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 3rd 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.
