It’s March. The sun is shining, and it feels like spring is on the way. A week where the world felt like it was shifting—seasons changing, politics unravelling, and everything moving just a little too fast.

This week at work

• Started planning a programme to assess a client’s digital workplace skills and capabilities—identifying gaps and how to fill them. Too often, organisations fixate on platforms, forgetting that success needs equal focus on platforms, processes, and people. And people are the hardest to get right, so they need early attention. Refreshing to have a client prioritise this. Looking forward to getting stuck in.
• Shared our recent work on digital workplace maturity with an industry ‘sounding board.’ Positive feedback so far—some useful tweaks to make, but overall, we’re on the right track.
• Started developing my keynote for LumApps’ Bright conferences in Chicago and Paris. First event’s not until late April, but with work about to get busy, I’m getting ahead so I’m not scrambling later.
• Adjusted an intranet delivery programme to flex around changes on the client’s side.

Also this week

My PowerPints appearance—”the world’s best (only) PowerPoint-based comedy show”—is next week, so I sketched out my material and slides. I think it’s in good shape now. Just need to work on delivery.

If you’re in Amsterdam, come down and watch.

With International Women’s Day approaching, it’s time for my annual round of calling out corporate hypocrisy. I’ve been compiling data on pay, discrimination and flexible work (with a lot of heavy lifting by Perplexity and Chat GPT!) so I’m ready to respond on IWD.

I put out a call for tips on which firms deserve scrutiny, with an anonymous form for people to share details if they don’t feel able to call them out themselves. The responses have been rolling in. Plenty of grim stories of maternity discrimination and unequal pay. If you’d like me to take a look at your employer/former employer, drop me some deets here.

Went to my first Expats in Amsterdam meet-up. Five and a half years here, but the whole ‘meeting new people in your new city’ thing passed me by during the pandemic, and I never really caught up. Surprisingly good mix—new arrivals, long-timers, all sorts. Might even go again.

Two very different gigs this week:

Hinds at Tolhuistuin – Their infectious energy is impossible to resist. Even as a duo, Carlotta and Ana keep the party spirit alive, turning the gig into a chaotic, joy-filled conversation with the crowd. Their latest album Viva Hinds brings a more polished sound, but on stage, they’re as raw, fun, and effortlessly cool as ever.

Dubioza Kolektiv at Paradiso – Second time seeing them live, and as ever, a whirlwind of energy and positivity. And positivity was sorely needed—as the post-war global order crumbled live on TV from the White House, people filtered into the venue. The band led a singalong to Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds, a thousand voices belting out “every little thing is gonna be alright”. Strange, beautiful, or just wishful thinking—because by then, we all knew it almost certainly wasn’t.

Consuming

👩🏻‍💻 Internetting
What’s in my browser this week

• It’s been five years since the world changed overnight when Covid hit. Long enough now to reflect on what changed for good, rather than just a temporary blip we’d rather forget. This Guardian piece asks experts in politics, business, work, arts, and psychology about the unexpected consequences. A super interesting read.
• Kind-of-relatedly, one of the more obvious outcomes of the pandemic was the rapid shift to remote work—a shift that’s clearly long-term. That’s reshaped how we manage people and teams, but one under-discussed aspect is the rise of monitoring and algorithmic “management” across many types of work, from gig-economy drivers to warehouse and office employees. This piece in MIT Tech Review gives a clear (and worrying) overview.
  
  FWIW, I think algorithmic supervision is inevitable in remote work, but it needs much greater dialogue between employers and employees. People should know what’s being tracked and why, with transparency and accountability in place—otherwise, workers are at the mercy of automated tools that measure, judge, and potentially replace them, often with little recourse.

📺 Watching

Binge-watched the first five episodes of Apple Cider Vinegar, the dramatisation of Aussie fake wellness influencer Belle Gibson’s rise and fall. It’s proper trash TV, in the best way. Over-the-top performances, wild embellishments, and a steady drip-feed of how did she get away with this? moments make it compulsively watchable. Not exactly highbrow, but as a glossy, scandalous take on influencer culture, it delivers.

📚 Reading

Nothing much this week.

🎧 Listening

Hinds’ cover of Davey Crockett sent me back to the original by Thee Headcoats, and down a garage rock rabbit hole.

Connections

Caught up with my old pal Tony Stewart to talk freelancing and the eternal struggle between having a clear proposition and keeping things broad enough for varied work. Go too broad, and you’re indistinguishable in a sea of consultants. Go too narrow, and you risk being ruled out of work that’s easily within your skillset.

Coverage

Back in October, I keynoted at the Global Marketing Summit in Istanbul on employee advocacy—the role of internal comms in giving employees the confidence, psychological safety, and knowledge to be strong brand advocates. This week, Fady Ramzy, who I met there, invited me onto his LinkedIn Live to dive into it further. You can watch it back here.

(First LinkedIn Live—more fun than expected. Should I do more?)

This week in pics