Workplace & Teams News
Expert commentary on workplace & teams communication events and trends.
What Awards Nights Get Wrong About Communication
The DEAR 2026 Gala, hosted by a Toastmasters chapter, brought together professionals to honor standout leaders and communicators. The event recognized individuals for excellence in public speaking, mentorship, and leadership development. It was, at its core, a celebration of people who took communication seriously enough to practice it, compete in it, and teach it to others.
Manager Threatens Firing Over Unspoken Rule: Who's Wrong?
A worker showed up for his scheduled shift at the correct start time and was immediately threatened with termination by a new manager who insisted he should have arrived thirty minutes earlier. No prior conversation about this expectation had taken place. The employee followed the schedule he was given. The manager held him accountable to a rule that existed only in her head.
Gen Z Workers and Bosses: A Communication Fix
A Gen Z intern published a frustrated account describing a trap many young workers recognize: stay quiet and get labeled disengaged, speak up and get accused of arrogance. The piece captures a broader tension playing out in workplaces across Singapore and beyond, where older managers and younger employees are operating from completely different assumptions about what "good" professional behavior looks like. Neither side is talking to the other. Both sides are talking about the other.
Why Your Boss Can't Say the Real RTO Reason
A wave of recent research has found a significant gap between the stated reasons employers give for return-to-office mandates and what the evidence actually supports. Productivity, collaboration, and culture are the usual justifications. But the data does not back them up. Researchers acknowledge remote work has its limits, but the gap between what bosses say and what they can prove is wide and growing.
Why Remote Teams Stop Listening to Their Managers
Companies in 2025 are still wrestling with how to manage employees they never see in person. HR departments across industries are revisiting their playbooks, trying to figure out what actually keeps remote workers engaged, accountable, and connected. The strategies getting attention now focus less on surveillance and scheduling and more on structured communication. The gap between what managers say and what remote employees hear has never been more expensive.
Culture and Cornhole: What Tony Pierce Gets Right
Tony Pierce manages over 500 employees at Akin, a firm that requires staff to be in the office at least three days a week. Rather than defaulting to mandates and memos, Pierce is investing in something less obvious: culture. He uses a mix of in-person activities (yes, including cornhole) and AI tools to keep a large, hybrid workforce connected and engaged.
13 Public Speaking Myths That Are Hurting You
A widely circulated list recently catalogued 13 persistent myths about public speaking, aiming to correct the bad advice that gets recycled through corporate training rooms and self-help content. The piece targeted beliefs that speakers carry for years, often without questioning where those ideas came from or whether they actually hold up. Most of the myths identified are things professionals have been taught, not things they invented themselves.
How to Handle Workplace Conflict the Right Way
SHRM recently published a toolkit designed to help workers and managers handle conflict in the workplace more effectively. The resource focuses on creating healthier team dynamics by giving people structured approaches to disagreement. It signals that organizations are still struggling with something fundamental: most professionals never learned how to fight productively.
Remote Teams Need This Communication Fix First
A company with a remote-first workforce made a deliberate decision to restructure three things at once: its internal culture, how employees communicate across distance, and how staff use AI tools in daily work. Rather than treating these as separate problems, the organization tackled them as one interconnected challenge. This is notable because most companies address each piece in isolation, and most fail as a result.
Why Writing Skills Now Win Remote Jobs
Remote work has quietly reshuffled the hiring deck. Companies are now screening candidates not just on resumes and interviews, but on how well they write in real time. Slack messages, project briefs, and email threads have become the new handshake. Employers are waking up to a simple truth: if you work remotely, writing is not a soft skill. It is the skill.
Why Senior Executives Fail Interviews (It's Not Their Resume)
Senior executives with impressive track records are getting eliminated at the interview stage for top roles. These are people with the credentials, the experience, and the results. But something breaks down when they sit across from a hiring panel. The problem is not their past performance. The problem is how they talk about it.
Remote Work Conflict: What Managers Get Wrong
Remote work didn't just change where people work. It changed how workplace conflicts fester and explode. Without hallway conversations, shared lunches, or the ability to read a room, teams are discovering that disagreements which once got resolved in five minutes now calcify into full-blown standoffs. Organizations are being forced to rethink how conflict resolution actually works when everyone is on a screen.
