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Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, employee burnout was a growing problem for American businesses with Deloitte finding in a survey that 77 percent of U.S. corporate professionals had experienced burnout at their current job.

Since the coronavirus crisis, employee productivity has been sabotaged by burnout, not just at the executive level, but on all rungs of the company ladder.

One-to-one meetings are more important than ever as many companies continue to guide a workforce that is remote or transitioning to a hybrid model with limited time in the office.

“Distance creates a new set of challenges that leaders must acknowledge and conquer so they can connect with and inspire their people. Maintaining relationships with your people—and strengthening relationships among your people—needs to be a primary objective,” writes William Arruda in Forbes.

It seems that all the business rules changed in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and that includes employee engagement in the United States.

Despite a shift overnight for many companies to a remote work model, employees reported record-levels of engagement during the year.

The origins of SWOT analysis are murky, but the strategic planning technique first became popularized in the early 1970s by Albert Humphrey at the Stanford Research Institute just as Silicon Valley was incubating into a global tech hotspot.

During these uncertain times of the COVID-19 pandemic we are reminded of former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s “known knowns” quote which is popular in corporate strategic planning.

Rumsfeld said: “[A]s we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

It is no secret that professional football is big business, but some people would be surprised how much NFL teams have in common with big companies such as Google and Amazon when it comes to measuring performances and using scorecards to target success.

Take the NFL 2020 season opener between defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs and the Houston Texans, for example.

Most people have a love-hate relationship with meetings. They love productive meetings, but hate time spent away from their desks.

Then there is humorist Dave Barry, who has a hate-hate relationship with meetings, saying: “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings’.” With apologies to Barry, meetings are not going away any time soon.

Flu season is here. Unfortunately, far too few businesses have invested heavily in combating the flu season as part of their risk management plans. One case of the flu where an employee comes to work while infected can spread through your entire staff like wildfire — eradicating productivity and making your office look like a ghost of Christmas past.

Critics of the performance review have long pushed for its extinction. And it's easy to jump on the bandwagon. When implemented incorrectly, performance reviews can feel outdated, cumbersome, and outright disingenuous. But when handled strategically, the performance review can bring benefits that far outweigh the cost of the process.

Here are five key reasons to keep and perhaps upgrade the performance review for your organization.