Coronavirus News (224)

 Universities sound alarm as coronavirus cases emerge just days into classes — 530 at one campus

Is Your Organization Ready for Permanent WFH?  organizations large and small are realizing that jobs we used to assume had to be done on-site can in fact be done remotely .........  Many companies, including Twitter and Facebook, are moving to make certain roles permanently remote .........  Americans live 16 miles from the office on average, and about 98% live within 50 miles of their offices ..........  CEOs of the top fully-remote organizations cite access to distributed talent as a key competitive advantage .........  people are willing to give up as much as 8% of their pay for the opportunity to work from home ........  before the pandemic Americans spent more than 52 minutes every day, on average, commuting to and from the office ...........  shifting to remote work could free up the equivalent of 28 to nearly 50 workdays per year per employee ............  Map out critical tasks and needed competencies. ............  Once you know what competencies you need, you can start thinking about which roles can be sourced locally and which will need to be remote-friendly to attract more-elusive, competitive talent. ........  Remote work makes it easy to miss the socioemotional undertones communicated through nonverbal cues (gestures, body position) and paralinguistic cues (tone, pace, pitch), making collaboration especially difficult. ..........  To overcome these communication and coordination challenges, focus on building clearer hierarchies and formal organizational processes. Don’t hesitate to put pen to paper to sketch out more-detailed job descriptions and reporting lines along with guidelines for how to get work done. Engage your employees in the process to capture their knowledge and create a shared sense of ownership. And where possible, structure teams and tasks such that employees on a particular task are either all remote or all in person. Hybrid teams with both remote and on-site employees can have the greatest communication challenges. ...........  encouraging video calls as well as more-frequent, shorter meetings to provide more social contact points can improve remote collaboration ..........   Investing in tools and software for remote collaboration, such as virtual whiteboards, project management software, and high-quality webcams and microphones, can further help your team meet the challenges of remote work.   

Could Russia side with the US and India against China? Cracks are opening in the Russia-China relationship, from the status of Vladivostok to Russian arms sales to India The biggest crack involves New Delhi’s suggestion that Moscow join the US-led Indo-Pacific grouping, which is widely seen as anti-China .......   “The Chinese are also engaged in reverse engineering Russia’s military technology and then trying to sell indigenous platforms based on Russian designs, thereby competing against Russia on the global arms sales market”  .................    throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union had been a close friend of India, and the relationship remained warm today.