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We’re spending too much time searching for answers at work

Good morning! Welcome back to our weekly Workplace newsletter where we share the latest tips, tools and insights to help you stay informed about the modern workplace. Starting this week you will receive the Workplace newsletter in your inbox twice a week — on Tuesdays and Fridays. Today: the solution for workplace search, performance review technology, and how workers are communicating in the hybrid work world.
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As more people work in hybrid arrangements, the ability to turn and ask a colleague a question or inquire about the location of a document has become cumbersome. Employees dig through Google Docs, Word, Notion, Dropbox Paper, email and their Slack history before finding basic documents like the annual holiday calendar. The stakes are even higher for others who struggle to pull up important documents during a client meeting. While some see this as an access issue, others consider it to be a major productivity blocker and challenge to spreading knowledge within a company.
The amount of time we spend looking for documents and answers to historical questions within an organization has grown as more information is scattered across applications and in the cloud.
A new startup called Glean made news last week after it came out of stealth mode with $55 million in funding and a number of companies already using its workplace search assistant. The transition to a remote-first world has highlighted the need for more symbiotic tools to keep workers plugged into a company, Chris O'Neill, chief business officer of Glean, told Protocol. Also, as more companies have embraced the cloud, the number of applications a company uses has risen, making information across a company even more disparate and specific documents harder to find.
How we use technology as workers has fundamentally changed, and the adoption of more apps has made it possible for workplace search companies to help with internal discovery, said Glean CEO Arvind Jain.
Elastic has taken on solving the same challenge via its open-sourced search technology. Matt Riley, the VP of product and enterprise search at Elastic, told Protocol the company's goal is to make search a more natural part of a company's workflow and help with everything from onboarding to gathering information to create a better product. Elastic's search product is meant to be embedded across applications ranging from Slack to Salesforce so that employees can have what they need at a moment's notice. The challenge for engineers working in enterprise search is making a customized search experience for each company and making sure the results pulled are relevant to each given employee.
Here's a riddle: What's highly regarded, but despised all over? If you guessed performance reviews, you guessed right. While many employees claim they want annual reviews, the review process often leaves something to be desired. One major pain point is that performance reviews are often thought to be biased because they are performed by people. What's needed instead is a consistent set of metrics to evaluate employees equally.
A number of tech startups are stepping in to solve this problem via chat app integrations, keywords and AI, and raising a lot of money while doing so. My colleague Michelle Ma reported the latest HR technologies entering the space and what experts say they're keeping in mind as they develop the new performance review. One of the main focuses among those she spoke to is making sure the people optimize alongside the review technology. While integrations like AI are great, they're only as objective as the humans who created the tools.
Read the full story here.
Zoom is for you. From meetings, chat, phone, and webinars to conference rooms and events, Zoom powers all your communication needs. Zoom for Government, our separate, U.S.-based platform, offers the same Zoom experience but with the specialized security controls and certifications required by the U.S. government. |
Today's tip is all about productivity and the best apps for blocking that urge to scroll through your phone. We've all been there: Someone texts you a funny tweet in the middle of the workday and next thing you know you've doom scrolled away an hour of your day on Twitter. Or maybe you were sleuthing through rants from engineers on Blind. Either way, our phones can be major distractions during the day. Here are a few apps that can help with basic phone distractions. But then again, no pressure. You've made it this far.
President Biden's mandate that companies with over 100 employees require COVID-19 vaccination or weekly testing has some wondering just how this rule will be enforced. Join Protocol on September 30 for a conversation with employment and HR experts about what the vaccine mandate means for your company. Panelists will discuss best practices, how to prepare and the most effective ways to handle vaccination exemptions and testing.
Workplace communication used to stay… well, at work. But our new hybrid work world has made chatting with co-workers a bit more personal. SMS and email software company Klaviyo found in a recent study that people are using their personal cell phone to text their colleagues and bosses more than before the pandemic. Texting about work has become both a symptom of and remedy for workplace anxiety:
Zoom is for you. From meetings, chat, phone, and webinars to conference rooms and events, Zoom powers all your communication needs. Zoom for Government, our separate, U.S.-based platform, offers the same Zoom experience but with the specialized security controls and certifications required by the U.S. government.
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Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to workplace@protocol.com. Have a great weekend, see you next week.
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