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Amazon CEO Mandates Employees Return to Office 5 Days a Week

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Amazon CEO Mandates Employees Return to Office 5 Days a Week

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made a case — and a mandate — for in-office work on Monday.

In a publicly available message, Jassy said that Amazon’s 1.5 million-plus employees must return to the office five days per week starting January 2. Amazon is also bringing back desk assignments to the offices that had that structure pre-pandemic.

Jassy positioned the move as a better way to work and a return to life before Covid.

“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” Jassy stated.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Jassy also said that situations that require remote work like sickness, an emergency, or being on the road are still acceptable.

However, these examples of remote work are the exception to the new rule, not the norm.

Related: Here’s How Much Money U.S. Employees Will Sacrifice to Avoid Returning to the Office, According to a New Study

Amazon employees have been back in the office at least three days per week as of February 2023. A July report from Bamboo HR showed that one in four executives secretly hoped employees would quit over stricter return-to-office policies.

“Strengthening our culture remains a top priority for the s-team [senior leadership team] and me. And, I think about it all the time,” he wrote. “We want to operate like the world’s largest startup.”

Under the new policy, working from home two days per week is no more. The office culture is returning to how it was before the pandemic, to strengthen work culture and drive better results, Jassy explained.

Related: Dell Reportedly Told Remote Employees to Come Back to the Office or Forgo the Chance to Be Promoted

Amazon joins companies like Salesforce and Walmart that have implemented stricter return-to-work policies.

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Expand Your Global Reach With Babbel, on Sale for More Than 60% Off

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Expand Your Global Reach With Babbel, on Sale for More Than 60% Off

Disclosure: Our goal is to feature products and services that we think you’ll find interesting and useful. If you purchase them, Entrepreneur may get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our commerce partners.

Want to break language barriers and expand your business network? Babbel’s lifetime subscription has you covered with access to 14 languages, perfect for anyone looking to boost their business communication.

With no recurring fees, you’ll pay $179.97 (sale ending October 20) for a resource that sticks with you for life, helping you build relationships and navigate new markets with confidence.

Babbel offers bite-size lessons that fit right into your schedule. Each session takes about 10 to 15 minutes, making it easy to squeeze in language-learning between meetings or on your commute. And with its speech-recognition technology, Babbel gives instant feedback on your pronunciation, so you’re prepared to speak like a pro when connecting with international clients.

From Spanish and French to less commonly studied languages like Turkish, Babbel’s got you covered. The short, interactive lessons focus on practical conversation, so you’re learning words and phrases that you can actually use in real business situations. Plus, Babbel’s course content is updated regularly, meaning you’ll always have access to fresh lessons and content as your skills grow.

With Babbel, you’re not just picking up phrases; you’re gaining tools to communicate effectively across cultures. Not to mention, it’s a one-time investment that pays off for years to come.

Get ready to take your business skills global with a lifetime subscription to Babbel Language Learning for $179.97 until October 20 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

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The Cities and States Where Side Hustles Could Earn the Most

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The Cities and States Where Side Hustles Could Earn the Most

More than half (54%) of Americans say they’ve started a side hustle to supplement their primary source of income in the last 12 months, according to a survey from MarketWatch Guides.

Although there’s no shortage of potential opportunities — side hustles can span teaching online to cleaning barbecues, creating digital products and so much more — one doesn’t necessarily have the same earning power as the next.

Related: 10 of the Most Profitable Side Hustles You Can Start With Little or No Money

Choosing a side hustle is one crucial piece of the puzzle — but where you decide to start it is another that might make or break your success.

So where in the U.S. do side hustlers have the greatest earning potential?

The team at SideHustles.com conducted a study to find out, analyzing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Community Survey to determine which states and cities have the highest percentage of residents earning self-employment income and their average earnings.

Households in North Dakota, New Jersey and Connecticut earn the most from self-employment income, at $60,221, $55,748 and $55,192, per the data from SideHustle.com.

Lake Charles, Louisiana, has the highest average self-employment earnings at $179,080 per household, followed by San Tan Valley, Arizona ($141,459) and Upland, California ($130,291), the analysis found.

Related: The Top 10 U.S. Cities for Starting a Side Hustle, According to Statistics

Read on to see the top five cities and states where people earn the most, on average, from self-employment income, according to the study:

Top five cities where self-employed earn the most

  1. Lake Charles, Louisiana: $179,080
  2. San Tan Valley, Arizona: $141,459
  3. Upland, California: $130,291
  4. Newton, Massachusetts: $118,527
  5. Bethesda, Maryland: $110,573

Related: This 20-Year-Old Student Started a Side Hustle With $400 — and It Earned $150,000 Over the Summer

Top five states where self-employed earn the most

  1. North Dakota: $60,221
  2. New Jersey: $55,748
  3. Connecticut: $55,192
  4. Massachusetts: $54,712
  5. California: $53,639

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I Lead a Company Built Through Decades of Acquisitions. Here’s a Key to Making Them Successful

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I Lead a Company Built Through Decades of Acquisitions. Here's a Key to Making Them Successful

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Despite the fanfare that often accompanies acquisitions, the reality is that about 80% fail to achieve their desired objectives.

After all, there’s a lot that can go wrong. Inadequate due diligence. Overvaluation. Poor integration planning and execution. A failure to retain employees from the new company.

And yet, businesses spend more than $2 trillion on acquisitions annually. Why? It’s often unrealistic for a company to build all that’s needed to reach its strategic goals fast enough to remain competitive. An acquisition, however, presents an opportunity to quickly expand a business’s ecosystem, tapping into new relationships, distribution channels, products and innovations.

I lead an entertainment technology company — composed of iconic brands like TiVo and DTS — that has grown our ecosystem through 15 acquisitions in the last decade alone. What has the experience taught me?

The success of an acquisition is about more than the nuts and bolts of the deal itself; you’re not just buying a technology, product or service to tack onto your company offerings. You’re also gaining institutional knowledge and bringing thought leaders on board who could help steer your business.

I believe one of the most critical aspects of an acquisition’s success is too often overlooked: the people. Here’s what I’ve learned about how they can be the difference-makers in the lead-up to and aftermath of a deal.

Related: 5 Reasons Small Businesses Should Consider Mergers and Acquisitions

The “why” has to include the “who”

Sure, pre-deal due diligence involves evaluating the potential profits and risks of an acquisition. But it also requires searching for leaders, along with the systems and cultures they’ve developed, that are likely to contribute to your company’s growth.

In dynamic industries like tech, companies often need to pivot to remain competitive. That means it’s essential to ask this question when evaluating incoming leaders: Whose strategic thinking, leadership skills and decision-making style do you want on your side, even if you end up shifting them to new areas in the future?

We learned the importance of this consideration from an early acquisition. The technology we’d bought eventually became outdated, but that CEO has remained an instrumental member of our leadership suite for more than a decade, and an acquired team under his leadership has transitioned to form the foundation of one the most exciting arms of our business: our connected car platform.

Once you’ve found a company with the resources and people that will likely benefit your business and conditions enable sensible valuations, developing an integration plan before the deal closes is imperative.

We accomplish this by identifying change champions — committed leaders who are strong communicators, open to feedback, adaptable, resilient and collaborative — from both companies to rally our people. Then, we create detailed checklists for the first year or more, often including thousands of line items from assigning desks to implementing training events, all to move us swiftly toward our goals of a fully integrated team and business asset.

Related: How Leaders Can Build Acquisition-Ready Companies

Use it as an opportunity to reimagine culture

Many people see an acquisition as an opportunity to innovate — adding and evolving products and developing strategies for new markets. One thing they often overlook, though, is the chance to innovate company culture. Specifically, to pick and choose the best of both of what the companies are doing to establish a new normal.

Often, the default assumption is that the acquiring company’s culture will remain dominant. But that can sometimes be a mistake.

Many times, bringing two companies together and fusing their resources and operations creates an entirely new company — one that may benefit from a cultural change.

For example, following a merger, we realized our previous corporate values no longer accurately reflected the new company. So we reset them. It wasn’t always easy: It took a long-term project involving employee input throughout. It also required objectivity at the leadership level to stay open to new ways of working and communicating. However, the initiative resulted in a set of values that more meaningfully illustrated our evolved mission and culture and set us on a path toward greater success.

Related: How to Create a High-Performance Organization Through a Successful Merger

Move as quickly and transparently as possible

A deal closing can feel like crossing the finish line for those overseeing it. But when you look over your shoulder, you see that most employees are just lining up at the start. The real marathon begins after the closing: It takes steady work to get the rest of the company across the finish line to reap the anticipated gains of the deal.

We’ve found that approaching this integration process with a focus on urgency, sensitivity and transparency is key to retaining as many employees as possible, along with the crucial institutional knowledge and skills they hold.

This means we work fast to communicate our plan openly and honestly. For instance, within 45 days of a recent acquisition, we got leaders physically in front of 80% of the team. This approach aims to mitigate uncertainty by laying out plans and providing clarity on roles and opportunities. Research shows that transparency can engender trust, so when the answer to a question is, “We don’t know yet,” leaders should prioritize being upfront about that.

We also expressed empathy. Acknowledging that it’s natural to feel anxious about uncertainty and change is important to build morale during a time of transition.

About a third of employees from an acquired company tend to leave within the first year due to uncertainty or culture clashes. But time and time again, we’ve seen that a deliberate process has helped to improve on this trend. While it’s not always possible for all employees to stay on, voluntary turnover within a year of our last two acquisitions was just 15%.

Defining success

There are many ways to define a successful acquisition: meeting financial goals, expanding relationships or staking a hold in new markets. We’ve seen this firsthand. For example, strategic acquisitions have allowed our business to significantly amplify our global footprint of streaming devices and open up new monetization opportunities.

While these elements are critically important, we view success even more broadly. It also means our team feels they’re continuously working toward a worthy goal. And viewing people as vital to the success of an acquisition has helped us to assemble a team prepared and motivated to do just that: deliver innovative, extraordinary experiences to our customers.

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