019.”
KPAX: New statewide website highlights earn-while-you-learn opportunities for young adults. “Too often, we see young adults leaving the great state of Montana to work somewhere else in the region or the country, and when that happens, Montana’s workforce suffers. Through a collaborative effort between the Missoula Chamber of Commerce and the Montana Department of Labor, Montana’s workforce is gaining some traction through a new website.”
CNN: Silicon Valley is starting to bring workers back to the office. “After years of building huge modern offices and a work culture that many industries have emulated, Silicon Valley was among the first to shutter those offices and go fully remote when the coronavirus pandemic began. Now, many of the tech industry’s biggest companies are slowly making plans to bring workers back, offering a potential road map in the process for what office work looks like in year two of the pandemic.”
BBC: Irish pubs could become work hubs in post-pandemic plan. “The Irish government scheme is part of a five year rural development policy, released on Monday. Under the plan, a fifth of public servants would shift to remote or home working by the end of the year.”
Indiana University: Self-compassion can alleviate feelings of loneliness due to remote work, IUPUI study finds. “When people feel lonely, the study found, they experience more depressive symptoms, and they are less likely to go above and beyond in their jobs, such as helping a co-worker — something many organizations may have hoped their employees would do during the pandemic. But there is hope — in the form of self-compassion.”
Axios: The long road to putting America back to work. “One year into the pandemic, more than 10 million Americans are still out of work — and many of the jobs they lost won’t even exist when this is over. The big picture: Putting the country back to work will require vast amounts of retraining and career shifting, as former bartenders learn to code and former cruise ship workers look for jobs at data centers. The U.S. is still unprepared to take that on at scale.”
Harvard Business Review: COVID Killed the Traditional Workplace. What Should Companies Do Now?. “A year ago, COVID-19 forced many companies to send employees home—often with a laptop and a prayer. Now, with COVID cases subsiding and vaccinations rising, the prospect of returning to old office routines appears more possible. But will employees want to flock back to buildings even when it’s safe again? Should companies do away with Zoom and return the workplace to its pre-COVID ways? The answer, in a word: No.”
Smashing Magazine: Making Remote Work Work: Useful Tools And Resources. “In this post, we compiled some useful tools and resources to help you tackle some of the challenges of working remotely. The collection is by no means complete, but rather a selection of things that we found useful and that we hope will make your day-to-day work more productive and efficient, too.”
Neowin: Microsoft introduces WorkLab, an insider into how it creates the future of work. “Microsoft is launching a new digital publication, WorkLab, to highlight research, science-based insights, and stories around the future of work. Through the publication, Microsoft will share the thinking and processes that influence the creation of products and features.”
News 18: Covid Traveling: Mask to Sanitiser, How to Commute Safely with Co-passengers during Pandemic. “Commuting is crawling its way back to normalcy after the intensive lockdown in India. Vehicles have started to ply as workplaces, market areas, shopping complexes and cinemas have begun opening. Many office-goers have to share cabs with people outside their families. Naturally, there is a fear of catching infections because of the tight space inside a car. However, there are still ways in which the riders can ensure safety for themselves.”
ABC 13: ABC13 exclusively debuts Texas’ new job search website during virtual job fair. “ABC13 hosted a virtual job fair featuring more than 400 jobs, and gave southeast Texans an exclusive look at the state’s new jobs website. The state will roll out the new site, where Texans can search for, match and apply for jobs in 2021. However, Workforce Solutions partnered with ABC13 to exclusively debut the new website during our virtual job fair Thursday.”
CNN: Looking for a job? This university shared its database with thousands of remote job openings. “California State University, East Bay published a public database of remote job vacancies across the country to help people struggling to find employment due to the pandemic.”
New York Times: Recession With a Difference: Women Face Special Burden. “For millions of working women, the coronavirus pandemic has delivered a rare and ruinous one-two-three punch. First, the parts of the economy that were smacked hardest and earliest by job losses were ones where women dominate — restaurants, retail businesses and health care. Then a second wave began taking out local and state government jobs, another area where women outnumber men. The third blow has, for many, been the knockout: the closing of child care centers and the shift to remote schooling.”
City A.M.: Exclusive: Coronavirus stalls nearly a third of promotions. “Some 28% of full time workers were due a promotion in 2020 that has been put on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic, exclusive research has revealed. The research found more than a third (36%) of full-time workers felt their professional development had regressed due to the coronavirus pandemic.”
