There was a time when the internet was seen as a source of good. It propelled progressive social movements and set information free. But today, the internet plays a vital role in steering mindsets and retreating democracy - from fake news bots to misinformation to conspiracy theories. The paradox - that the internet is both saviour and executioner of democracy - can be understood through the lenses of classical economics and cognitive science.

The shift of the internet

In traditional markets, firms make goods to satisfy the preferences of consumers. But the market on social media and the internet exists to serve the needs of the advertisers, not the consumers. These markets sell information about their users to advertisers. On social media, users"pay" for free services by giving up their data to unspecified third parties who use it to expose them to tailored ads. This economic model is driving online platforms to exploit their users' cognitive limitations and vulnerabilities.

The internet as saviour and executioner of democracy

A strategy to maximize advertising revenue when the interests of the online platform do not align with the user's interests is to present users with surprising or sensational content to keep them engaged. A study by Mozilla researchers found that YouTube actively recommends sensational content to keep users engaged. Our attention is negatively captured by either negative or awe-inspiring news. To grab our attention, digital platforms offer misinformation that feeds outrage and anger. For example, Facebook's newsfeed curation algorithm favours content eliciting anger and negative ads.

In pursuit of our attention

When people use social media, they are not always aware that they are the passive subjects of commercial transactions between the platform and advertisers involving their own personal data. Users are also often unaware of how their news feed on social media is curated. Even people who are aware of algorithmic curation tend not to fully understand what that involves. However, people often object to collecting sensitive information and data for personalization.

Users are often unaware

Protecting citizens from manipulation and misinformation and protecting democracy itself requires redesigning the current online “attention economy”. The redesign must restore the signals that are available to consumers and the public in conventional markets: users need to know what platforms do and what they know, and society must have the tools to judge whether platforms act fairly and in the public interest.

Shifting the balance of power 

<ol><li>There must be greater transparency and more individual control of personal data. </li><li>Platforms must signal the quality of the information in a newsfeed so users can assess the risk of accessing it. “Endogenous” cues could alert us to emotionally charged words designed to provoke outrage.</li><li>The public should be alerted when political speech circulating on social media is part of an ad campaign. Paid ads masquerading as independent opinions distort that marketplace.</li><li>The public must know exactly how algorithms curate and rank information. The public should be able to shape their own online environment.</li></ol>

Online regulation 

There is considerable public and political scepticism about regulations. Governments that step in to regulate social media content, if done improperly, could result in censorship. In liberal democracies, regulations must not only be proportionate to the threat of harmful misinformation but also respectful of fundamental human rights. The best solution lies in shifting control of social media from unaccountable corporations to democratic agencies that operate openly, under public oversight.

Concerns with online regulation

Attaining a more transparent and less manipulative online media.

Achieving a more transparent and less manipulative online media may well be the defining political battle of the 21st century.

Stashed ideas

Algorithms, lies, and social media

People are already feeling more isolated due to the current circumstances. The digital world can actually help you amplify your gratitude. <ul><li>One easy activity starts with posing this question to your immediate leadership team: “Think of how fortunate we are to be in this meeting making decisions that impact others. Reflect over the last few days. Is there someone who had a positive impact on you?”</li><li>Proceed by asking for two to three people to say the person’s name and what they did. Finally, ask everyone to open their emails and send a quick appreciation email to those individuals. </li></ul>

Amplify appreciation with digital heart-to-hearts

To facilitate broader participation, pass the mic. Designate a new MC for each team meeting, ideally more junior talent, to manage the agenda, goals, and rhythm. A side benefit is that your younger team members can gain confidence speaking in front of their colleagues. Switching from running the meeting to being the coach will immediately impact engagement.

Pass the torch and watch others shine

A favorite and fun exercise to jumpstart a newbie on your team is to ask them to give a personal pechakucha (Japanese for “chitchat”). This is a storytelling format that inspires people to talk less and show more. The rules for a pechakucha presentation are simple: The presentation must contain exactly 20 slides that are displayed for 20 seconds each, making the total presentation time 6 minutes and 40 seconds. This method is highly effective when done virtually as it allows entire teams to quickly learn about their new teammates and what makes them tick.

Start with a personal "pechakucha" 

UnitedLex’s chief commercial officer says his approach to cultivating culture has helped him set up a better 2022. Here are three more ideas to help you develop authentic relationships among employees in the virtual world.


How to get to know people on remote work

Basically, this means that the more programming languages and technologies you have mastered, the more projects you can work on.Learning as many programming technologies and languages should be the first and most important step in your journey to becoming a freelance web developer.You can’t learn everything at once but it will help to prioritize languages such as Python, which is not only versatile in application but in great demand as well.You can then continue building your skill-set and technologies with more languages in the course of time.

Learn the Trade and Languages

As a freelance web developer, your skills and portfolio mean more than a fancy university degree.While certifications are great to have, most clients only care about your ability to deliver high-quality work more than the time that you spent at MIT.The web design industry is ever-changing so the courses you learned at college may be outdated by the time you hit the market. That’s why you need to develop your skills on the latest trends in the industry in order to become a successful freelance web developer.

Build Your Skill-set in Diverse But Relevant Fields

Freelancing gives you the advantage of creating your own personal work environment depending on your business needs.<ul><li>If you work from home as most freelance web developers do set up a workstation or office in a distraction-free area. This can be a room where you are not likely to be disturbed while working.</li><li>You’ll also need to invest in the best tools of the trade such as a reliably powerful computer, a comfortable chair, and a desk as you may be working long hours sometimes, the best software for your business, a telephone, and business cards among other things.</li></ul>

Invest in The Best Tools and Equipment

The best way to launch your freelance web developer career is by choosing and specializing in a single niche while starting out. In this way, you’ll know what to learn and the relevant skill-set that you need to have.However, do not narrow down your focus too much. You could focus on WordPress, building e-commerce sites, financial or legal sites, or blogs for bands, weddings, and marketers.

Specialize in One Niche at The Beginning

Your portfolio provides an effective means of showing your skills and expertise to potential clients.The best place to start when building your portfolio is your business website. As a freelance web developer, you’ll need a website showcasing your work, contacts, and any other pertinent information.Your goal is to create a reference point where clients can find you and place orders.

Build a Strong Portfolio

As a freelance web developer with the success of your business in mind, you should focus on building your brand in the industry.As a brand, you’ll not only gain credibility but achieve client loyalty as well.Give your business a good and relevant name that clients can remember and focus all your marketing messages on this name. Sell your business as a trusted name rather than as a web developer working from the bedroom.

Market Yourself as A Brand

There are many reasons why a lot of people dream to become a freelance web developer ⚡ In this article we will tell you how to became successful freelance web developer.

How to Become a Successful Freelance Web Developer?

The pandemic has forced us to take a hard look at the modern workplace. Options such as all-remote or hybrid are becoming part of work mainstream. Another idea is shrinking the workweek. Proponents argue that the reduced hours working model can address current work negatives and make employees more productive, happier and healthier.

Reevaluating the modern workplace

The standard workweek of 40 hours is not set up for efficiency. Energy cannot be sustained for a solid eight hours per day. <ul><li>A 2014 study suggested productivity drops after working 50 hours a week.</li><li>Other experts suggest that 35 hours is the optimal work time before productivity starts to decline.</li></ul> Research shows people get more done when they work fewer hours. One high-profile study in Iceland found that productivity remained the same or improved when working either 35 or 36 hour weeks.

An argument for a shorter workweek

Working fewer hours leads to happier, healthier, and more engaged workforces. <ul><li>Shorter hours allow people to feel more rested and better able to juggle caring needs.</li><li>A 2021 study found that reduced working hours kept burnout, boreout and depression at bay.</li><li>A 2017 study showed reducing working hours by 25% improved sleep and lowered stress.</li><li>A 1990 study showed working only six hours a day improved workers' family lives.</li><li>A 2019 study found happy workers are 13% more productive.</li></ul>

Benefits of a shorter workweek

There are different models for a shorter workweek. The four-day week reduce working hours by 20%. Everyone at a company might take the same day off, or people can take two afternoons off. Or, the workweek can be reduced from 40 to 36 hours. Importantly is that salaries remain the same. Shorter working hours won't work for every role in every industry. While experts urge to exercise caution when implementing these models, they also think now could be the best time to try.

The future of shorter working hours

More than ever, workers want to work fewer hours, saying they can be just as effective in less time – and happier, too. They may be on to something.

The case for a shorter workweek

The standard of performance is a leadership philosophy where the focus is on disciplined improvement as well as core values, principles and ideals.
This approach is not about control - it is about instilling excellence.

"The Standard of Performance" is a way of doing things

The highest contribution to our goals comes from applying the little things consistently.
In isolation, these trivial things are seen as insignificant and we quickly brush them aside. But when combined, they make a big difference in the things we achieve.

Success is in the little things

We all start on goals with good intentions. But a common mistake is failing to identify the tangible actions needed to make meaningful progress toward that goal.
We do this for three reasons:
<ol>
<li>We don't really know why we want to reach this goal.</li>
<li>The goal is framed as "could" or "should". ("I could go on a diet") instead of "must" ("I must study").</li>
<li>We don't have specific, step-by-step instructions to follow (what, when, and how).</li>
</ol>

The standard of performance in practice

<ol>
<li>Choose an action and an attitude that will make the highest contribution toward your goal. The actions are the daily habits that make everything else easier. The attitude is believing that it will work.</li>
<li>Give yourself instructions to follow. Write down what, when and how you'll do it.</li>
<li>Commit your action and attitude to at least 66 days. Studies show it takes about two months to make an action become the new normal.</li>
</ol>
If you focus on your habits, your goals will take care of themselves.

How to take action with your goals

Want is Bill Walsh's Standard of Performance? Read this article to learn about Walsh’s unique and valuable advice on how to achieve success.

Career

The Standard of Performance: Why the ‘Trivial Details’ Matter

In the last 10 years, authenticity has been a huge buzzword in the business press. Professionals who are good at their core job, are more often than not struggling in roles they get after they are promoted, as the same skills that made them successful are not enough.
These transition positions require us to leave our established identity and move towards new skills, often at the cost of a complete personality overhaul. This identity crisis while shifting towards a new role feels inauthentic.

Authentic Leadership: Growing Pains

<ul>
<li>The word ‘sincere’ comes from ancient Rome where merchants selling statues would often hide the cracks and flaws with wax. The ones who weren’t dishonest used to hang a sign outside their shop saying “Sine Cera”, meaning without wax.</li>
<li>The world ‘authenticity’ comes from the Greek word ‘authenteos’ which means: What is done by one’s own hands.**</li>
</ul>

"Sincere" And "Authenticity": A Brief History Lesson

<ol>
<li>Authenticity is being true to yourself: But if the ‘self’ is changing, how is one authentic to the past, present or future self at the same time?</li>
<li>Authenticity is being sincere: It is about saying what we mean, and meaning what we say.</li>
<li>Authenticity is being true to your values: If one has an ingrained value, one cannot sabotage it.</li>
</ol>

Defining Authenticity

A professional moving up the ladder wants to be successful and have the desired impact, but if in doing so has to sacrifice the ingrained values and integrity, one would end up being less sincere and more ‘political’.
The answer to this paradox may be on how we see our job. If we are only focused on content delivery, knowledge, ideas and research, we would not be able to do anything with ourselves. We have to focus on owning the space where we work with our presence, creating engagement and increasing learning.

The Authenticity Paradox

Being authentic and sincere is only possible if we grow ourselves through learning, which happens when we do things we aren’t very comfortable with.
We have to move out of the comfort zone we have created in our existing job roles and take the approach of self-authoring, by experimenting and learning things we haven’t done before.

The Great Learning Experiment

Real authenticity is playful, not rigid, and it's part of the lifelong process of learning about yourself, says leadership researcher Herminia Ibarra PhD.

Yes, good leaders are authentic leaders — but here’s what that actually means

<ul>
<li>Micromanagement has a bad reputation, and team members want to work autonomously, not being watched all the time and told what to do.</li>
<li>Managers, however, cannot be held guilty in most cases, as team members doing complex work often need extensive help, and are now farther away in their homes, making it even more difficult to oversee.</li>
<li>Extensive research has shown that ‘pervasive helping’ leads to better performance, as compared to leaving the employee alone.</li>
</ul>

Managing Without Micromanaging

"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."

Successful managers don’t preempt every obstacle a team member encounters but watch and listen, looking for the right time to pitch in. If someone is already stuck in the challenge, first-hand, they are engaged enough to take the advice in a positive manner.
Lending the hand at the right time makes the employee use the instructions in a better way, as if the same thing was said in the beginning, it would not have registered with them at all.

The Timing Of A Help Offer

<ul>
<li>The power dynamics of being a manager and the multiple personalities that make up a boss can make the subordinates doubt the fact that they can get any effective help. </li>
<li>A boss stepping in is perceived as a sign of failure.</li>
<li>Employees can become defensive, unreceptive or the provided assistance and demoralized with the involvement of a boss.</li>
<li>The Manager needs to clarify their intentions and voice out the fact that they are there as an advisor and not an evaluator.</li>
</ul>

Offering Help: Clarify Your Intentions

<ul>
<li>If the project is complex, cognitively demanding and highly creative, one has to engage in a deep manner in the short term, but non-engagement(path clearing) in the long term.</li>
<li>The manager has to step in when an employee has come upon an obstacle which cannot be taken care of by some feedback or light input and may need to closely align with the team for days. </li>
<li>If the other two key strategies are followed by managers, they won’t have a problem doing a timely and intensive intervention when the need is there.</li>
</ul>

Alignment Of Involvement To Need

How to Help (Without Micromanaging)

Strategic developmental feedback requires careful thought and insightful construction, in order to help someone learn and improve. It should be:
<ul>
<li>Big-picture focused</li>
<li>Organizationally aligned: it should take into consideration the values of your organization</li>
<li>Behavioral and specific (should be clear and based on real accomplishments)</li>
<li>Factual, not interpretive</li>
<li>Both positive and negative (both positive and negative feedback work and fuel for real change)</li>
<li>Focused on patterns, not on specific events</li>
<li>Linked to impact.</li>
</ul>

Strategic developmental feedback

Executive Summary Most of the feedback we receive isn't actually very useful. It's often filled with platitudes and vague labels like "inspiring," "great," or "lacking executive presence." To help someone grow, try strategic developmental feedback instead. This kind of feedback includes eight components.

How to Give Feedback People Can Actually Use

“Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential; it will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders.”

As companies strive to become more meaningful, purpose-led, sustainable and connected to human well-being, they are seeing increasing value among stakeholders and customers.

Human Well-being 

To make real progress, governments, civil society, companies, and charities must come together and form an alliance.

A crucial Alliance

As companies work towards their purpose, these are new skills they need to learn:<ul><li>Empathy</li><li>Global movement</li><li>Employee orientation towards meaningful work.</li></ul>

The new skills required

Companies usually look at what customers want or need.They need to understand the feelings of the customers, their motivations and empathize with customers beyond the product, at a grassroots level.

Empathy

Normally, companies are spending top dollar in marketing and lobbying around economic agendas, to increase their profit share in the market.They need to have a similar global movement towards social causes, using the resources they have, to have a real impact.

Global Movement

Good, purpose-led values that drive work in the charity sector needs to be cultivated at the workplace.Corporates should unlock the purpose and motivation that a charity has, by making their employees find meaning in their work, and helping society, starting from their workforce.

Helping Employees find meaning

Sustainable, meaningful, purpose-led. However framed, when applied to organizations, these terms indicate to wider society that a company is committed to making a difference. Evidence proves that purpose-led organizations are no longer a buzzword; they are fast becoming the norm because they can prove that they add real value to employees, shareholders, and customers.

As companies become purpose-led, where does that leave charities?

Most companies hire the smartest people they can find, as they look for candidates who can provide innovative ideas, do the best kind of ‘coding’ or make a great presentation/report.
What hiring managers overlook and often ignore are the predominantly social people who ‘talk’ a lot, and are always on social media, assuming them to be a useless, unproductive lot.

Being Smart Is Not Enough

Geniuses: An organization filled with genius-level workforce won’t have people learning from each other, turning into an anti-social organization full of isolated, lonely performers.
Butterflies: Socially adept workers pollinate good ideas and spread innovation around, even ideas that may not be concrete, brilliant or easily visible. This makes the butterflies an essential part of the pollination of information in the organization, creating a healthier, more productive environment.

Algorithms, lies, and social media

How to get to know people on remote work

How to Become a Successful Freelance Web Developer?

The case for a shorter workweek

The Standard of Performance: Why the ‘Trivial Details’ Matter

Makayla O.