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While you’re waiting for the next edition to land on Tuesday, catch up with the first two editions here and here.

Topics we’ve covered already include: Shared leadership, Zappos, team habits, who does HR for the White House, un-zooming, virtual connections, increasing non-exempt salary thresholds, the intersection of psychological safety and white supremacy culture, and puppies!

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This year I’m keenly aware of when my birthday falls. Why you ask? Because, this year, my birthday coincides with the U.S. federal Election Day: November 3. It feels like I’m getting hourly reminders of just how few days remain between now and then. And as Election Day quickly approaches, companies who care about the health and safety of the people who work for them must spend time — especially if they’re not already — planning for November 4 and the months ahead.

We are already seeing an uptick in hate crimes across the country as Election Day approaches. By…

With my heart pounding out of my chest and feeling an urge to vomit, I raised my hand and then watched as the microphone was tossed across the cavernous room towards me. There I was, shakily holding one of those foam box microphones and standing in a room of some of the most recognized CEOs and companies in the U.S. I then opened my mouth hoping audible words would form as I nervously said that I didn’t think the Conscious Capitalism movement would be sustainable if it didn’t confront capitalism’s role in perpetuating racism and oppression.

Last October, I had…

Someone recently asked me, “When do you think we can start pushing our teams to achieve pre-pandemic performance levels again, I mean, it’s been five months?”

This past March in North America a giant remote work experiment began for many as an Adrenaline-fueled sprint. Organizations raced to get workers set up with home offices, stores sold out of computer monitors and tablets, and internet providers were inundated with rush requests to set up new or upgraded access. Coworkers helped each other learn how to use Zoom, access files on the physical server still located in their office, and move money…

As a companion piece to our “How to Transition to a Virtual Workplace Overnight,” we recorded a Work. Shouldn’t. Suck. podcast episode with people who work in, and manage, entirely virtual teams and organizations. We asked them: If you had to transition to this kind of workplace quickly, how would they approach it? [Full episode transcript is below.]

We covered a wealth of topics from VPNs to video meetings; going “virtual first” to balancing life and work when they both are happening in the same space; isolation and loneliness to how exactly *can* people work when no one is watching…

The question that I’m increasingly asked nowadays (and something the team at Fractured Atlas who helped manage our own transition have been discussing) is: now that we’re an entirely virtual organization, having evolved into it over 4–5 years, what if we had to do again, overnight?

Our planning and transition to an entirely virtual organization evolved over years. We went through multiple stages that lead us almost naturally from one iteration to the next. I’ve detailed that journey here.

However, with the global spread of COVID-19, many organizations no longer have the advantage of time on their sides. They need…

by Tim Cynova, Co-CEO & Chief Operating Officer at Fractured Atlas; Principal, Work. Shouldn’t. Suck.

A few years ago, the Fractured Atlas People team began an ambitious project lead by Jillian Wright and Pallavi Sharma, and greatly aided by our colleague Nicola Carpenter. They set out to workshop a concept for something that we hoped would help us be able to make more objective performance assessment decisions, particularly when it came to promotion decisions. …

[This piece was co-written by Russell Willis Taylor, Chair of the Fractured Atlas Board, and Tim Cynova, Chief Operating Officer at Fractured Atlas]

Challenge

How does a Board of Directors (re)craft its annual assessment of the CEO when that role is filled by a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team? This was precisely the challenge the Fractured Atlas Board faced in early 2019. Below, in detail, we describe the process we crafted to answer this question.

Quick recap

Fractured Atlas has officially been operating with a shared, non-hierarchical leadership team since January 2018. Functionally, we’ve been doing it for about a year longer than…