The Links of the Week rounds up the top articles on my Twitter feed. This week we have one on Amazon’s new employee engagement system, Millennials and their love of transit, and the importance of “feedback loops” for rapid personal and professional growth. Enjoy!

 

#1

What Amazon’s Employee Feedback System Can Teach Us About Employee Engagement (Tech.Co)

Overall, Amazon historically struggled to treat employees respectfully and properly engage them. However, through their new anonymous feedback system, they are improving work conditions for their employees.

To be honest, there’s not a lot of “meat” in this article. The article highlights the recent New York Times’ scathing report about the working conditions for white-collar workers at Amazon and how they’re trying to turn things around with a new program called “Amazon Connections”. The new program doesn’t sound very innovative which is a system that collects anonymous information and feedback from employees.

While it’s not groundbreaking, it’s a good lesson in that even multi-billion dollar companies still need to start “from the bottom” to get honest, unbiased feedback from employees to move employee engagement in the right direction.

 

#2

Millennials love public transit, survey says (Boston Globe)

According to the survey, 78 percent of respondents thought it was “very important” for their workplace to be near public transit (About 32 percent said they believed it was important to be near restaurants or bars, and 32 percent also said they cared about workplace amenities).

I’m firmly in the “transit fan” camp. Transit is a huge part of my life and having access to it near my house (and work – if I didn’t work from home) is critical. This is a massive shift that I’m hoping city planners are noticing.

 

#3

Feedback Loops: How to Master the Invisible Hand That Shapes Our Lives (James Clear)

My argument is that we should spend less time letting feedback loops shape our lives in invisible ways and more time designing the feedback loops we want and need.

I love this article and pretty much all of James Clear’s stuff. If you haven’t subscribed to his blog, I would highly recommend it. In this article, he breaks down feedback loops and how you can hack them to your advantage. All feedback loops start with being able to measure your starting point and I know that’s something I can incorporate more in my life – e.g. counting how many words I’ve written for my blog or journaling about how I felt after eating a certain type of food.

 

Some great articles this week. Thank you to those that liked, re-tweeted, or commented on the posts. Looking forward to next week’s roundup!