The disconnect of remote workers

US employee engagement presents a mixed picture in the emerging hybrid and remote workplace.

Gallup’s latest insights show that engagement overall is ticking back up, but with a red flag: remote workers’ connection to the mission and purpose of their organisations has deteriorated to a record low.

The most worrying finding in our latest research – especially in an increasingly hybrid and remote workplace – is that employees who can do their work remotely have an eroding connection to the mission or purpose of the organisation.

The drop is even more pronounced recently for exclusively remote employees — only 28pc strongly agree they feel connected to their organisation’s mission and purpose.

This doesn’t mean that remote work cannot work — but it requires exceptional managers who prioritise meaningful conversations.

This single habit of holding at least one 15 to 30-minute meaningful conversation per week with each employee develops high-performance relationships more than any other single leadership activity.

(Adapted from “Are Remote Workers and Their Organisations Drifting Apart?” by Jim Harter, published on August 24, 2023, by Gallup)

Financial maturity with age

At around the ages of 53 and 54, people have accumulated knowledge and experience about money, spending and saving but haven’t begun losing key analytic cognitive skills. It’s also roughly the age when adults make the fewest financial mistakes related to things like credit-card use, interest rates and fees.

A 2022 study that looked at financial literacy, which is the ability to understand financial information and apply it to managing personal finances. Financial literacy typically peaks at age 54 and then declines, according to the study. Financial decision-making requires a combination of reasoning skills that differ by age.

Those in their 20s are better at absorbing and processing new information and computing numbers — so-called fluid intelligence — but don’t have as much life experience or crystallised intelligence —the accumulation of facts and knowledge. Crystallised intelligence tends to improve with age.

(Adapted from “The Exact Age When You Make Your Best Financial Decisions,” Clare Ansberry, published on August 26, 2023, by The Wall Street Journal)

A multipolar financial system

The bank set up by BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — plans to begin lending in the South African and Brazilian currencies to reduce reliance on the dollar and promote a more multipolar international financial system, according to its president. Dilma Rousseff, the former Brazilian leader who heads the New Development Bank (NDB), also said the Shanghai-based lender was considering applications for membership from about 15 countries and was likely to approve the admission of four or five.

She declined to name the countries but said it was a priority for the NDB to diversify its geographic representation. But despite its intention to offer an alternative to the US-based financial order, the NDB has been forced to suspend all operations in member country Russia to avoid being sanctioned and cut off from the international financial system.

(Adapted from “Brics Bank Strives To Reduce Reliance On The Dollar,” by Michael Stott, published on August 22, 2023, by the Financial Times)

Deep fake scams

Cybercriminals are constantly searching for new ways to trick people. One of the more recent additions to their arsenal was voice simulation software. In 2019, the CEO of a British energy provider transferred €220,000 ($249,000) to a scammer after he received a call from what sounded like the head of the unit’s German parent company asking him to wire money to a Hungarian supplier.

The voice was generated using artificial intelligence, says Rüdiger Kirsch, a fraud expert at Euler Hermes, the energy company’s insurer. Some cybersecurity experts have long feared what a hacker might be able to do with AI in video — create a convincing version of, say, a corporate executive who really wants to know your password. AI software is now capable of doing this practically in real time, meaning a hacker could pretend to be your boss on a Zoom call.

(Adapted from “The Next Wave Of Scams Will Be Deepfake Video Calls From Your Boss,” by Margi Murphy, published on August 25, 2023, by Bloomberg)

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, September 4th, 2023