Karen Ladany

THIS WEEK'S READ TikTok will require most US employees in the office five days a week starting in September. They fall in line with Amazon, Instagram, JPMorgan, and 3M. A year ago, only 11% of Fortune 100 companies required five days in office. Now it's over 54% and growing. One number for context: The average person stays at a company about 3.9 years. We sent people home more than six years ago. A lot of these employees were hired as remote employees. Researchers at the University of...

THIS WEEK'S READ 70% of employees are avoiding a difficult conversation with their boss, colleagues, or direct reports right now, according to Bravely's Conversation Gap report. And 1 in 4 have postponed a hard conversation for over a year (VitalSmarts, via Atana). The cost: A VitalSmarts survey found every single conversation failure costs an organization $7,500 and more than seven workdays. And employees spend 2.8 hours a week dealing with conflict, about 4 weeks a year: A full month of...

THIS WEEK'S READ 82% of managers have had zero formal leadership training. The Chartered Management Institute calls them accidental managers: promoted because they were great at their job, then handed a team. The managers know it. Only 48% strongly agree they have the skills to excel at their job, per Gallup. And only 22% of managers are engaged at work, down 9 points since 2022 (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace). The cost rolls downhill. 84% of workers say untrained managers create...