What’s going on in Boston this week?
How to Manage an Employee Who’s Having a Personal Crisis – Harvard Business Review
The Harvard Business Review recently explored how managers can best support employees to “take care of themselves emotionally while also making sure they are doing their work.”
Annie McKee, author of How to Be Happy at Work and a senior fellow at Penn’s Graduate School of Education, offers three helpful suggestions:
- Set a tone of compassion in the office. It will not only give your employees confidence to approach you with struggles, but also give you the ability to spot warnings signs.
- Be creative with solutions. A flexible schedule may allow a person to maintain their output without much disruption.
- Check in from time to time, both to reassure the employee and to make sure that further adjustments or accommodations aren’t needed.
You can read the full article over at HBR.
Agile at Scale, Explained – MIT Sloan Newsroom
MIT Center for Information Systems Research’s Kristine Dery is currently studying how agile management—the increasingly popular management methodology adopted by the likes of Microsoft, Ericsson, and Spotify—relates to the employee experience.
MIT Sloan School of Management senior lecturer and industry liaison Carine Simon writes, “The traditional method of managing, the waterfall method, which is very inflexible, planned-in-advance, linear, and not iterative at all, wasn’t lending itself at all to the flexibility and the adjustments that were necessary to make great software.”
Simon adds, “[Agile is] iterating with customer feedback, prototypes, and tests, versus taking some requirements and issuing the product maybe a year later, when the customer’s requirements have changed or technology has evolved.”
Many companies have taken note of agile’s prevalence and begun to “ask whether the method’s practices and philosophies could be scaled up to apply with equal success to other projects or even entire business functions,” according to Simon and Dery.
Simon continues, “In customer-centric processes where customer input is key, and in that sense it’s quite uncertain or fast-changing, then those would be the types of areas in a firm that lend themselves to agile.”
Check out the full article here.
Questrom Professor Named 2018-19 Batten Fellow – Questrom Blog
BU Questrom School of Business‘ Siobhan O’Mahony was recently awarded a 2018-19 Batten Fellowship by the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at University of Virginia Darden School of Business.
The Batten Fellows program, according to Darden, “provides support for prominent thought leaders and high-potential scholars who seek to generate new knowledge about entrepreneurship and innovation.”
O’Mahony, an Associate Professor of Strategy & Innovation and Academic Director of Research and Curriculum for Innovate@BU, explores how “technical and creative projects organize for innovation.”
O’Mahony plans to use her fellowship to “research entrepreneurial ecosystems and how those systems influence entrepreneurs and their efforts around venture creation.”
Read all about O’Mahony’s fellowship as part of the full article here.