Santa Claus can deliver presents this year (video)

 

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Adopt a Christmas letter

 

For more than a century, it was a simple way of making a child’s dreams come true during Christmas. Volunteers could go to the post office, sift through piles of letters that children had sent to Santa Claus and pick one — or more — that tugged at their heartstrings. Gifts were then acquired, wrapped and shipped to families whose space beneath the tree might otherwise be bare.

With the coronavirus pandemic still raging, however, the U.S. Postal Service is taking its annual “Operation Santa” campaign nationwide and letters to Santa are uploaded to the Operation Santa website.  Postal customers can read them and choose to send gifts with their responses, with a signature saying it’s from Santa (or St. Nick, Kris Kringle or any of Santa’s many names).

“Covid-19 has caused undue hardships, both financial and emotional, to so many Americans this year,” Kimberly Frum, a spokeswoman for the Postal Service, said in an email. “The program provides kids and families with an opportunity to receive gifts during the holidays from anonymous, generous postal customers.”

Operation Santa expects to receive a record surge in letters this year — and not just because it's the first time in the program's 108 year history that the Postal Service has expanded it nationwide.

As of Friday morning, more than 23,000 of the letters had been adopted, and USPS continues to refresh its site with new letters each day.

Erlanger Turner, a clinical psychologist who specializes in parenting and child behavior, says letters to Santa can be a beneficial exercise for kids' mental health.

"Narrative therapy approaches, where we write out our feelings and emotions and experiences, is really helpful," said Turner. "You could definitely see in the letters that kids are witnessing stress that their parents are feeling, in terms of financial concerns."

The letters to Santa, he added, can provide a starting point for families to begin talking about some of these difficult subjects.

"Sometimes parents don't even mention those things or have conversations with them about their financial struggles, but kids see things," said Turner.

To this day, Damion DiGrazia is driven by the thoughtfulness behind a gift he received through Operation Santa.

DiGrazia had been living in low-income housing with his two siblings and his single mother when she told him he should write a letter asking Santa for two things — "just in case Santa can't get one or the other," he recalled.

He wanted an alarm clock — to help him "be more independent" — and a radio for entertainment. When Christmas arrived, he got something he couldn't even imagine he wanted: a two-in-one alarm clock radio.

"It was the best thing ever," said DiGrazia.

About five years ago, he started his own Operation Santa spinoff program, eventually leaving his career on Wall Street. He founded Santa's Knights, a nonprofit in New York City's Harlem neighborhood that runs its own holiday letter adoption effort.

Earlier this month, a letter with a distressing request landed in his inbox.

Eight-year-old Morgan wrote, "This year has been hard for my family. We had to leave our house. Could you help Santa?"

Morgan's mother, Jeanine Campbell, was searching for charities that might help give her young daughters a merrier holiday when she discovered DiGrazia's site. That's when she helped her two girls, London, 3, and Morgan, write a letter to Santa. The family is asking for warm clothes, diapers and Barbies.

In March, Morgan’s mother, a teacher from St. Petersburg, Fla., lost her second job — helping kids at an after-school learning program — when classes went virtual. Then, over the summer, the 33-year-old said she emptied her savings. But a reply from Santa's Knights was a bright spot amid the stress.

"I was very blessed when I got an email that said that they would do whatever they can to help the kids," Campbell said. "I was overjoyed."

"They keep asking me, 'Mommy, did Santa get our letters?' " she said. "Before this happened, I wasn't sure that they would have anything. It's really moved me to be able to be so happy that, yeah, Santa's going to get them — he'll do what he can. I'm so grateful because I didn't know, I really didn't know that this was going to happen."

From NPR News (edited)

Why did NYC oldest bookstore website crush? (video)

 

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'Daddy Dressed Me' founder (audio)

 

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A 4-day workweek for 5 days’ pay

Unilever New Zealand will begin a one-year experiment to allow all 81 of its employees to earn their full salaries while working one day fewer per week, a move the company said might actually boost productivity and improve employees’ work-life balance.

The company, which imports and distributes Lipton tea, Dove soap, Vaseline and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, is the latest to experiment with the long-discussed four-day workweek.

Nick Bangs, managing director of Unilever New Zealand, said the four-day-week experiment is a fundamental shift in how the company views its work force.

“Our goal is to measure performance on output, not time,” Mr. Bangs said. “We believe the old ways of working are outdated and no longer fit for purpose. The goal is to get the same amount of work done in fewer hours for the same pay.”

The move to a four-day workweek has been around for decades. Anyway, in a work-centric culture, people simply are not wired to unplug from the office, particularly in industries like finance, medicine and consulting.

Social changes, like the push to work remotely, might lead to a reformulation of what success actually requires.

Chris Bailey, the author of the books “The Productivity Project” and “Hyperfocus” says that producing 40 hours of work in 32 hours takes more than a firm deadline.. The other ingredients are energy and attention.

As for Mr. Bangs in New Zealand, he is leading by example.

“Yes, I will be working a four-day week,” he said. “I have three young children, so I’m looking forward to spending more time with them, as well as using the extra time to learn new skills.”

 

From The New York Times (edited)

Fights over politics and relationships (video)

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Hawaii and remote workers

CNN - What better way to survive a pandemic than to do it on a beach in Hawaii?

For anyone who finds the idea dreamy, Hawaii is offering free round trip tickets to Oahu to out-of-state remote workers who want to live and work there while contributing to the state's economy.

The state launched the temporary residency program, known as "Movers and Shakas," in collaboration with schools and businesses. It's accepting its first group of applicants until December 22.

"Movers and Shakas is a small step towards economic recovery and diversifying our economy," Jason Higa, the group's founder, told CNN.

"The pandemic," he said, "has normalized remote work for the foreseeable future, so we believe this situation presents an opportunity for local residents to return home, and for out of state professionals to experience Hawaii, not as tourists, but as contributing members of our community."

Fifty people will be chosen for the first cohort. To apply, you must be a remote worker and at least 18 years old.

Participants will have to move to Hawai'e within one month of being selected and must spend at least 30 consecutive days in Hawaii.

"Hawai'i currently has the lowest rate per capita of Covid infections in the country, also making it one of the safest places to live and work," according to the program's news release.

"Movers and Shakas" is specifically looking for individuals who want to contribute to Hawaii's local communities.

Those accepted into the program are required to commit a few hours every week to a nonprofit where they can use their knowledge and skills.

Though the program will accept remote workers from across the United States, it's also geared towards former Hawaii residents who want to return.

Among those people is Richard Matsui, a Movers and Shakas founder who recently returned to Hawaii from San Francisco.  He told CNN

"I was born and raised in Hawaii and my dream was to move back home. The pandemic normalized remote work and I took the opportunity to relocate home."

Matsui also pointed to one of the program's central goals: to help diversify the economy.

"Beyond bringing in valuable dollars into our local businesses, the real value of the program is bringing talented knowledge workers who will help to build our communities through volunteer work and to make our economy more resilient," Matsui said. "On the one hand, the pandemic is an enormous crisis, but on the other it presents Hawaii with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to diversify our economy."

 From CNN (edited)

Celebrity chef Vikas Khanna (audio)

 

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Managers and the pandemic

Businesses are still struggling to understand which of the pandemic’s effects will be temporary and which will turn out to be permanent. 

Three new reports attempt to analyze these longer-term trends. One is from Glassdoor, a website that allows workers to rank their employers. Another is from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a management consultancy. The third is from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), a British professional body. Read together, they imply that firms stand to benefit—but that managers’ lives are about to get more difficult.

One change that is all but certain to last is employees spending more of their time working at home. The Glassdoor report finds that less commuting has improved employee health and morale. Splitting the week between the home and the office is also overwhelmingly popular with workers: 70% of those surveyed wanted such a combination, 26% wanted to stay at home and just 4% desired a full-time return to the office. Perhaps as a consequence, remote work has not dented productivity—and indeed improved it in some areas. Flexible work schedules can be a cheap way to retain employees who have child-care and other home responsibilities.

Telecommuting offers other potential cost savings, and not just the reduced need for office space. Remote workers do not need to live in big cities where property is expensive. If they live in cheaper towns and suburbs, companies don't need to pay them as much. Glassdoor estimates that software engineers and developers who leave San Francisco could eventually face salary cuts of 21-25%; those quitting New York could expect reductions of 10-12%. As the report points out, remote employees are, in essence, competing with a global workforce and are thus in a much weaker bargaining position.

Despite its advantages, a remote workforce brings challenges for managers, as the third report demonstrates. The CMI surveyed 2,300 managers and employees. The survey shows that the experience of remote working has not been uniform. Of those working virtually, 69% of women with children want to work at least one day from home when the pandemic ends, compared with 56% of men with kids.

The results highlight just how important effective communication is to good management. They also unearthed an interesting difference of perspective: nearly half of senior executives thought they were engaging employees more in decision-making since the pandemic, but only 27% of employees agreed.

Ironically, though managers may have feared that remote working would allow employees to slack, it may be that managers have not been up to the challenge. Bosses may have spent too much time videoconferencing and not enough speaking directly with subordinates.

In a world of remote working, employees stress how the employer communicates with them. Not so much “management by walking around” as management by phoning—or Zooming—around. It is time to get dialing.

 

From The Economist (edited)