What I learned about showing up for your teammates after the tragedy in Seoul.

What to say, what to ask, what to wear, and how to follow up.

Focus on the quality of your work - not the quantity of hours you put in.

It probably won''t surprise you to learn that incivility on the front lines of business is on the rise. After all, as the pandemic wore on, we saw in real time how frontline workers went from being seen as "essential" to being seen as, essentially, punching bags. What might not be obvious is that incivility doesn''t affect only workers who experience it directly - it also affects those who witness it, with consequences for .....more

Customers'' incivility toward frontline employees hurts workers emotionally, physically, and cognitively and can result in lower performance. But these effects are compounded when employees are required to keep providing "service with a smile," according to psychology professor Alicia Grandey''s research. Companies looking to support their employees in dealing with rude behavior should train them in how to mitigate the effects .....more

Most companies plan how they manage employees, but how many consider how to manage their customers? Given how important customer-employee relationships are to business, and amid rising reports of customer incivility toward the frontline workforce, organizations are taking a page from people management and learning how to better select, train, evaluate, discipline - and even sometimes fire - customers.

Social media companies couldn''t exist in their current form without content moderation. But while these jobs are essential, they''re often low-paid, emotionally taxing, and extremely stressful - they require exposure to horrific violence, disturbing sexual content, and generally the worst of what we see (or don''t see) online. Do they have to be? Sarah T. Roberts, faculty director of the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry .....more

Frontline managers who spoke to HBR about the incivility that they and their employees face in the workplace outlined three key strategies to support employees: intervening in the moment, encouraging candor, and having a process for responding to incivility. Yet frontline workers said their managers rarely implemented these strategies, which compounded the stress created by ill-behaved customers, clients, and patients. If managers would only pay attention .....more

Covid-19 put the world''s focus, briefly, on frontline workers. But they are still not being treated as essential by corporate leadership. The author suggests two changes, one symbolic and one practical, to fix this. First, companies should flip their org charts, putting frontline workers at the top. That will underscore their importance and clarify that executives exist to serve and coach their employees, not to control them. Second, CEOs .....more

This case talks about the 3P (People Planet Profit) strategies of Ant Group backed MYbank, which was established as an online bank in China, as part of Alibaba''s ecosystem, with the vision of providing inclusive finance services to SMEs and farmers in rural China. In April 2022, however, the Chinese economy was grappling with the after effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and macro-economic trends had predicted slower growth for the year. The .....more