You probably don't want to work for Amazon Amazon is known for its cutthroat efficiency and harsh tactics; it's what makes it possible to get a pack of toilet paper delivered to your door in less than 24 hours. But CEO Jeff Bezos' love of precision and data goes far beyond fulfilling orders and undercutting competitors' prices. It permeates every aspect of the workplace. And ruthless optimization, unsurprisingly, doesn't make for a very supportive workplace environment. "Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk." Employees describe a system that quantifies and analyzes every aspect of their work. It isn't hard to argue that it's a good idea for a company to know what its employees are actually accomplishing. To fulfill quotas, managers rank every employee and fire the lowest-scoring individuals Perhaps worst of all is Amazon's apparent approach when its employees need help. All of that said, Amazon is clearly a massively successful company. Let's just hope that this isn't how all companies are run in the future.
Global seed vault dispatches first ever grain shipment It was meant to be the ultimate insurance policy against a catastrophe that could wipe out the world’s food supply. Now the global seed vault – a repository burrowed deep into the frozen hillside of the closest town to the north pole – has issued its first down-payment on that legacy. The caretakers of the vault, situated on the Svalbard archipelago in the high Arctic, said yesterday that they had dispatched the first shipment of seeds to try to regenerate ancient food crops lost during Syria’s civil war. The seeds – including varieties of wheat, barley, lentils, chickpeas and the wild versions of pulses and cereals – were copies of those originally held at an international research facility in Aleppo, Syria, that had been deposited in the vault for safekeeping. The seeds were withdrawn from the Svalbard vault and shipped to Lebanon and Morocco, the trust which manages the facility said on Monday.
Travelling to work 'is work', European court rules - BBC News Time spent travelling to and from first and last appointments by workers without a fixed office should be regarded as working time, the European Court of Justice has ruled. This time has not previously been considered work by many employers. It means firms including those employing care workers, gas fitters and sales reps may be in breach of EU working time regulations. BBC legal correspondent Clive Coleman said it could have a "huge effect". "Thousands of employers could now find themselves in breach of working time regulations," he added. 'Falling below minimum wage' Chris Tutton, from the solicitors Irwin Mitchell, agreed the ruling would be "very significant" and could have an impact on pay. "People may now be working an additional 10 hours a week once you take into account their travel time, and that may mean employers are falling below the national minimum wage level when you look at the hourly rate that staff are paid," he said. 'Bear the burden'
François Dupuy : «Moins le sommet a d’informations, plus il lance d’initiatives en tous sens !», Organigramme Accueil Le sociologue des organisations pointe, dans son dernier opus _« La faillite de la pensée managériale » publié aux éditions du Seuil_, l’inculture générale et la paresse managériale du monde de l’entreprise. Structure n’étant pas organisation, il estime aussi que les organigrammes ne reflètent en rien ce que font réellement les gens. Pour correctement appréhender le fonctionnement d’une entreprise, il recommande plutôt de s’interroger sur qui détient effectivement le pouvoir plutôt que sur qui est le chef. Après « Lost in management » en 2011, François Dupuy tire, dans cette interview exclusive, un portrait sans concession d’un monde qu’il côtoie de près. Avec l’espoir de susciter chez les dirigeants une vive et rapide prise de conscience.(...) Cet article est réservé aux abonnés, pour en profiter abonnez-vous. Et aussi sur les Echos Les articles à la une High tech Qui est le nouvel homme fort de Google ? + VIDEOS - Sundar Pichai est le nouvel homme fort de Google. Recommandé par
India's digitisation spells the end for 200,000 document writers | Swati Sanyal Tarafdar | Global development Varudu Nagaraju pores over a bunch of stapled, stamped papers belonging to the men sitting on the other side of the table in his two-roomed office. They want to buy property and need Nagaraju’s help with the registration process. Nagaraju’s office is in Vijayawada, in Andhra Pradesh. There are an estimated 150,000-200,000 self-proclaimed document writers in the south-eastern state. “After getting the documents ready for the application for registration, I will send those over to the SRO upstairs, to the desk of a certain officer, who will verify and sign them, asserting that the new property, with the enclosed specifications, is now rightfully owned by my clients,” Nagaraju says. He reluctantly admits that he usually feeds in small amounts of money to the right people along the way. Bribes are a common currency in registration offices. These practices cost the state in lost revenues, and the government of Andhra Pradesh is accelerating its efforts to digitise operations.
Efficiency up, turnover down: Sweden experiments with six-hour working day A Swedish retirement home may seem an unlikely setting for an experiment about the future of work, but a small group of elderly-care nurses in Sweden have made radical changes to their daily lives in an effort to improve quality and efficiency. In February the nurses switched from an eight-hour to a six-hour working day for the same wage – the first controlled trial of shorter hours since a rightward political shift in Sweden a decade ago snuffed out earlier efforts to explore alternatives to the traditional working week. “I used to be exhausted all the time, I would come home from work and pass out on the sofa,” says Lise-Lotte Pettersson, 41, an assistant nurse at Svartedalens care home in Gothenburg. “But not now. The Svartedalens experiment is inspiring others around Sweden: at Gothenburg’s Sahlgrenska University hospital, orthopaedic surgery has moved to a six-hour day, as have doctors and nurses in two hospital departments in Umeå to the north.
7 'digital nomads' explain how they live, work and travel Feel miserable working in a cubicle or living in a boring town? The Internet has revolutionized the term ‘work’ today, bringing new opportunities and employment that didn’t exist until recently. For many, the Internet is an opportunity to combine work and traveling the world. To cut through the garbage, we caught up with seven bona fide location independent workers and business owners about what they do, how they do it, and what steps others aspiring to follow them can take. Read on for more. (Click here to read this article on a single page) Image via wavebreakmedia / Shutterstock
Dubai wants to be 'world's happiest city'. Report says it has a long way to go | Cities Dubai’s ambition to become the “world’s happiest city” by the end of the decade has suffered a blow with the publication of the latest annual World Happiness Report, which sees the United Arab Emirates slip down the rankings from 20th to 28th place. The new report, which ranks 156 countries by their happiness levels, also states that “happiness inequality” has increased significantly “in most countries, in almost all global regions, and for the population of the world as a whole.” In an effort to counter this trend, in 2014 Dubai – one of seven emirates that make up the UAE – launched its own “happiness index”, aimed at collecting data on how government services impacted happiness. “Creating happiness is the final result of the smart city agenda,” Ahmed Bin Byat, CEO of the investment group Dubai Holding, told a government summit last year. Some observers have raised eyebrows at the UAE’s “happiness project”, coming as it does amid ongoing human rights concerns.
How Coca-Cola and Pepsi achieved global domination For years, we've known that soda is a major contributor to the obesity epidemic. But lately, major soda companies have gotten a lot of really bad press for trying to obscure that fact. There was last month's New York Times revelation that Coca-Cola had been quietly funding researchers and organizations that diverted the conversation about obesity away from too many calories and toward the notion that people simply aren't exercising enough. This week, the company published on its website a list of all the external organizations it has funded over the past five years, to the tune of nearly $120 million. (We searched and sorted the data here. This didn't come as a surprise to Marion Nestle, a New York University professor who wrote the seminal tome on the politics of food (appropriately named Food Politics). But the tale isn't a sad one. Julia Belluz: How exactly did soda companies become some of the most powerful corporations in the world? There was also a big push during World War II.
Parlons d'agilité et faisons de la bureaucratie | Yves Cavarec