The Must-Read Articles for Talent Professionals This Week

According to a recent article from Behavioral Scientist, many desk workers — yes, that includes recruiters and talent development pros — are “caught up in a busyness culture.”

What does that mean exactly? Well, consider the following research and data that Behavioral Scientist cites in the article:

Desk workers in an office setting are interrupted almost every three minutes and it can take — on average — 23 minutes and 15 seconds for them to get back on track and where they were before the interruption.
Non-executive workers spend about 10 hours per week in meetings and say 43% are a waste of time.
And perhaps most damning of all, one study found that “after accounting for meetings, excessive emails, office chitchat, or unproductive conversations and low-value administrative tasks — all unproductive busywork — the typical middle manager has only six and a half uninterrupted hours a week to do their actual work.”

All of this busyness adds up to desk workers feeling overwhelmed with somewhat performative busywork and burnt out from trying to tackle their more important work outside their regular office hours. “In conversation after conversation,” Behavioral Scientist writes, “workers said they spent their days being super busy, rushing from one meeting to the next, jumping on and off the phone, and plowing through their email. It was only at what should have been the end of the paid workday that they realized they hadn’t gotten to the one big thing they really needed to do.”

Sound familiar? If so, be sure to check out some possible solutions to busyness culture — including enforcing meeting hygiene, adopting “vacation roulette,” and launching an “It Can Wait” email campaign — in the article at the top of our list below of must read articles for talent professionals.

And further down our list, you can also learn why the resume is dead but we’re still stuck using it; how to lead during a turbulent U.S. election year; and why working women have been stuck with an additional digital burden.