Tausi Insider

Do women become less “nice” in middle age? It would appear that we think so. And that throws an additional wrench into our efforts to develop more gender-balanced leadership teams. A gender stereotype we hold of is that women are kinder and more warm-hearted, nicer and less aggressive, compared with men. But University of California business professor Jennifer Chatman decided to investigate whether that held as we age, after noticing student evaluations of her teaching became harsher when she entered her forties, even as she felt her teaching was improving. With colleagues, she conducted three different studies of various work situations and found both men and women are perceived as more capable or effective as they get older, but only women are seen as less warm as they age – causing them to be judged more harshly. This is a critical age, of course, as decisions are often being made for top leadership posts. Perhaps this helps some women – no longer blocked for being too nice – but...

Pete Ryan/Tausi Insider On a warm night this past July, Bay Street finally came back out to play. Over a glittering view of Toronto’s entertainment district from the rooftop terrace of the TIFF Bell Lightbox, 300 guests — including lawyers, students, clients, bankers and businesspeople —enjoyed mini Jamaican patties, jerk shrimp, rum punch and ginger beer, while a steel-pan band and dancers in traditional Caribbean dress entertained the crowd. Caribbean Fête, hosted annually since 2018 by the Caribbean Practice Group at WeirFoulds LLP, made its long-awaited return after a two-year COVID-19 hiatus. “We had people constantly asking us, when is this thing coming back? Are you guys ever going to do this party again?” says partner Kayla Theeuwen, who barely had a chance to enjoy the food and drink, flitting about as the consummate host and reconnecting with her network. Indeed, WeirFoulds had been trying to get this popular shindig going again since it was last held in February 2020, to m...

If your career objective is to climb the corporate ladder, then you need to get recognized as a high-potential employee, or HiPo. HiPos have been tagged as the top performers in an organization and are invited to key meetings, asked for input, offered advanced learning opportunities and given plum assignments. And even when economic circumstances lead to layoffs, they are the ones who seem to emerge unscathed. So what does it take to be recognized as a HiPo? While some of it may be who you know, or luck, there are ways to influence how you and your talents are perceived. If you are deliberate and thoughtful about showcasing your strengths and establishing your workplace value, you can, and will, position yourself as a HiPo. Read the full article for seven things you can do right now to become worthy of HiPo status. Stop trying to fix women. Start fixing your organization for gender equality Do women become less “nice” in middle age? It would appear that we think so. And that throws a...

As companies are adapting to new ways of working at varying speeds, there is a need for organizations, teams and individuals to optimize and prioritize along new dimensions: What work is best suited in-office versus remote? What is best accomplished synchronously versus asynchronously? How can we rethink and revitalize meetings so we aren’t stuck in meetings all day with no time to think or do? Many employees are overstretched and overwhelmed, finding there aren’t enough hours in the day to deliver on commitments. According to Microsoft’s September 2022 Work Trends Index , 48 per cent of employees and 53 per cent of managers say they are already burned out. In the same report, it was noted that last spring, meetings had increased by 153 per cent since the start of the pandemic, “double bookings” increased by 46 per cent in the last year and, in an average week, 42 per cent of participants multitask during meetings. This goes to show that, in many cases, there is no slack in the syste...

The chef Matty Matheson, who plays a handyman on 'The Bear,' at home in Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada, Aug. 24, 2022. Brandon Watson/The New York Times News Service If you’re not watching The Bear , you should be. The series follows a top chef who takes over at his late brother’s failing restaurant in Chicago. And one of the show’s breakout stars isn’t even a professional actor—it’s 40-year-old Canadian celebrity chef Matty Matheson, who rose to foodie fame as the executive chef at Toronto’s Parts & Labour. His empire now includes restaurants, cookbooks, a YouTube channel, cooking tools and a line of workwear. Defy expectations Matheson became a top chef because he was good at it. He became a celebrity chef because he didn’t fit the mould. He’s from New Brunswick. He’s covered in tattoos. He used to work as a death-metal roadie. And he partied hard, which, to be fair, is what most people expect from chefs—except that Matheson gave up both booze and drugs after having a heart...

Working from home may be your preferred option, but is it the right move for your career? A 30-second commute to the couch or the dining table may sound great, but the price for this privilege could be an uphill battle in your professional journey. The pandemic showed us that remote work is not only possible, but also comes with advantages. Now many organizations are offering remote work as an alternative. But if you do opt to work from home, even just some of the time, you likely have co-workers who are at the office more than you. As a result, they may have career advantages you are missing out on. Here are six drawbacks to working from home you should consider. Your network will shrink While we were all at home, new employees came on board, people changed jobs and others retired. Not just within your organization, but also in your industry and in your marketplace. You may have talked to them online, but face-to-face and in-person is how the best connections are made. The newcomers...

Office vacancy rates in downtown Toronto and Vancouver are climbing quickly, as well-known businesses such as Plenty of Fish, Air Miles and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP try to get rid of unneeded space amid the shift to remote work and economic uncertainty. Toronto’s vacancy rate reached 15 per cent at the end of September, according to new data from commercial real estate firm Altus Group. That is up from 4.2 per cent in 2019 prior to the start of the pandemic. The current level tops vacancies during the Great Recession and marks the highest since 2003 when Toronto was dealing with the aftermath of the dot-com bubble and the vacancy rate was 13.3 per cent. In Vancouver, the vacancy rate hit a two-decade high at 11.5 per cent, according to Altus. That compares to 3.5 per cent in 2019. Both cities’ downtowns hollowed out during the pandemic with office employees working from home. At the same time, a slew of new skyscrapers opened and flooded the cities with new office space. Today, bus...

According to research conducted by Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services increased nearly 19 per cent in 2022. pcess609 Cloud services were originally billed as a more cost-effective way to manage information technology (IT). As a rising number of companies flock to them it’s becoming clearer that, left unchecked, cloud costs can accumulate quickly. According to research conducted by Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services increased nearly 19 per cent in 2022, and it is projected to grow an additional 20.7 per cent in the year ahead. In another recent study from Toronto-based cloud-managed services provider Aptum, 73 per cent of IT decision makers said cloud computing has resulted in higher-than-expected costs, up from 57 per cent last year. Sixty-five per cent admit to having wasted money on cloud-related inefficiencies. “We are beginning to see the kickback, where customers are starting to say ‘wait, this isn’t working the way I thoug...

Empty chairs at an office in Toronto. Adetona omokanye/Tausi Insider Is remote work keeping inflation down? And if that’s the case, should we make sure it survives a downturn in the labour market? Those seem to be the questions posed by a U.S. study this year on working from home, and they seem particularly relevant when the Bank of Canada is talking about driving the unemployment rate up as a way to rein in price pressures. The study comes from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Trying to get an idea of the correlation between wages and remote work, the researchers asked businesses whether they were using more opportunities to work from home as a way to keep workers happy and moderate wage-growth pressures. Thirty-eight per cent of respondents said yes, they were indeed dangling work-at-home options as alternatives to offering more money. Looking for a more precise way to quantify the impact, the researchers used the data to calculate that expanding remote-work opportu...

Text-to-image generators like DALL·E 2 create pictures with as little as a few words of guidance. Artificial intelligence (AI) has long been a recurrent topic in science fiction. These days, AI isn’t just a plot point, it’s an intensely practical tool that is transforming entire industries. Among those upended is the creative sector, with tools such as Midjourney, DALL·E 2 and Movio revolutionizing the way digital content is produced. These tools rely on natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) technologies to automatically create new content based on user input. A simple prompt can produce an entire article, a new logo design or a compelling product video with minimal effort from users. AI tools stand to change how a range of industries – from advertising and media, to building and architecture design, to automotive and engineering – generate both internal and consumer-facing content. They’re most intuitively deployed for such things as brand images, b...