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A reader recently sent me a viral video. It features a heavily muscled and perpetually shirtless fitness influencer named Ashton Hall demonstrating what he calls “the morning routine that changed my life.” It starts at 3:52 a.m. with Hall flexing in the mirror as he pulls off a piece of tape covering his mouth (presumably placed the night before to promote nose breathing during sleep). At 3:54 a.m., he brushes his teeth and gargles water from a fancy bottle. At 4:00 a.m., he walks onto his balcony to do push-ups. Then he performs some standing meditation. At 4:40 a.m., Hall journals. At 4:55, he listens to sermons on his phone while continuing to drink from the same water bottle, and at 5:46, he pours the remaining water into a bowl of ice and plunges his face into it. And so on… The video continues until 9:26 a.m., when Hall finally eats breakfast. It’s been five and a half hours since he woke up, and now he’s finally ready to start his day. This Ashton Hall video is obviously extreme. But it’s a good example of a popular type of online content that presents overly-complex routines that promise to deliver you a desirable reward, be it a superhero’s body or a supervillain’s bank account. Many commentators like to make fun of these influencers, and I get it, as these earnest efforts are out of step with an online culture that tends toward sardonic detachment. (One of the top comments on the Hall video dryly quips: “The last time I stepped on the balcony to do my morning pushups, I noticed I don’t have a balcony. Broke three ribs.”) But I’ve become worried that a deeper issue lurks. I’m less concerned about what makes these influencers cringe than I am about what makes them popular. This genre seems to work, in part, because the instructions it provides are hard enough that you can believe them capable of delivering real rewards, and yet are also sufficiently tractable that you can imagine yourself following them – a sweet spot that’s compulsively consumable. This formula essentially hijacks our natural ambition, shifting our attention from the hard, ambiguous, but ultimately satisfying efforts required for true accomplishment toward overwrought prescriptions that waste our time. I’m particularly worried about young people (a popular audience of this content) who might be diverted into these clickbait rabbit holes at a time when they should be seeking genuine mentorship instead. To help make sense of these issues, I recently sat down to talk with bestselling writer Brad Stulberg, whose fantastic new book, The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World, comes out tomorrow. Stulberg is an expert in the field of (actual, measurable) performance. His new book (which 9-time NBA Champion Steve Kerr described as capturing “a lot of what I believe as a coach”) makes the case that embracing a commitment to “genuine excellence” can deliver more meaning than the types of performative efforts popular online. Here are three useful things I learned from Stulberg, each set up by a quote from his book: → “There is no greater illusion than thinking the accomplishment of some goal will change your life.” Genuine excellence is more about craft than rewards. You need to find meaning in the act of trying to improve at something. This satisfaction is more lasting than any isolated achievement. → “Caring is cool.” You have to care deeply about what you’re pursuing, meaning it should align with your values and help make you a better person. This is quite different from, say, trying to develop biceps purely to impress girls or buying a fancy car to make your friends jealous. → “True discipline is not a chest-thumping, hype-speech giving, performative act of toughness.” Excellence works better when you disconnect. Don’t brag about your accomplishments online. Don’t look for brief hits of hype from emotionally manipulative videos. Instead, take care of your business with a quiet, inward satisfaction. If you’re worried about the internet hijacking your ambition (or the ambition of someone you care about), then keep these ideas in mind. It’s not enough to dismiss influencers like Ashton Hall; you need to replace what they’re offering with a more compelling alternative. Stulberg’s writing, in my opinion, points the way to one such alternative. “The real reward is that you become a better version of yourself,” he summarizes toward the end of his book. This might not be as exciting as sticking your face in ice water before sunrise. But it sounds about right to me. — It may go without saying that I highly recommend The Way of Excellence. It’s a must-read book that offers a path toward the discipline of mastery, competence, and mattering. Consider buying a copy today. And if you do, fill out this form to obtain some bonus material from Stulberg, including a video master class on the topic and a list of related reading. The post Is the Internet Hijacking Our Ambition? appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

A reader recently sent me a viral video. It features a heavily muscled and perpetually shirtless fitness influencer named Ashton Hall demonstrating what he calls “the morning routine that changed my life.” It starts at 3:52 a.m. with Hall flexing in the mirror as he pulls off a piece of tape covering his mouth (presumably placed the night before to promote nose breathing during sleep). At 3:54 a.m., he brushes his teeth and gargles water from a fancy bottle. At 4:00 a.m., he walks onto his balcony to do push-ups. Then he performs some standing meditation. At 4:40 a.m., Hall journals. At 4:55, he listens to sermons on his phone while continuing to drink from the same water bottle, and at 5:46, he pours the remaining water into a bowl of ice and plunges his face into it. And so on… The video continues until 9:26 a.m., when Hall finally eats breakfast. It’s been five and a half hours since he woke up, and now he’s finally ready to start his day. This Ashton Hall video is obviously extreme. But it’s a good example of a popular type of online content that presents overly-complex routines that promise to deliver you a desirable reward, be it a superhero’s body or a supervillain’s bank account. Many commentators like to make fun of these influencers, and I get it, as these earnest efforts are out of step with an online culture that tends toward sardonic detachment. (One of the top comments on the Hall video dryly quips: “The last time I stepped on the balcony to do my morning pushups, I noticed I don’t have a balcony. Broke three ribs.”) But I’ve become worried that a deeper issue lurks. I’m less concerned about what makes these influencers cringe than I am about what makes them popular. This genre seems to work, in part, because the instructions it provides are hard enough that you can believe them capable of delivering real rewards, and yet are also sufficiently tractable that you can imagine yourself following them – a sweet spot that’s compulsively consumable. This formula essentially hijacks our natural ambition, shifting our attention from the hard, ambiguous, but ultimately satisfying efforts required for true accomplishment toward overwrought prescriptions that waste our time. I’m particularly worried about young people (a popular audience of this content) who might be diverted into these clickbait rabbit holes at a time when they should be seeking genuine mentorship instead. To help make sense of these issues, I recently sat down to talk with bestselling writer Brad Stulberg, whose fantastic new book, The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World, comes out tomorrow. Stulberg is an expert in the field of (actual, measurable) performance. His new book (which 9-time NBA Champion Steve Kerr described as capturing “a lot of what I believe as a coach”) makes the case that embracing a commitment to “genuine excellence” can deliver more meaning than the types of performative efforts popular online. Here are three useful things I learned from Stulberg, each set up by a quote from his book: → “There is no greater illusion than thinking the accomplishment of some goal will change your life.” Genuine excellence is more about craft than rewards. You need to find meaning in the act of trying to improve at something. This satisfaction is more lasting than any isolated achievement. → “Caring is cool.” You have to care deeply about what you’re pursuing, meaning it should align with your values and help make you a better person. This is quite different from, say, trying to develop biceps purely to impress girls or buying a fancy car to make your friends jealous. → “True discipline is not a chest-thumping, hype-speech giving, performative act of toughness.” Excellence works better when you disconnect. Don’t brag about your accomplishments online. Don’t look for brief hits of hype from emotionally manipulative videos. Instead, take care of your business with a quiet, inward satisfaction. If you’re worried about the internet hijacking your ambition (or the ambition of someone you care about), then keep these ideas in mind. It’s not enough to dismiss influencers like Ashton Hall; you need to replace what they’re offering with a more compelling alternative. Stulberg’s writing, in my opinion, points the way to one such alternative. “The real reward is that you become a better version of yourself,” he summarizes toward the end of his book. This might not be as exciting as sticking your face in ice water before sunrise. But it sounds about right to me. — It may go without saying that I highly recommend The Way of Excellence. It’s a must-read book that offers a path toward the discipline of mastery, competence, and mattering. Consider buying a copy today. And if you do, fill out this form to obtain some bonus material from Stulberg, including a video master class on the topic and a list of related reading. The post Is the Internet Hijacking Our Ambition? appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

President Donald The President's recently filed lawsuit against megabank JPMorganChase and its CEO Jamie Dimon is not expected to succeed in court, legal experts say. View the full article

United Wholesale Mortgage, which was sued twice in December for alleged violations, put the blame for some text messages on an independent mortgage broker. View the full article

Prepayment speeds approached recent highs last month, but distressed borrower data paints a mixed picture about the current housing market, according to ICE. View the full article

For decades, people with disabilities have relied on service dogs to help them perform daily tasks like opening doors, turning on lights, or alerting caregivers to emergencies. By some estimates, there are 500,000 service dogs in the U.S., but little attention has been paid to the fact that these dogs have been trained to interact with interfaces that are made for humans. A team of researchers from the United Kingdom wants to change that by designing accessible products for, and with dogs. The Open University’s Animal-Computer Interaction Laboratory in the UK was founded in 2011 to help promote the art and science of designing animal-centered systems. Led by Clara Mancini, a professor of animal-computer interaction, the lab studies how animals interact with technology and develops interactive systems designed to improve their wellbeing and support their relationships with humans. The team’s first commercially available product is a specifically-designed button that service dogs can press to help turn on corresponding appliances at home, like a lamp, a kettle, or a fan. The Dogosophy Button took more than ten years to develop and was tested with about 20 dogs from UK charity Dogs for Good. It gives dogs more control over certain aspects of their home, which can make training them easier and further strengthen the bond between a human and their dog. It’s also taught the team a few lessons about how to design for humans. “I am now a better human designer,” says Luisa Ruge, an industrial designer who worked with Mancini and led the design of the button. For now, the Dogosophy Button is only available for purchase in the UK (for about $130). The challenges of designing for animals Anyone who’s ever designed a product for a human client knows the process relies on a perfect storm of variables like gender, age, background, and personal preferences. But these designers also have one advantage they likely take for granted: they can ask their client what they think at every step of the way. Getting feedback from a dog is much harder and requires an understanding of animal behavior. “There’s a lot of iteration,” says Ruge, “and a huge ethical and reflective component because I can’t be a dog, I don’t [feel] what they feel.” Ruge began her career as an industrial designer, but as she moved up the corporate ladder, she realized she was fascinated with animals. Her interest led her to train as a service dog trainer at Bergin College of Canine Studies in California. “One of the ways to bond is we had to be tied to our dog with a carabiner and leash for 8 days, 24/7,” she recalls. Later, she attended a conference on human behavior change for animal welfare, where she met Mancini and became interested in her lab. Ruge immediately enrolled in a PhD at The Open University, and spent the next three years writing a thesis on designing for the animal user experience and proving out her dog-centered methodology. Ruge followed the five human factors model, a method that helps designers understand the end user’s behavior by breaking down the UX into five factors. The typical list includes physical, cognitive, social, cultural, and emotional factors, but Ruge added a sixth—sensory—and then later, a seventh: consent. To understand the exact characteristics and abilities she had to design for, she focused on Labrador Retrievers, Golden Retrievers, as these are the most common breeds for service dogs. Her research led to various correlations that informed the design of the button. For example: since both breeds have long tails, the button should not feature sensors that might accidentaly be activated by it. Since both breeds are predisposed to hip dysplasia and joint problems, the button should also not be designed in a way that requires jumping to activate. And since all dogs see the world in hues of yellow, blue, and brown, the button should be made in one of these colors so it is easy to perceive. When Ruge first got involved, the prototype Mancini had developed was square in shape, and looked a bit like the standard metallic button that people with wheelchairs can press to open a door. Now—after about 20 iterations and five prototypes—the button is round, convex, and blue. It is textured to prevent a dog’s wet snout from sliding on it, and its push depth is such that a more timid dog shouldn’t have to press hard to activate it. Ruge had to test some of her designs the hard way. The first prototype she ever made took days to develop and the dogs destroyed it “in two seconds,” she recalls with a laugh. But dogs don’t know that a prototype should be handled with care. To them, a work-in-progress product looks no different than a finished product. Animal design as a discipline Designing for dogs humbled Ruge’s assumptions. “It lets you know you’re never 100% right,” she says, adding that the only way to confirm her theories was through extensive testing and observation. It also made her a better designer for humans, because she learned to better spot her biases and assumptions. “Sometimes, I’m assuming you feel a handle like I do, and you don’t,” she says. In the end, though, animal design is where Ruge’s passion lies. Since earning her PhD, she has moved back to her native Colombia and started a design consultancy called Ph-auna (pronounced “fauna”) where she focuses on animal centered innovation. She hosts a podcast called Pomodogo, guiding humans to better connect with their dogs, and is now working on an app that gamifies dog training and inspires humans to be better caretakers. “There’s an immense opportunity for animal design to be its own design discipline,” she says. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Dogosophy Button is available to individual customers willing to buy it, but the team is hoping to broaden its scope beyond the home. Mancini, who spearheaded the button project, says they first installed an earlier version of the button to operate the motorized door of a restaurant’s accessible toilet, but the restaurant ended up shuttering. Then, they tried installing it at a local shopping mall, but the plan fell through due to budget constraints. Still, she plans to continue developing new versions and adapt them for the characteristics of other species too. “It is my interest to try and install the buttons in public buildings,” she says. “I would love for whole cities to be more accessible for dogs and other urban animals.” View the full article

These questions aren’t easy to answer—especially since Google keeps AI Overview data under lock and key. But, if you keep reading, you might just find out… When people talk about “tracking AI Overviews”, they could be referring to a few…Read more ›View the full article

On my phone, there are already videos of the next moon landing. In one, an astronaut springs off the rung of a ladder, strung out from the lander, before slowly plopping to the surface. He is, alas, still getting accustomed to the weaker gravity. In another, the crew collects a sample—a classic lunar expedition activity—while another person lazily minds the rover. A third video shows an astronaut affixing the American flag to the ground, because this act of patriotism is even better the second time around. The blue oceans of Earth are visible, in the background, and a radio calls out: “Artemis crew is on the surface.” America is going back to the moon, and NASA is in the final weeks of preparing for the Artemis II mission, which will have astronauts conduct a lunar flyby for the first time in decades. If all goes well, during the next endeavor, Artemis III, they’ll finally land on the lunar surface, marking an extraordinary and historical and in some sense, nostalgic, accomplishment. The aforementioned videos are not advance copies, or some vision of the future, though. They were generated with OpenAI’s video generation model and are extremely fake. Still, this kind of content is a reminder that the upcoming Artemis missions promise a major epistemic test for the deniers of the original moon landing. This a small but passionate and enduring community who doubt the Apollo moon landing for a host of reasons, including that (they allege) the government lied or (they believe) it is simply physically impossible for humans to go the moon. Now, when NASA returns to the lunar surface, these people will be confronted with far more evidence than from the last time around. The space agency operation will be broadcast, live, and including camera technology and social media platforms that just weren’t around in the 1960s. But there’s also a bigger challenge before us. NASA will be launching its moon return effort in a period of major distrust in American scientific and government institutions, and, amid the proliferation of generative AI, declining confidence in the veracity of digital content. Most observers will be able to sort through the real NASA imagery, and anything fake that might show up. Still, there tends to be a small number of people who doubt these kinds of milestones, especially when a U.S. federal agency is involved. Adding AI to the conspiracy theory cocktail “When the moon landing first came in, AI wasn’t a thing. The sophistication of [the landing] didn’t necessarily make us question it,” says David Jolley, a professor at the University of Nottingham who studies conspiracy theories. “But now, with the power of AI and the power of images that you can create, it certainly offers that different reality if you want to interpret it in that way.” “It’s the trust in those sources that we need to kind of really create. Of course, if you haven’t got trust in our gatekeepers and you don’t trust scientists, well, suddenly you are going to lean into: well, this, is this real? Is this just AI?” he continues. The upcoming Artemis missions aren’t yet a major topic among lunar landing deniers. But there are hints it will attract more attention from conspiracy theorists. During the last Artemis mission, which was unmanned, Reuters had to push back on online posts suggesting the expedition “proved” that Apollo 11 didn’t actually happen. (Skeptics suggested longer Artemis I mission timelines, a product of a change in route, actually cast doubt on the original Apollo timeline). Other online skeptics have already suggested that, with Artemis, NASA is yet again faking a space endeavor. Some people in internet conspiracy communities suggest the upcoming moon missions will be entirely CGI (computer-generated imagery). Generative AI stands to introduce even more confusion, says Ben Colman, the CEO of Reality Defenders, a deep fake detection platform. Generating a believable image of a (fake) moon landing is now something any consumer can do. “Any astute physicist will be able to tell you if these videos get star placement or physics wrong, as they are likely to do,” he says, “but even that is getting better with each model iteration.” Conspiracy theories are sticky There are, of course, many reasons why people say they deny reality of the first lunar expeditions. They are canonical, misinterpreted references, like Van Allen belts, a zone of energetic charged particles that surrounds the planet (critics say the belts are too radioactive for manned vehicles to traverse) and the suspicious flag-in-the-wind (there’s no wind on the moon!). All of these points—and the many other points deniers bring up—have been thoroughly debunked. Still, this small community of self-appointed detectives are insistent. Even decades after the missions ended, people are still combing through NASA’s videos and images, mining for signs of alternations or other surreptitious editing. To them, an expected shimmer reveals a film operation just beyond the view of the camera. A movement that might not look right is a hint that the world has been duped. Open source intelligence (OSINT) becomes the rabbit hole. “Some allege we didn’t go to the moon, perhaps because we were trying to trick the Soviets into thinking that we had superior technology than they did,” explains Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who also studies conspiratorial beliefs. “Some people think we did go but it wasn’t televised. And that footage that we saw was made later in a sound studio. Some people think Stanley Kubrick was in charge of filming the ‘faked’ Moon Landing footage.” For its part, NASA is preparing to point to evidence, should any deepfake allegations come their way. Agency spokesperson Lauren Low tells Fast Company: “We expect AI experts will be looking closely at all our images and will be able to verify they are real images taken by real astronauts as part of the Artemis II test flight around the Moon.” Moreover, Low added, there will be many ways for people to watch the lunar flyby themselves, including live broadcasts, two 24/7 YouTube streams, a new conference, and “views from Orion cameras.” In other words, the reality of Artemis will be very hard to deny. Research suggests that conspiracy theories are entertaining, and even serve peoples’ core psychological needs, like a desire to understand the world or a way of dealing with uncertainty. Finding other people, including on social media, pushing these theories can help normalize them, and make someone feel like they’re part of a broader community. Some people simply don’t trust institutions, and evidence that something did, indeed, happen only raises further questions, and suspicions that it didn’t. To an extent, politics matters, too; people outside the United States are more likely to deny the moon landing, polls show. In the end, says Uscinski, we should prepare for people who are prone to conspiratorial thinking, or prone to mistrusting institutions, to take a skeptical view of any big news event. This may happen again when the Artemis missions finally launch. “The good news is that belief in conspiracy theories isn’t likely to get worse,” he explains. “The bad news is that this conspiratorial thinking has always been this pervasive.” “People are very good at waving away evidence that tells them things they don’t want to hear, and they’re very good at believing things, either without evidence or with really shitty evidence when it tells them what they do want to believe about the world,” Uscinski adds. “You don’t need AI or sophisticated technology to provide a justification.” View the full article

Search engines “think” in topics, not keywords. They understand entities—people, places, products, ideas—and how they relate. They focus on meaning, not word matching. If you want to do SEO today, or show up in AI recommendations, you need to understand…Read more ›View the full article

Andy Burnham veto leaves government where it started — with a weakened PM struggling to push controversial policy through parliamentView the full article

It looks like OpenAI is taking the “new year, new you” approach when it comes to its business strategy. To kick off 2026, the company announced it would soon introduce ads into ChatGPT—which was a bit of a surprise, considering CEO Sam Altman had previously said ads would be a “last resort” as a business model. It’s hard to say how final a resort this is without looking at OpenAI’s balance sheet, but we do know the company is feeling the heat. After Google released Gemini 3 in the fall—which scored well on leaderboards, market share, and plaudits from the AI community—Altman declared a “code red” at OpenAI to ensure that ChatGPT is best in class. And as impressive as OpenAI’s fundraising has been, Google is a $4 trillion company. OpenAI needs all the resources it can get. So ChatGPT users are getting ads. It’s a risky move, since there are strong indicators that consumers are wary of ads in AI answers. A report from Attest, a consumer research company, found that 41% of consumers trust AI search results more than paid search results, suggesting that AI users like that they don’t have to worry about ads in AI summaries, even if their accuracy may sometimes be questionable. Hallucinating is apparently less of an offense than selling out. However, ads in AI experiences look increasingly like an inevitability. Consumers don’t love ads on TV or streaming either, but they’re endemic to the media ecosystem. Google is already serving ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and it may someday bring them to Gemini, too, although company executives deny there are any plans to do this. Regardless of what it does with the Gemini chatbot, Google appears determined to weave advertising into many of its AI experiences, which is hardly a shock. Big Tech, bigger bite For the media, this isn’t exactly thrilling news. OpenAI entering the ad business means yet another Big Tech player is competing with them for digital ad dollars alongside platforms like Google, Meta, and Amazon. And there’s less traffic to go around since those same AI chatbots summarize content, often negating the need to click through. There’s a reason web traffic to publishers dropped by a third last year. However, advertising tied to AI answers might end up being exactly the leverage publishers need to make their case for compensation. When a publisher’s content is used to create the answer to a query, the line back to revenue is always somewhat indirect—after all, the user likely subscribed to the chatbot well before they ever typed their question, and most AI services have a free tier anyway. But if your content fuels an answer, and that answer directly leads to revenue for the AI company through either impressions or transactions, the chain from content to dollars is clearer. It’s also more trackable than it’s ever been. Whereas the world of SEO inferred a lot from search terms and clicks, queries in AI search are more specific, and the tools much better at pinning down intent. Understanding which answers, and what content within them, best facilitate transactions is a very knowable thing. OpenAI did its best to quash fears about commercialization by stating its first principles of advertising, one of them being that ads will not influence the substance of the answers in ChatGPT. The idea is that if, say, Coca-Cola pays for an ad campaign, then any answer will not be any more or less likely to mention Coke than if that campaign didn’t exist. But I wonder if the answer might be more or less inclined to steer the user toward buying a soft drink in general, with the ad providing a little card for you to tap on that does just that. Optimize and persuade Even if OpenAI insists that won’t happen, it can’t speak for all the brands and content providers that fuel the answer. How successful such efforts might be is extremely unclear at this point, but it’s a safe bet they’re going to try. The nascent field of GEO (generative engine optimization) seems destined to give rise to a new dimension—not just how content affects AI answers, but how it convinces users to take action. You’re not just optimizing for presence, but also for persuadability. All of this is theoretical, of course, and perhaps Google, OpenAI, and everyone else will succeed in keeping the ad-revenue pie all to themselves. But as revenue from AI answers increases, every marketer on the planet will want to know which answers are the most lucrative, and what content they’re made from. If publishers can prove they’re providing the secret sauce, they’ll have more leverage in demanding their slice. Proving that value is not trivial. Successful bargaining over this “content-to-click” effect starts with measuring it, and that’s going to take work. Understanding how content appears in and affects AI answers is brand-new science, but it is science: Experimentation, iteration, and leveraging different kinds of tools—like snippets, bot blocking, and dedicated GEO platforms—are what’s needed. Over the past 25 years, Silicon Valley slowly built tremendous platforms that ended up consuming the vast majority of advertising revenue, locking out the media in the process. And let’s be honest: There’s a good chance artificial intelligence will end up continuing that trend. But the irony of monetizing AI answers with advertising is that it may end up creating the best opportunity for publishers to define exactly how much value they bring to them. View the full article

Henry Ford famously noted, “Whether you think you can do it or not, you are usually right.” His point was that beliefs, especially about our talents, performance, and even luck, can be self-fulfilling. Irrespective of whether they are right or wrong, they will become true by influencing objective success outcomes. Ford was hardly alone. Along the same lines, decades of psychological research show that beliefs matter, often profoundly so. Perhaps the most influential work comes from Albert Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy, defined as people’s beliefs in their capability to organize and execute the actions required to manage prospective situations. Across hundreds of studies, higher self-efficacy has been linked to greater motivation, resilience, learning, and performance. People who believe they can improve are more likely to set challenging goals, invest effort, persist in the face of difficulty, and recover from failure. Closely related ideas emerged from attribution theory and expectancy value models, which showed that individuals who attribute success to effort rather than fixed ability, and who believe their actions will make a difference, tend to perform better in school and at work. The most popular variant of these, at least in the world of HR and management, has been Carol Dweck’s research on growth versus fixed mindsets, which popularized the idea that believing that abilities can be developed encourages learning-oriented behavior, greater perseverance, and better responses to feedback. Taken together, this body of research persuaded a large number of people of the importance of mindset, implying a counterintuitive causal chain whereby beliefs shape performance—rather than the other way around. Specifically, the story goes, irrespective of how rational our thoughts are, they will likely shape attention, effort, emotional reactions, and behavior, which in turn impacts tangible results and outcomes. A mental software update Suitably, much of the self-help industry has run with this idea at full speed. Bookstores, podcasts, LinkedIn feeds, and corporate off-sites are now saturated with advice urging us to “reframe,” “manifest,” “believe harder,” and “upgrade our mindset.” According to this logic, success is largely a mental software update away. Change your thoughts, and the universe will follow! This is where things start to get a little silly. Mindset does not suspend physics, probability, or competence. It still matters whether you can actually cross the road without getting hit by a bus. And even if you firmly believe you are Serena Williams on the tennis court, lacking the ability to play tennis means you may be the only person on earth who shares that belief. Confidence does not magically produce a serve, a backhand, or a Grand Slam title. Motivational cosplay At its most extreme, mindset culture drifts into motivational cosplay: people repeating affirmations in the mirror while ignoring the inconvenient details of skill, preparation, competition, and luck. Worse, it can quietly turn failure into a moral flaw. If you didn’t succeed, you must not have believed enough, visualized hard enough, or optimized your morning routine sufficiently. Structural barriers, unequal opportunities, and plain bad luck are written out of the story. The irony is that the science never claimed mindset was omnipotent. Beliefs help when they are tethered to reality. They amplify effort, persistence, and learning, but they cannot substitute for ability, practice, or opportunity. Positive thinking works best when paired with negative feedback, deliberate practice, and a sober assessment of constraints. In short, mindset matters (a bit), but not in the magical way the self-help industry sells it. Thinking you can do something helps you try. It does not guarantee you will succeed. And no amount of positive thinking will turn wishful confidence into world-class talent. Modest effects Indeed, a closer look at the scientific evidence indicates that popular interpretations on the power of mindset and positive thinking have gone too far. First, the effects of mindset are actually not that large. Meta-analyses show that growth mindset interventions produce small to moderate effects, particularly when compared with structural factors such as prior ability, socioeconomic status, quality of instruction, or access to opportunity. Put differently, believing you can improve is helpful, but it is no substitute for actually improving. Between thinking you are as good as Lionel Messi and being half as good as him, the latter is unequivocally preferable—unless your goal is to impress people who don’t understand soccer, in which case you can hope to deceive or fool them! Confidence without competence may feel empowering, but it rarely wins matches, promotions, or championships. (It does make for popular sitcom characters like Michael Scott or David Brent, though.) Second, beliefs do not operate in a vacuum. Confidence helps most when it is paired with real skills, feedback, and environments that reward effort. The problem with overvaluing confidence or self-belief is that, roughly half the time, it is correlated with actual ability. When people are genuinely competent, their confidence is often earned, which is why Muhammad Ali could plausibly claim that “it isn’t bragging if you can back it up.” In those cases, belief is less a psychological trick than a reasonably accurate signal of underlying skill. The trouble starts when confidence drifts away from competence. Underconfidence, while uncomfortable, can be oddly functional: It pushes people to prepare more, seek feedback, and close gaps they suspect (or know) they have. Accurate confidence, by contrast, reflects self-awareness—a realistic calibration between what one can do and what the situation demands. Delusional confidence is different altogether. It may help people impress, persuade, or temporarily fool others, but this is usually a short-lived strategy unless everyone else is equally deluded. When confidence consistently outruns competence, the cost is eventually paid, either by the individual when reality catches up or by everyone else who has to deal with the consequences. Third, an excessive focus on mindset risks slipping into a form of psychological moralizing, where success is credited to the “right attitude” and failure is blamed on the individual’s thinking rather than on constraints, inequality, or bad luck. This becomes especially problematic when people are encouraged to believe not only that they live in a meritocracy, but also that their outcomes hinge primarily on how strongly they believe in themselves. In such a world, effort and optimism are not just virtues but moral obligations, and when success does not materialize, the only plausible culprit left is the self. The result is a quiet but corrosive form of self-blame. If belief is supposed to be the main lever of success, then failing to succeed feels like a personal deficiency of character, motivation, or mental toughness. Structural barriers fade into the background, while disappointment is internalized as guilt. Ironically, this narrative can be demotivating, not empowering. A better way A more helpful alternative would be to focus less on upgrading people’s beliefs and more on developing their actual skills and competence. This remains valuable even when individuals start out with low confidence in their abilities, which may simply reflect an accurate awareness of the gap between their current and ideal selves. Closing that gap through practice, feedback, and learning does more for long-term performance and well-being than insisting people feel confident before they have much to be confident about. Needless to say, there is also evidence that positive beliefs can backfire when they become detached from reality. Inflated self-beliefs are linked to poor calibration, overconfidence, and reckless decision-making. In organizational settings, confidence without competence can be costly, especially when it crowds out learning, dissent, or accurate self-assessment. In some cases, acknowledging that you are simply not very good at something is not an act of pessimism but of strategic realism. Persisting in a poorly matched role or career path on the basis of “false hope” can be actively harmful. Psychologists refer to this as false positive self-beliefs or miscalibrated optimism (which appear to be the norm), where individuals overestimate their likelihood of success and continue investing in goals that are unlikely to pay off. By contrast, recognizing limits early allows people to redirect their effort toward domains where their abilities, interests, and opportunities are better aligned. There is also a social cost to miscalibration. If others realize you are less capable than you believe yourself to be, the reputational penalty is typically higher than if you had reached that conclusion first. Self-awareness signals judgment and maturity; obliviousness signals risk. In practice, what matters most is not how good you think you are, but how good others think you are, because it is other people who allocate opportunities, responsibilities, promotions, and trust. Ironically, some of the best performers are those who initially underestimate themselves. Mild underconfidence can motivate preparation, learning, and skill acquisition, leading to steady improvement and positive surprises. Conversely, people who overestimate their abilities often stagnate, mistaking confidence for progress and reassurance for feedback. Over time, belief divorced from performance does not just fail to help; it actively prevents development. The science, then, supports a more nuanced conclusion. Mindset matters, but it is not magic. Beliefs are best understood as enablers rather than engines of success. They help people make use of their abilities and opportunities, but they cannot substitute for them. And yet, we tend to praise self-belief far more enthusiastically than self-knowledge. Confidence is celebrated as a virtue; realism is often mistaken for negativity. But from the perspective of everyone else, self-knowledge is usually the more valuable trait. Most of us have worked with at least one person who is spectacularly pleased with themselves, modestly competent at best, and blissfully unaware of the gap between the two. Their confidence may be admirable in the abstract, but it is considerably less charming when they are making decisions, leading teams, or presenting their “vision.” If we evaluated the world from other people’s point of view, we would quickly realize that it is not in anyone’s interest for the unjustifiably confident to succeed because of those very flaws. When people advance on the strength of misplaced self-belief rather than demonstrated competence, the costs are externalized: Colleagues pick up the slack, organizations absorb the damage, and reality eventually intervenes, often expensively. A healthier mindset, then, is not blind optimism but informed confidence: knowing what you can do, what you cannot yet do, and where your effort will actually pay off. In short, self-belief may feel good, but self-knowledge gets things done. Reality rewards competence, not confidence. The only role of belief is to signal whether you know the difference. View the full article

Think of your creativity like a high-performance garden: If you focus only on the visible harvest (outputs) and never allow the soil to lie fallow (liminal space) or the bees to roam freely (play), the ground eventually becomes depleted. Boredom is the signal that the soil needs replenishing, ensuring that your next season of work is a flourish rather than a struggle. In our current “busyness addiction,” we have come to glorify the hustle, over-indexing on output while neglecting the very well-being that fuels it. We treat leisure and rest like guilty pleasures rather than sacred pauses. Yet the truth of the Imagination Era is this: Our best work often happens when we are not visibly working. To flourish in a world of ubiquitous technology and unprecedented burnout, we must stop grinding and start cultivating what I call the “sexy bits” of productivity: boredom, play, and the magical in-between of liminal space. Boredom: An Invitation to Create We often reprimand ourselves for feeling bored, yet boredom is not a behavior to repress, it’s an invitation. It serves as a neurological cue to find new sources of stimulation. When we allow ourselves to be bored rather than reach for a digital distraction, we activate the brain’s default mode network (DMN), the “meaning-making” part of the brain that connects dots, finds patterns, and synthesizes information when we are not laser-focused on external tasks. It acts like a “washing machine” for our ideas, taking deeply felt information and making sense of it. By viewing boredom as a trigger for curiosity, we move away from a mechanical “1 + 1 = 2” productivity mindset toward one of cultivation, where we value what is evolving in the dormant, invisible realm. Consider the following sobering insights from neuroscience and workplace research. “Mind-wandering” is your competitive advantage. While we spend 47% of our waking hours thinking about something other than what we are currently doing, mind-wandering isn’t a distraction. It’s a survival mechanism that, when channeled, aids in “aha” moments for problem-solving. Daydreaming is scientifically linked to an increase in alpha waves in the brain’s frontal cortex, a pattern directly associated with enhanced divergent thinking and creativity. Yet we’re suppressing it relentlessly. Here’s where it gets urgent: According to a November 2023 Linearity blog post, 80% of people believe that unlocking creativity is critical to economic growth. Yet 75% of respondents in a Thrive My Way study reported being pressured to be “productive” (output-oriented) rather than creative at work. We’re systematically shutting down the very neural pathways that drive innovation. Here’s something you could do to carve out time for creativity at work: Institute “thinking hours” in your calendar, protected time (even just 30 minutes daily) where team members are encouraged to step away from their screens with no agenda. A 2021 study by Tork found that 9 out of 10 employees reported being more likely to stay at a company where management encouraged taking breaks. That’s not wellness theater; that’s a retention strategy with a 90% success rate. So position this carved-out time explicitly as creative work, not procrastination. Measure the impact on idea generation in your next sprint or project cycle. The Power of Play and Meta-Cognition To navigate today’s complex systems, we must reintroduce play, which toy designer Brendan Boyle defines simply as “engagement.” The opposite of play isn’t work; the opposite of play is boredom. Integrating play at work, whether through prototyping rough draft mock-ups or gamifying meetings, boosts morale and stimulates critical executive leadership skills like empathy, negotiation, and the ability to improvise. This playful mindset is enhanced by meta-cognition: the practice of thinking about one’s own thinking. By engaging in what I call “backcasting” (reflecting on past experiences to make sense of skills acquired) we build an “inventory of courage.” This self-inquiry allows us to recognize that our pains plus our gains equal our assets, providing the firm foundation needed to leap into the unknown. The data on this is striking, and it challenges everything we think we know about efficiency. That same research by Thrive My Way showed that creativity training delivers a 350% return on engagement. Groups trained in creativity tools and principles generated 350% as many ideas—and those ideas were 415% more original—than those from untrained groups. This isn’t a soft-skill metric. This is innovation measured in the ideas that move your business forward. But we’re facing an engagement crisis. As of 2024, only 20% of employees are engaged, marking the lowest level of employee engagement ever recorded. We’re grinding harder while our teams check out. The correlation is clear: We’ve optimized engagement out of work entirely. You can avert an engagement crisis at your own company by launching a “play audit” in your next strategy session. Identify two nonnegotiable meetings per month that will be redesigned around play. Those could be improv exercises, Lego Serious Play, or physical problem-solving. Track engagement scores and idea quality before and after. You’ll likely find that the most serious strategic challenges get solved when your team stops taking them so seriously. Engaging the Liminal Space Amid Distraction We live in an age of “stolen focus,” where the average knowledge worker now switches tasks every 47 seconds. The shift is staggering: In 2004, the average knowledge worker switched tasks every three minutes. That’s a 73% compression of attention span in less than two decades. Research from distraction expert Gloria Mark indicates that we spend approximately 47% of our waking hours thinking about what isn’t currently happening, a type of mind-wandering often linked to unhappiness. This constant task-switching drains cognitive resources and spikes cortisol levels, creating a neurological state designed for crisis response, not creativity. The antidote is to intentionally engage in liminal space—that transitional “betwixt and between” phase where growth happens under the surface. Liminality can be physical, like a commute, or metaphorical, like the fallow time between project cycles. Instead of filling every gap with a screen, we should embrace restorative ambiguity, where we feel expectant and at peace in the not knowing. The financial toll of ignoring this is substantial, and something we all need to hear. Burnout is an economic crisis masquerading as a personal problem. Workplace stress is not just a personal issue but a massive economic one, costing U.S. industries more than $300 billion annually in absenteeism, turnover, and diminished productivity. Some 71% of knowledge workers reported experiencing burnout at least once in 2020, with burned-out employees taking 60% more sick days and being 2.6 times more likely to seek a different job. Many of us are performing productivity instead of creating it. The pressure to appear busy is pervasive, with 83% of full-time U.S. workers admitting to engaging in “performative work behaviors” (productivity theater) in the past year. Your teams aren’t actually more productive, they’re just better at looking busy while running on fumes. Whether it’s a two-minute daydream break or a weeklong sabbatical, these pauses allow us to unburden the cognitive load on our neocortex. By valuing the dormant times as much as the growth spurts, we transform our work from a series of tasks into a progression of cultivated learning experiences. In this new operating system, rest is not a soft perk, it’s a fundamental human right and a critical tool for sustainable, innovative leadership. Try mapping your organization’s task-switching velocity. How often are meetings scheduled back-to-back? How many channels are teams expected to monitor? Implement “no-meeting blocks,” similar to what Zapier did when it instituted a “get stuff done” week. These could be two-hour windows weekly where no meetings are scheduled. Explicitly frame these as liminal space where people can complete deep work or simply think. Monitor retention and productivity metrics over a quarter. You’ll likely see both move upward. The Bottom Line We stand at a crossroads. We can continue grinding our teams into burnout while generating incrementally better ideas, or we can cultivate organizations that honor boredom, play, and strategic pause as the foundations of sustainable innovation. The choice sounds simple until you realize it requires us to fundamentally redefine what “productivity” means. The organizations that will outthink their competition in the next five years won’t be the ones that eliminated downtime. They’ll be the ones brave enough to design it in. They’ll be the leaders who understand that creativity isn’t a luxury, it’s infrastructure. And they’ll be the companies that attract and retain the best talent because they respect something far more valuable than productivity theater: the human capacity to flourish. Your move. View the full article

In 2023, Ken Lux found himself in an FBI briefing on child trafficking. The CEO of Luxe Aviation was there as the past commander of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office’s Air Squadron, a volunteer cadre of 50 general aviation pilots supporting police missions and community service. Lux recalls the FBI agent relaying the story of a since-jailed airline pilot who used his credentials to traffic children to clients in the Philippines with chilling negotiations. “I have a girl that’s 12 years old for your client,’” the pilot said. The client’s response: “No, we think we need an 8-year-old.” The group was horrified. “I have two daughters,” Lux says. “We said, ‘Wait a minute, really? Where are these people?’ Until that time, I thought it only happened overseas. And they said, ‘No, it happens in every community in the United States.’” The agent showed them photos of girls crammed into squalid rooms, branded with clipped ears, tattoos, and burns, with life expectations averaging just seven years in such conditions. “A lot of times, it’s just kids that get mixed up with the wrong people, or somehow get tricked into it. And then they don’t know how to get out,” Lux says. Lux and his colleagues would learn the extent of the crisis—a $150 billion global criminal enterprise whose size trails only that of illegal drugs. Human trafficking involves more than 27 million victims worldwide—who are forced into marriages, slave labor, military service, organ sales, and sexual exploitation. That includes some 200,000 victims domestically, prompting January to be designated as National Human Trafficking Prevention Month. Flying rescue missions The briefing so rattled the squadron pilots that they began volunteering for police rescue missions, focusing on victims of sex trafficking. Their first trip shuttled a trafficked teen in Sacramento back home to Oregon. Then came more requests from surrounding counties and district attorneys needing to ferry the rare survivor brave enough to testify against her captor to court. AndrewBeltan “It’s really hard to pin down and prosecute these guys because they use burner phones and hide behind technology,” Lux says. “It’s not like the drug business, where they find you with so much cocaine in your car.” As demand grew, Lux realized that they needed a more formalized organization. In April 2024, he founded Flights to Freedom (F2F), a nonprofit that matches 200 volunteer pilots nationwide with law enforcement, Child Protective Services, aftercare advocacy centers, and medical staff. “We could probably use 200 [pilots] just in California because the problem is so pervasive,” he says. F2F board adviser Kevin LaRosa, the aerial coordinator for films such as Top Gun: Maverick and F1, considers the organization a lifeline to the most vulnerable. “Aviation isn’t just about speed and connectivity—it’s about human impact,” he says. “When law enforcement rescues a child from exploitation, swift and secure transport can literally be the first step toward healing and safety.” F2F has organized just over two dozen flights to transport survivors ages 12 to 24 across 11 states. But it can accept only half of its monthly requests due to time constraints or a lack of planes. Because law enforcement can’t reserve rescuers, F2F has only a 24- to 48-hour window to organize flights. “If I can’t find a pilot available, we have to turn [down requests],” Lux says. “It’s heartbreaking.” The nonprofit operates on a $60,000 budget, which covers insurance and an office at McClellan Airport in Sacramento. It is funded by individual donations and an annual fundraiser at the Aerospace Museum of California, where Lux was a past president. Except for a few regional jets, most of its pilots fly smaller airplanes that hold four to six people. (Lux’s ride is a Beechcraft 58 Baron, a six-seater twin-engine plane.) On rare occasions, F2F has chartered flights when it hasn’t found a pilot. “The problem is, we don’t have a lot of money,” he adds. Lux’s focus for this year is recruiting more pilots (who can apply here), partnering with larger charter companies, and increasing awareness of F2F and similar services like Freedom Aviation Network and Wings of the Way. He’s already mapped out a $750,000 to $1 million plan to eventually expand F2F’s operations. “We’ve proven it works; now it’s time to push it to the next level,” he says. The first steps in healing Every F2F flight includes a chaperone—usually a deputy sheriff, a Child Protective Services advocate, or a licensed therapist—who accompanies the survivors and evaluates both their state of mind and ability to fly by means of a customized psychiatric and medical questionnaire. The chaperone also serves as a buffer between the pilots, who are often male, and the very traumatized survivors. “They’re often on drugs. They’ve been brainwashed. They’ve been abused up to 20 times per day,” Lux says. “We don’t want someone to have a really bad experience on an airplane with a strange pilot and a strange plane going to different places. We follow a sterile cockpit policy—typically, the pilot doesn’t know who the deputies or survivors are. It’s all confidential. It’s all safe.” Victims, sometimes rescued in the middle of the night or in sting operations, are given backpacks with a blanket, a change of clothes, hygiene products, and a blue teddy bear. They’re walked down a red carpet to the plane entrance and treated to a private jet experience—often their first time on an airplane. “I feel like we really are one of the first steps in healing,” Lux says. “We hear back from some of the survivors through the agencies, and they’re just, like, ‘We are so grateful to Flights to Freedom, because it was the first time in my life anyone ever paid attention to me.’” View the full article

“If you’re a millennial and you’re going through your midlife crisis, this post is for you.” So begins a viral TikTok video posted last month by comedian Mike Mancusi. Many millennials are now in their forties, with the youngest about to turn 30, putting the generation at the beginning of the unofficial age bracket when midlife crises traditionally hit. But Mancusi argues that the millennial version is a singular experience. For past generations, a midlife crisis followed a familiar blueprint: graduate college, climb the career ladder, get married, have kids, then—somewhere between roughly 40 and 60—confront mortality and blow it all up for a red sports car or a younger trophy partner. That is not the case for millennials, many of whom missed those milestones due to economic and social upheaval during their formative years. In fact, according to a 2024 study from mental health platform Thriving Center of Psychology, 81% of millennials polled said they couldn’t “afford” to have a midlife crisis. “Can you imagine having a midlife crisis while owning your home, easily paying all your bills, and saving for retirement?” one user commented on Mancusi’s post. “Like what?” Mancusi suggests there’s another reason at play. “Other generations’ midlife crisis has been built off of looking forward,” he says in the clip. “Ours has been built off of looking back.” Where midlife crises were once triggered by a sense of fading youth, millennials are reckoning with something else entirely. “We look back and go, ‘Wait a minute, I was told to do all these things. I did them, and still I’m not happy,’” Mancusi explains. “And that is a way different crisis.” The stability that previous generations found stifling rarely exists in the same way today. The social contract between employees and employers has fractured. Millennials who followed the prescribed path and climbed the ladder are now realizing that the stability and success they were promised is largely a pipe dream. A majority of U.S. workers (60%) don’t have a “quality job” that provides basic financial well-being, safety, and autonomy, among other things, according to Gallup research. These days, 71% of millennial employees are not engaged or are actively disengaged at work, according to a separate Gallup report, and about 66% of millennials report moderate or high levels of burnout, according to a recent Aflac report. “The problem for millennials is we listened,” one commenter wrote. As another put it: “Our crisis isn’t mid-life, it’s existential.” Mancusi’s recommendation for anyone who fears a midlife or existential crisis coming on: “You have to find something else to do,” he says. “I don’t know what you’re into, but you need to find that thing and build it into every single day, because that is what’s going to allow you to move forward in a way that you feel in control of and that you feel passionate about.” In other words, instead of a sports car, get a hobby. View the full article

The “New Tab” page in Chrome is the digital equivalent of a blank stare. A white void. Nothing, and plenty of it. Why are we settling for this? Your browser’s start page is the most valuable real estate on your computer. It’s the first thing you see! Instead of looking at an empty space, you could be looking at a command center. Here are five Chrome extensions that turn that boring start screen into something actually useful. Momentum If you want your browser to feel less like a software application and more like a high-end wellness retreat, Momentum is the gold standard. Every day, it greets you with a stunning, high-res landscape photo and a simple question about your main focus for the day. It’s minimalism that works, keeping a single to-do list and your primary goal front and center so you don’t forget what you actually sat down to do. Bonjourr If Momentum feels a bit too inspirational, Bonjourr is the lightweight, open-source alternative built for speed and clean lines. It’s a minimalist’s dream, featuring transparency, clean fonts, and zero bloat. You can even tweak the CSS if you’re willing to dig into the code a bit, but most people will just appreciate that it loads almost instantly and looks beautiful while offering enough flexibility to use whatever niche search engine they’re currently experimenting with. Presentboard Maybe you don’t want a pretty picture; maybe you want data. Presentboard is a hidden gem that treats your New Tab page like a literal dashboard, using a grid-based system where you can drop widgets for Google Calendar events, latest emails, stock tickers, and custom RSS feeds. It’s for the person who wants to see their entire digital life at a glance before they even type a single URL. You can resize and move boxes around until the layout is exactly how your brain likes it, turning your browser into a functional workstation rather than just a window to the web. Dashy For those who have 14 apps open just to manage their life, Dashy acts as a “mega-dashboard” that lets you pin functioning widgets directly to your start page. We’re talking full integrations where you can check your calendar, scroll a Reddit feed, and manage Todoist tasks without ever leaving the New Tab screen. It even allows for custom profiles, so you can toggle between a “Work Mode” filled with Slack widgets and a “Weekend Mode” dominated by Spotify and news feeds. It’s the closest you can get to turning Chrome into its own operating system. This is for serious dashboard connoisseurs: The free version offers basic widgets and integration with popular websites, while the $5-per-month paid version offers unlimited widget access, a side panel, custom website embeds, and more. Tabliss If you’re tired of extensions locking the best features behind a monthly subscription, Tabliss is the open-source hero you need. It’s completely free, respects your privacy, and offers a massive library of backgrounds from Unsplash and Giphy. This one sits comfortably between beauty and simplicity, offering unique widgets like a “Work Hours” countdown or live sports scores. It’s highly modular and even includes a binary clock for the truly dedicated geeks who find reading time normally to be far too easy. View the full article

Keeping staff records is vital for both legal compliance and operational efficiency. You need to know how long to retain different types of records, from pre-hire documents to termination files. Each category has specific timelines that vary based on regulations and circumstances. Comprehending these requirements can prevent potential legal issues and streamline your processes. Nevertheless, the details can get complex, and knowing the best practices for securing and disposing of these records is fundamental. Key Takeaways Retain employee records for at least seven years post-employment to protect against legal issues and claims. Store pre-hire documents, such as applications and resumes, for a minimum of two years. Keep Form I-9 for three years after hire or one year after employment ends, whichever is longer. Maintain payroll and tax forms (W-4s) for at least four years following termination. Hold FMLA records for three years from the last recorded action to comply with legal requirements. Importance of Employee Record Retention In relation to managing your organization’s human resources, grasping the importance of employee record retention is vital. Comprehending how long to keep employee records can safeguard your organization from potential legal issues. Typically, retaining records for at least seven years post-employment serves as a conservative approach to protect against lawsuits and claims. It’s important to be aware of employee record retention by state, as specific laws can vary greatly. Proper documentation additionally supports operational efficiency during the retention period while safeguarding employee privacy. Certain records, like I-9 forms and FMLA documents, have distinct retention requirements that must be followed to maintain compliance with federal regulations. Regular audits of your recordkeeping practices not merely promote accountability within your HR team but also improve your organization’s overall risk management strategy. Pre-Hire Records Retention In relation to pre-hire records retention, you need to understand the key documentation types and the guidelines for how long to keep them. It’s vital to store items like job descriptions, applications, and interview notes for at least two years to comply with legal requirements and support operational efficiency. Retention Duration Guidelines Properly managing pre-hire records isn’t just a best practice; it’s vital for compliance and protecting your organization against potential legal issues. So, how long do you have to keep employee records? For pre-hire documents like job descriptions, applications, and resumes, it’s recommended to retain them for at least two years from the hiring decision date. This duration likewise applies to background checks and interview notes, ensuring you can effectively respond to any inquiries regarding the hiring process. References received during recruitment should be maintained for the same two years. By following these retention duration guidelines, you improve your compliance with employment regulations and safeguard against potential discrimination claims. Comprehending how long to keep employee files is fundamental for efficient record management. Essential Documentation Types Grasping the crucial documentation types required for pre-hire records is critical for maintaining compliance and ensuring a fair hiring process. You should retain job descriptions, applications, resumes, and cover letters for at least two years after the hiring decision. This duration supports compliance with employment regulations and protects against potential claims. Furthermore, background checks and interview notes must be stored for a minimum of two years to document candidate evaluation. References must be kept for at least two years post-decision for future inquiries. Comprehending how long to keep payroll records and how long employers can keep employee records further improves your knowledge of how long to keep staff records, ensuring effective management of critical documentation. Compliance Considerations Managing pre-hire records is not merely about keeping track of applications and resumes; it’s furthermore a matter of compliance with legal standards. You need to retain these records to protect your organization and adhere to regulations. Here’s a quick reference: Record Type Retention Period Job Descriptions 2 years Applications & Resumes 2 years Background Checks & Interview Notes 2 years from hiring decision References 2 years post-hiring Employment Eligibility Records (Form I-9) 3 years or 1 year after employment ends Staying compliant not only fulfills legal obligations but likewise safeguards you against potential claims of discrimination or unfair hiring practices. Being diligent in record retention is crucial for a smooth hiring process. Active Employee Records Retention When you manage active employee records, it’s crucial to understand how long to retain them for legal and operational purposes. Keeping these records organized guarantees compliance and protects your organization. Here are key retention timelines to remember: Employment eligibility records (Form I-9): Retain for three years after the hire date or one year after employment ends, whichever is longer. Payroll and tax forms (W-4s): Keep for a minimum of four years following the employee’s termination. FMLA records: Maintain for at least three years from the last recorded action. Additionally, OSHA records related to workplace injuries should be kept for five years after the calendar year they cover, whereas ADA records regarding disability accommodations need to be retained for one year after the last action. Tracking these timelines helps you stay organized and compliant with regulations. Termination Records Retention In terms of termination records, knowing the required retention periods is essential for your compliance and protection. You’ll need to keep records for involuntarily terminated employees for at least one year, whereas exit interviews and termination letters should be stored for five to six years. Furthermore, handling any disputes related to termination may require you to retain documentation for longer, ensuring you’re prepared for potential claims. Required Retention Periods Comprehending the required retention periods for termination records is vital for compliance and risk management. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) mandates that records of involuntarily terminated employees must be kept for at least one year. Furthermore, exit interviews and termination letters should be retained for 5-6 years to effectively manage potential claims. Severance agreements need to be stored according to your company policy and any applicable jurisdictional requirements, which can differ. Involuntary termination records: at least 1 year Exit interviews and termination letters: 5-6 years Severance agreements: as per company policy Keeping these records organized is significant for managing and defending against potential employment-related claims. Handling Dispute Documentation Maintaining thorough records of any disputes related to termination is vital for effective risk management and compliance. For involuntarily terminated employees, you must retain documentation for at least one year, as mandated by the EEOC. Nevertheless, to effectively manage potential claims, keep exit interviews and termination letters for 5 to 6 years. Severance agreements should align with your company policy and any relevant jurisdictional requirements, guaranteeing you’re prepared for future disputes. Moreover, records of disputes may require extended retention beyond typical periods to defend against legal challenges. By keeping extensive termination documentation, you not only safeguard your organization against potential legal claims but likewise guarantee adherence to regulatory requirements, helping maintain a compliant workplace. Exit Interviews Importance Exit interviews play a significant role in the retention of termination records, offering insights that can improve organizational effectiveness. Keeping these records for 5-6 years is crucial, as they provide valuable information about employee experiences and potential organizational improvements. Proper documentation helps in managing any claims related to wrongful termination or workplace disputes and identifies trends in employee turnover. Exit interviews serve as evidence in legal challenges, protecting your organization from liability. The EEOC mandates retaining records of involuntarily terminated employees, including exit interviews, for at least one year. Analyzing exit interviews can contribute to strategic HR planning, enabling you to create a better work environment. Medical Records Retention Though it might seem straightforward, comprehending how long to keep medical records is crucial for compliance with various regulations and the protection of employee privacy. You should retain medical records related to employee health for at least three years following the last treatment date, as required by FMLA and ADA regulations. OSHA mandates that you keep records of workplace injuries and illnesses for a minimum of five years after the incident occurs. According to HIPAA, medical records must be maintained for at least six years from the date they’re created or last updated. Moreover, records of drug testing and related medical information should be kept for at least one year after the test date. To guarantee compliance and protect employee privacy, make certain these medical records are securely stored and accessible only to authorized personnel. Keeping these timelines in mind will help safeguard both your organization and your employees. Compliance With Legal Requirements Keeping accurate staff records isn’t just about good practice; it’s also a necessity for compliance with various legal requirements. Different regulations dictate how long you must retain specific documents, and failing to comply can lead to serious consequences. Here are some key retention timelines you need to know: Employment eligibility records (Form I-9): Retain for three years after hire or one year after employment ends, whichever is longer. Payroll and tax forms (W-4s): Keep for at least four years post-employment to comply with IRS regulations. FMLA records: Required to be retained for a minimum of three years from the date of the record. Moreover, OSHA records related to workplace injuries must be kept for five years, and records for involuntarily terminated employees need to be retained for at least one year, as mandated by the EEOC. Risks of Improper Recordkeeping When you fail to keep accurate staff records, you open yourself up to serious legal penalties, including hefty fines from agencies like OSHA. Furthermore, losing sensitive information can lead to lawsuits, which not only drain your resources but likewise damage your organization’s reputation. It’s essential to understand these risks to maintain compliance and protect your business effectively. Legal Penalties Imposed Improper recordkeeping can lead to significant legal penalties that affect your organization on multiple fronts. Failing to maintain accurate employee records can invite scrutiny from federal agencies, resulting in hefty fines. Moreover, neglecting payroll or tax records can incur penalties and back taxes from the IRS, increasing your financial burden. Consider the following risks of improper recordkeeping: Legal fees and settlements from lawsuits filed by current or former employees. Potential loss of government contracts or state licenses because of noncompliance. Serious breaches may even lead to criminal charges against executives, damaging reputations. Being diligent with your recordkeeping practices is essential for avoiding these costly penalties and maintaining your organization’s integrity. Loss of Sensitive Information Maintaining accurate staff records is vital, as failing to do so can expose sensitive employee information to unauthorized access and greatly increase the risk of identity theft and data breaches. If you don’t secure employee records properly, you may face legal penalties, including fines from agencies like OSHA and the U.S. Department of Labor for non-compliance with regulations. Inadequate disposal practices can result in lawsuits from employees alleging mishandling of their personal data. For businesses in regulated industries, improper record management might jeopardize licenses or government contracts, disrupting operations. Furthermore, executives could face criminal charges for serious noncompliance with data protection laws. Effective record retention policies are important to mitigate these risks and protect your organization. Best Practices for Document Management Effective document management is essential for any organization aiming to maintain compliance and protect sensitive information. To achieve this, consider adopting these best practices: Implement a centralized cloud-based HR information system (HRIS) to streamline document management, improve security, and guarantee compliance with recordkeeping regulations. Regularly audit and review your document retention policies, aligning them with state and federal requirements to minimize the risk of legal penalties for noncompliance. Utilize secure disposal methods, including shredding physical documents and employing secure deletion strategies for digital files, to safeguard employee privacy. Additionally, organize archived records using labeled banker’s boxes and acid-free filing supplies to ease access during audits. Training your staff on document management best practices is equally important, as it cultivates a culture of organizational accountability and assures accurate, compliant employee records. Following these steps helps you manage documents effectively as you reduce risks associated with sensitive information. Digitization and Automation of Records As organizations endeavor to improve their document management practices, digitization and automation of records play a pivotal role in streamlining processes and increasing efficiency. By adopting cloud-based HRIS platforms, you can centralize and secure employee files, guaranteeing efficient access and compliance with retention regulations. Digitization eliminates the need for physical copies, which reduces management overhead and minimizes the risk of lost or damaged documents. Automated systems with strong access permissions protect sensitive employee information, allowing for quick document retrieval as they maintain privacy. Furthermore, implementing regular backups in digital systems safeguards your data integrity and security against potential loss. Automation likewise streamlines document management processes, enabling HR teams to shift their focus from tedious manual recordkeeping tasks to strategic initiatives that drive organizational success. Embracing these technologies not only improves efficiency but also guarantees your records are managed in a compliant and secure manner. Secure Disposal of Outdated Records In relation to secure disposal of outdated records, grasping the proper methods is crucial for protecting sensitive employee information. You must take care when disposing of both physical and digital records to guarantee confidentiality and compliance with privacy laws. Here are some key practices to follow: Shred physical documents to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data. Use secure deletion strategies for digital records, assuring all data is permanently removed from all storage locations, including cloud backups. Maintain a structured system for tracking destruction dates, assuring timely disposal of records that have surpassed their retention period. Regular Audits and Reviews Regular audits and reviews of employee records are essential for maintaining compliance with legal requirements and your organization’s document retention policies. By conducting these audits regularly, like quarterly or annually, you can guarantee adherence to these policies and minimize the risk of penalties. Benefit Impact Identify Issues Early Prevent potential legal disputes Promote Accountability Guarantee HR understands record management Continuous Improvement Keep retention processes up to date Update Retention Schedules Align with changing regulations These regular checks not just help maintain organized records but serve as an opportunity to review and update retention schedules according to evolving business needs. By being proactive, you create a culture of accountability, reinforcing the importance of proper record management within your team. Global Considerations for Record Retention Understanding global considerations for record retention is crucial for organizations operating in multiple countries. Different legal requirements can impact your record-keeping practices notably. To guarantee compliance, you must understand local regulations and their implications. The European Union’s GDPR limits personal data retention to what’s necessary for its intended purpose. Specific retention periods for payroll or health records can vary widely, especially compared to U.S. standards. Noncompliance may lead to hefty fines and legal repercussions, emphasizing the importance of a robust policy. For multinational companies, developing a thorough record retention policy that addresses diverse legal obligations across jurisdictions is vital. This approach helps mitigate risks and maintains compliance with the varying laws governing employee records. Frequently Asked Questions How Long Should You Keep Old Employee Records? You should keep old employee records for various durations depending on the document type. For instance, retain Form I-9 for three years after hiring or one year post-employment, whichever is longer. Payroll records must be kept for at least four years because of IRS rules. FMLA documents need preservation for three years, whereas OSHA records require a minimum of five years. Exit interviews and termination letters should be stored for five to six years. What Records Should Be Kept for 7 Years? You should keep several records for seven years to guarantee compliance and protect against legal issues. This includes employee payroll records, W-2 forms, and tax documents. Furthermore, maintain FMLA records for at least seven years, especially if disputes arise. Records related to workplace injuries, involuntary terminations, performance evaluations, and disciplinary actions are likewise essential. Retaining these documents helps safeguard your organization against potential audits, claims, and legal challenges in the future. What Records Should Be Kept for 10 Years? You should keep several records for 10 years to safeguard against potential legal issues. This includes employee injuries and illnesses, termination records, and severance agreements. Retaining performance reviews and disciplinary records for this duration can likewise help defend against wrongful termination claims. Furthermore, consider holding onto employment eligibility records longer than the standard requirement, as this conservative approach guarantees compliance and protects your organization from unforeseen disputes. Why Do Jobs Keep Record for 7 Years? Jobs keep records for seven years to comply with legal requirements and protect against potential claims. This period aligns with the statute of limitations for discrimination and wrongful termination, which often ranges from two to six years. Furthermore, it meets IRS standards for payroll and tax documents. Conclusion In summary, comprehending how long to keep staff records is vital for compliance and operational efficiency. Retaining pre-hire records for two years, active employee records for seven years, and termination records for one to six years helps protect your organization legally. Don’t forget to securely dispose of outdated documents and conduct regular audits to maintain accuracy. By implementing effective record-keeping practices, you guarantee compliance with regulations during the process of safeguarding sensitive information, eventually supporting your organization’s success. Image via Google Gemini This article, "How Long to Keep Staff Records – A Quick Guide" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Keeping staff records is vital for both legal compliance and operational efficiency. You need to know how long to retain different types of records, from pre-hire documents to termination files. Each category has specific timelines that vary based on regulations and circumstances. Comprehending these requirements can prevent potential legal issues and streamline your processes. Nevertheless, the details can get complex, and knowing the best practices for securing and disposing of these records is fundamental. Key Takeaways Retain employee records for at least seven years post-employment to protect against legal issues and claims. Store pre-hire documents, such as applications and resumes, for a minimum of two years. Keep Form I-9 for three years after hire or one year after employment ends, whichever is longer. Maintain payroll and tax forms (W-4s) for at least four years following termination. Hold FMLA records for three years from the last recorded action to comply with legal requirements. Importance of Employee Record Retention In relation to managing your organization’s human resources, grasping the importance of employee record retention is vital. Comprehending how long to keep employee records can safeguard your organization from potential legal issues. Typically, retaining records for at least seven years post-employment serves as a conservative approach to protect against lawsuits and claims. It’s important to be aware of employee record retention by state, as specific laws can vary greatly. Proper documentation additionally supports operational efficiency during the retention period while safeguarding employee privacy. Certain records, like I-9 forms and FMLA documents, have distinct retention requirements that must be followed to maintain compliance with federal regulations. Regular audits of your recordkeeping practices not merely promote accountability within your HR team but also improve your organization’s overall risk management strategy. Pre-Hire Records Retention In relation to pre-hire records retention, you need to understand the key documentation types and the guidelines for how long to keep them. It’s vital to store items like job descriptions, applications, and interview notes for at least two years to comply with legal requirements and support operational efficiency. Retention Duration Guidelines Properly managing pre-hire records isn’t just a best practice; it’s vital for compliance and protecting your organization against potential legal issues. So, how long do you have to keep employee records? For pre-hire documents like job descriptions, applications, and resumes, it’s recommended to retain them for at least two years from the hiring decision date. This duration likewise applies to background checks and interview notes, ensuring you can effectively respond to any inquiries regarding the hiring process. References received during recruitment should be maintained for the same two years. By following these retention duration guidelines, you improve your compliance with employment regulations and safeguard against potential discrimination claims. Comprehending how long to keep employee files is fundamental for efficient record management. Essential Documentation Types Grasping the crucial documentation types required for pre-hire records is critical for maintaining compliance and ensuring a fair hiring process. You should retain job descriptions, applications, resumes, and cover letters for at least two years after the hiring decision. This duration supports compliance with employment regulations and protects against potential claims. Furthermore, background checks and interview notes must be stored for a minimum of two years to document candidate evaluation. References must be kept for at least two years post-decision for future inquiries. Comprehending how long to keep payroll records and how long employers can keep employee records further improves your knowledge of how long to keep staff records, ensuring effective management of critical documentation. Compliance Considerations Managing pre-hire records is not merely about keeping track of applications and resumes; it’s furthermore a matter of compliance with legal standards. You need to retain these records to protect your organization and adhere to regulations. Here’s a quick reference: Record Type Retention Period Job Descriptions 2 years Applications & Resumes 2 years Background Checks & Interview Notes 2 years from hiring decision References 2 years post-hiring Employment Eligibility Records (Form I-9) 3 years or 1 year after employment ends Staying compliant not only fulfills legal obligations but likewise safeguards you against potential claims of discrimination or unfair hiring practices. Being diligent in record retention is crucial for a smooth hiring process. Active Employee Records Retention When you manage active employee records, it’s crucial to understand how long to retain them for legal and operational purposes. Keeping these records organized guarantees compliance and protects your organization. Here are key retention timelines to remember: Employment eligibility records (Form I-9): Retain for three years after the hire date or one year after employment ends, whichever is longer. Payroll and tax forms (W-4s): Keep for a minimum of four years following the employee’s termination. FMLA records: Maintain for at least three years from the last recorded action. Additionally, OSHA records related to workplace injuries should be kept for five years after the calendar year they cover, whereas ADA records regarding disability accommodations need to be retained for one year after the last action. Tracking these timelines helps you stay organized and compliant with regulations. Termination Records Retention In terms of termination records, knowing the required retention periods is essential for your compliance and protection. You’ll need to keep records for involuntarily terminated employees for at least one year, whereas exit interviews and termination letters should be stored for five to six years. Furthermore, handling any disputes related to termination may require you to retain documentation for longer, ensuring you’re prepared for potential claims. Required Retention Periods Comprehending the required retention periods for termination records is vital for compliance and risk management. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) mandates that records of involuntarily terminated employees must be kept for at least one year. Furthermore, exit interviews and termination letters should be retained for 5-6 years to effectively manage potential claims. Severance agreements need to be stored according to your company policy and any applicable jurisdictional requirements, which can differ. Involuntary termination records: at least 1 year Exit interviews and termination letters: 5-6 years Severance agreements: as per company policy Keeping these records organized is significant for managing and defending against potential employment-related claims. Handling Dispute Documentation Maintaining thorough records of any disputes related to termination is vital for effective risk management and compliance. For involuntarily terminated employees, you must retain documentation for at least one year, as mandated by the EEOC. Nevertheless, to effectively manage potential claims, keep exit interviews and termination letters for 5 to 6 years. Severance agreements should align with your company policy and any relevant jurisdictional requirements, guaranteeing you’re prepared for future disputes. Moreover, records of disputes may require extended retention beyond typical periods to defend against legal challenges. By keeping extensive termination documentation, you not only safeguard your organization against potential legal claims but likewise guarantee adherence to regulatory requirements, helping maintain a compliant workplace. Exit Interviews Importance Exit interviews play a significant role in the retention of termination records, offering insights that can improve organizational effectiveness. Keeping these records for 5-6 years is crucial, as they provide valuable information about employee experiences and potential organizational improvements. Proper documentation helps in managing any claims related to wrongful termination or workplace disputes and identifies trends in employee turnover. Exit interviews serve as evidence in legal challenges, protecting your organization from liability. The EEOC mandates retaining records of involuntarily terminated employees, including exit interviews, for at least one year. Analyzing exit interviews can contribute to strategic HR planning, enabling you to create a better work environment. Medical Records Retention Though it might seem straightforward, comprehending how long to keep medical records is crucial for compliance with various regulations and the protection of employee privacy. You should retain medical records related to employee health for at least three years following the last treatment date, as required by FMLA and ADA regulations. OSHA mandates that you keep records of workplace injuries and illnesses for a minimum of five years after the incident occurs. According to HIPAA, medical records must be maintained for at least six years from the date they’re created or last updated. Moreover, records of drug testing and related medical information should be kept for at least one year after the test date. To guarantee compliance and protect employee privacy, make certain these medical records are securely stored and accessible only to authorized personnel. Keeping these timelines in mind will help safeguard both your organization and your employees. Compliance With Legal Requirements Keeping accurate staff records isn’t just about good practice; it’s also a necessity for compliance with various legal requirements. Different regulations dictate how long you must retain specific documents, and failing to comply can lead to serious consequences. Here are some key retention timelines you need to know: Employment eligibility records (Form I-9): Retain for three years after hire or one year after employment ends, whichever is longer. Payroll and tax forms (W-4s): Keep for at least four years post-employment to comply with IRS regulations. FMLA records: Required to be retained for a minimum of three years from the date of the record. Moreover, OSHA records related to workplace injuries must be kept for five years, and records for involuntarily terminated employees need to be retained for at least one year, as mandated by the EEOC. Risks of Improper Recordkeeping When you fail to keep accurate staff records, you open yourself up to serious legal penalties, including hefty fines from agencies like OSHA. Furthermore, losing sensitive information can lead to lawsuits, which not only drain your resources but likewise damage your organization’s reputation. It’s essential to understand these risks to maintain compliance and protect your business effectively. Legal Penalties Imposed Improper recordkeeping can lead to significant legal penalties that affect your organization on multiple fronts. Failing to maintain accurate employee records can invite scrutiny from federal agencies, resulting in hefty fines. Moreover, neglecting payroll or tax records can incur penalties and back taxes from the IRS, increasing your financial burden. Consider the following risks of improper recordkeeping: Legal fees and settlements from lawsuits filed by current or former employees. Potential loss of government contracts or state licenses because of noncompliance. Serious breaches may even lead to criminal charges against executives, damaging reputations. Being diligent with your recordkeeping practices is essential for avoiding these costly penalties and maintaining your organization’s integrity. Loss of Sensitive Information Maintaining accurate staff records is vital, as failing to do so can expose sensitive employee information to unauthorized access and greatly increase the risk of identity theft and data breaches. If you don’t secure employee records properly, you may face legal penalties, including fines from agencies like OSHA and the U.S. Department of Labor for non-compliance with regulations. Inadequate disposal practices can result in lawsuits from employees alleging mishandling of their personal data. For businesses in regulated industries, improper record management might jeopardize licenses or government contracts, disrupting operations. Furthermore, executives could face criminal charges for serious noncompliance with data protection laws. Effective record retention policies are important to mitigate these risks and protect your organization. Best Practices for Document Management Effective document management is essential for any organization aiming to maintain compliance and protect sensitive information. To achieve this, consider adopting these best practices: Implement a centralized cloud-based HR information system (HRIS) to streamline document management, improve security, and guarantee compliance with recordkeeping regulations. Regularly audit and review your document retention policies, aligning them with state and federal requirements to minimize the risk of legal penalties for noncompliance. Utilize secure disposal methods, including shredding physical documents and employing secure deletion strategies for digital files, to safeguard employee privacy. Additionally, organize archived records using labeled banker’s boxes and acid-free filing supplies to ease access during audits. Training your staff on document management best practices is equally important, as it cultivates a culture of organizational accountability and assures accurate, compliant employee records. Following these steps helps you manage documents effectively as you reduce risks associated with sensitive information. Digitization and Automation of Records As organizations endeavor to improve their document management practices, digitization and automation of records play a pivotal role in streamlining processes and increasing efficiency. By adopting cloud-based HRIS platforms, you can centralize and secure employee files, guaranteeing efficient access and compliance with retention regulations. Digitization eliminates the need for physical copies, which reduces management overhead and minimizes the risk of lost or damaged documents. Automated systems with strong access permissions protect sensitive employee information, allowing for quick document retrieval as they maintain privacy. Furthermore, implementing regular backups in digital systems safeguards your data integrity and security against potential loss. Automation likewise streamlines document management processes, enabling HR teams to shift their focus from tedious manual recordkeeping tasks to strategic initiatives that drive organizational success. Embracing these technologies not only improves efficiency but also guarantees your records are managed in a compliant and secure manner. Secure Disposal of Outdated Records In relation to secure disposal of outdated records, grasping the proper methods is crucial for protecting sensitive employee information. You must take care when disposing of both physical and digital records to guarantee confidentiality and compliance with privacy laws. Here are some key practices to follow: Shred physical documents to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data. Use secure deletion strategies for digital records, assuring all data is permanently removed from all storage locations, including cloud backups. Maintain a structured system for tracking destruction dates, assuring timely disposal of records that have surpassed their retention period. Regular Audits and Reviews Regular audits and reviews of employee records are essential for maintaining compliance with legal requirements and your organization’s document retention policies. By conducting these audits regularly, like quarterly or annually, you can guarantee adherence to these policies and minimize the risk of penalties. Benefit Impact Identify Issues Early Prevent potential legal disputes Promote Accountability Guarantee HR understands record management Continuous Improvement Keep retention processes up to date Update Retention Schedules Align with changing regulations These regular checks not just help maintain organized records but serve as an opportunity to review and update retention schedules according to evolving business needs. By being proactive, you create a culture of accountability, reinforcing the importance of proper record management within your team. Global Considerations for Record Retention Understanding global considerations for record retention is crucial for organizations operating in multiple countries. Different legal requirements can impact your record-keeping practices notably. To guarantee compliance, you must understand local regulations and their implications. The European Union’s GDPR limits personal data retention to what’s necessary for its intended purpose. Specific retention periods for payroll or health records can vary widely, especially compared to U.S. standards. Noncompliance may lead to hefty fines and legal repercussions, emphasizing the importance of a robust policy. For multinational companies, developing a thorough record retention policy that addresses diverse legal obligations across jurisdictions is vital. This approach helps mitigate risks and maintains compliance with the varying laws governing employee records. Frequently Asked Questions How Long Should You Keep Old Employee Records? You should keep old employee records for various durations depending on the document type. For instance, retain Form I-9 for three years after hiring or one year post-employment, whichever is longer. Payroll records must be kept for at least four years because of IRS rules. FMLA documents need preservation for three years, whereas OSHA records require a minimum of five years. Exit interviews and termination letters should be stored for five to six years. What Records Should Be Kept for 7 Years? You should keep several records for seven years to guarantee compliance and protect against legal issues. This includes employee payroll records, W-2 forms, and tax documents. Furthermore, maintain FMLA records for at least seven years, especially if disputes arise. Records related to workplace injuries, involuntary terminations, performance evaluations, and disciplinary actions are likewise essential. Retaining these documents helps safeguard your organization against potential audits, claims, and legal challenges in the future. What Records Should Be Kept for 10 Years? You should keep several records for 10 years to safeguard against potential legal issues. This includes employee injuries and illnesses, termination records, and severance agreements. Retaining performance reviews and disciplinary records for this duration can likewise help defend against wrongful termination claims. Furthermore, consider holding onto employment eligibility records longer than the standard requirement, as this conservative approach guarantees compliance and protects your organization from unforeseen disputes. Why Do Jobs Keep Record for 7 Years? Jobs keep records for seven years to comply with legal requirements and protect against potential claims. This period aligns with the statute of limitations for discrimination and wrongful termination, which often ranges from two to six years. Furthermore, it meets IRS standards for payroll and tax documents. Conclusion In summary, comprehending how long to keep staff records is vital for compliance and operational efficiency. Retaining pre-hire records for two years, active employee records for seven years, and termination records for one to six years helps protect your organization legally. Don’t forget to securely dispose of outdated documents and conduct regular audits to maintain accuracy. By implementing effective record-keeping practices, you guarantee compliance with regulations during the process of safeguarding sensitive information, eventually supporting your organization’s success. Image via Google Gemini This article, "How Long to Keep Staff Records – A Quick Guide" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Is it reasonable to ask teams to “host” coffee hours? My new-ish boss implemented division-wide monthly coffee hours when he started a couple years ago, and it’s been a nice way to get out of your office and talk to others (our division is spread out on a college campus). Due to cost-cutting measures, he is no longer able to spend the small amount of money for these events. Instead, we are asking teams within the division to “host” coffee hours by bringing food in. The administrative assistant is able to help brew coffee, set up, and clean up. This does not seem unreasonable to me, and I signed my team up to host, imagining people could bring whatever was simple for them (some will bake, some will purchase on the way into work). I received a lot of blowback! Some complain they don’t go to the coffee hours and don’t want to be forced to by hosting, some don’t eat due to dietary restrictions or other reasons, some don’t think it’s fair to ask them to spend their own money on a work-related event, and some preemptively complain that the same people will bring the food/do the work and others will do nothing (I suspect they refer to gender roles, something I am very aware of and plan to mitigate). Is this too much to ask? I really am trying to support my boss’s idea of building community, while also making it accessible to those on my team. Some teams like this sort of thing and are happy to participate. Others really don’t — and when that’s the case, asking people to spend their own time and money to fund a work activity that they’re not interested in is likely to grate. Where that’s the case, it’s really not a good idea to do it; the point is to build morale, and you risk doing the opposite. It’s not going to build community if half the people there are annoyed and resentful. It’s also really not reasonable to try to shift the cost of a business activity on to employees, and doubly so when they’re actively telling you they don’t want to participate. If it’s serving a necessary business purpose, the employer should pay for it. If there’s no money for it, that means it can’t happen — not that the employer should draft employees into funding it themselves. 2. How to deal with a more senior coworker who demands that I do things “right now!” We wear uniforms at my workplace, and recently our directed implemented new uniform shirts. About a week ago, we received the new shirts. (They’re ugly! But that’s not the point.) A team lead (not mine) who I’ll call Lee demanded that I put on the uniform immediately. I told them that I would like to wash the pieces before I wear them, and I would wear the new shirt tomorrow. Factory chemicals, ewww! (The chemicals used in manufacturing causes me to break out, and a trip through the laundry usually helps.) This was apparently unacceptable, and they stated the demand again. I looked at the shirts that I received. They were all the wrong size. Lee told me to try it on and show them, so I did. The snap-down front stretched so tight over my chest that I felt uncomfortable wearing it. Lee tried to convince me to wear it anyway. I refused, and told my team lead how Lee was treating me. My team lead, Jane, was surprised, because she hadn’t heard of the immediate uniform change, and I was informed that my correct size would be ordered. Nothing happened after that; it was a normal day. I’ve had some time off, and haven’t heard anything further. Lee has a history of overstepping their authority. I think this happens because they see the director every day. My team works out of a different building, and the director rarely comes back there. I need some scripts for Lee, when they try to pull me away from my (extremely time-sensitive) tasks to do something “right now!” “I’ll need to check with Jane because she told me to prioritize X.” “Sure, let me check with Jane.” “I need to finish X right now, but you could check with Jane if you want this to bump that.” With something like the shirts, where it’s not about competing tasks: “Let me talk with Jane, since she’s normally fine with me doing X instead.” You can also just go talk with Jane on the spot, explain what Lee is asking, and ask if she wants you to do that or not (and explain why you think you shouldn’t, when that’s the case). It sounds like it would be worth talking to Jane about the pattern, too: “Lee often asks me to do things that I don’t think you’d agree with like X or Y, wants them done immediately, and is pretty aggressive if I push back. How should I be handling that when it happens?” 3. Can your company make you say the Pledge of Allegiance? I was watching an episode of The Office, and it started with the entire office reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to start their day. It struck me that I would have a real problem with being told to do this and would likely refuse. Hypothetically, could your employer force you to recite the Pledge? Would you have any legal recourse if you faced repercussions for refusing? It would be extremely odd and unusual for them to do that — which is why it was used as a source of comedy on The Office — but in general a private employer could require you to do it, as long as they made exceptions for people who wanted to opt out for reasons covered by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, such as national origin (like if you were from another country) or religious objection (some religions object to pledging allegiance or saluting a flag). 4. Should the alternate contact listed in an out-of-office reply actually be available? What is customary for out-of-office replies — is it important to be sure the person you list as a contact while you are out will be available during your absence? We are required to say in our out-of-office reply who can be contacted for urgent matters. In most cases, it is our supervisor. Last spring, when I had an out-of-office reply that said to contact my boss while I was out for a week, my grandboss noticed that my boss was also out during most of my trip and pointed out that I should give someone else’s name for immediate assistance. So I changed my out-of-office to say to contact one of my boss’s peers for urgent matters before I returned. Now I’m not sure whether to apply this same standard to those I manage. I was off for about a week again and totally disconnected from work email. My boss and direct reports have my cell number and can text me if needed. It is rare that someone has an urgent matter that needs a response from me when I’m out, but that is the arrangement and it works well. The day before I came back, one of my direct reports texted that they’d be out sick and asked me to make some quick changes to their calendar. In that process, I emailed her and one other person. They both still had out-of-office replies on for the holiday that had been the day before, and both said to contact me for immediate assistance. Before I tell them that they should have listed someone else (my boss, for example), I want to make sure this is really a customary expectation. Yes, it is. If your out-of-office message tells people to contact someone else in your absence, that person should actually be available. Otherwise, you’re setting people up for a frustrating chase where they they’re told “X will help you” and then X does not in fact help them. Obviously there are times when this system will fail; you might set up an out-of-office assuming Person X will be available, but then Person X is unexpectedly out sick that day — but as a general rule, you shouldn’t list people without checking that they’ll actually be around and available. 5. My job is planning around me because they don’t know I’ll be leaving soon I recently accepted a job offer that I’m extremely excited about. It is pending final HR approval, so I haven’t put in my notice or anything, but I have been given a start date almost two months ago. I was told that my new job was hoping to have the approval in place sooner, but, it sounds like there’s a batch of positions that HR is going to approve around the same time. My concern is that I have a leadership role in my current job, and my office is going through some changes. My direct supervisor is very much planning on me taking an active role in training new people who are going to be brought on. I can’t give notice yet, but I’m feeling guilty about not being able to give any kind of heads up to him. Is there anything I can do, or do I just need to hope I’m able to let him know soon about my future plans? You need to proceed as if you’re not leaving until the other job is completely finalized. While it probably won’t fall through, sometimes that does happen (or the start date gets pushed back further than you were anticipating). You don’t want to give notice until you’re actually ready to give notice, and while that can make things less convenient for your employer, it’s just the way this stuff goes because you can’t be expected to jeopardize your own financial security to mitigate that for them. But this happens! People leave jobs all the time when those jobs were planning around them for all sorts of things, and people figure it out. Your current job will too. The post can we ask teams to “host” coffee hours, coworker demands that I do things “right now,” and more appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

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