This Week in EID - Episode 42

France Jackson took over as EID site manager this week.  You can read her introduction in Thursday’s post.  I am really excited to have her join the team.  She has great energy, insight into human factors, and comes at the science from a different perspective than I do (no one has ever accused me of having even a clue about fashion) so her technical and conceptual additions to the content will be fantastic.  Plus, you can see by the seamless transition in the posts that she has the computer chops to take care of all of that. 

That said, I want to again give Keith a huge THANK YOU and wish him well going forward.  His support over the past year was invaluable and we could not have launched the EID site without him.

So, on to the recap.  On Wednesday I shared the idea of companionate love in the workplace.  This is a horrible term, but the basic idea is that performance goes up when you have some besties at work.  More than just collegiality.  But not romance.  Just real empathy, really caring about your coworkers. Their success, their health, their happiness.  The study I cited had a limited scope, but it found that the benefits are pretty widespread.  Better productivity, better worker health outcomes, more job satisfaction, and longer worker retention. But my comments focused on the challenges of doing anything to generate it.  That is the hard part.

I also shared some ideas about gamification for airlines to use, riffing on some ideas that were listed on The Cassandra Daily.  If you read my blog often, you know that I love the principles behind trendwatching – basically just keeping up with everything going on the world with the intention to predict and act on trends as the emerge rather than being late to the table.  But these ideas needed a lot of substance.  I hope I added some for you.

Monday’s post was about how children learn to read and summarized some research demonstrating the critical time period between kindergarten and 3^rd grade.  It is rewarding to know that all kids can learn to read, no matter what their starting point.  They just need some good pedagogy in school.  This is promising for disadvantaged kids.  The problem is that they don’t catch up either.  So we still need to do more for Pre-K.