Inside the culture at OpenAI

ALSO: the GenZ stare, how Moderna merged HR with IT and much more

A huge range of different workplace culture links this week.

From why young workers might be less likely to come along to social events, how RTO mandates are getting on, how one firm merged IT and HR to redesign work, the culture at OpenAI, what to do if your business model is based on billable hours and yes, ending on the Gen Z stare.

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• Struggling to get younger team members to company social events? 15-24 year olds party 70% less now than the same age did 20 years ago - you might need to be a bit more inventive with your team bonding plans. More stats on this (US data):

  • Men (who watch TV) now spend 7 hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend with friends

  • The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends with human friends

• Booze isn’t the magic ingredient any more: along adjacent lines two-thirds of people say they drink because of their job (whether at work events, under pressure from their boss or to cope with the stress of work pressure). Campaign group Alcohol Change want to encourage workplaces to move on from using alcohol in professional settings

• Wondering how the RTO mandates are going at places like JP Morgan? Largely they’re being ignored finds an investigation by Inc

• Meanwhile the threat of being summoned back to the office is creating stress at work - more than a third of workers say their wellbeing has suffered from the angst of being forced back. (On the flip side, 87% of women say hybrid working has improved their wellbeing)

• Moderna merged its HR and IT departments to ensure that they had a progressive approach to being intentional about future work. It involved ‘redesigning teams across the company based on what work is best done by people versus what can be automated with technology… with roles being created, eliminated and reimagined as a result’. ‘The company now has developed over 3,000 custom GPTs, that are designed to [automate] specific tasks’

• Another good article about AI’s impact on work from the New York Times which uses a real life example of when Chat GPT got briefly banned in Italy and the impact it had on mid-level coders

• Scott Galloway: ‘AI is corporate Ozempic, you can have the great taste of growth without the calories of more people’ - a good discussion between Galloway and Jaime Teevan, chief scientist at Microsoft (with the caveat that Galloway does tend to return to the same 5 or 6 soundbites whenever you see him). They talk about the importance of the skill of integrating AI into our work, using AI as a personal mentor and more

• Fascinating Reuters analysis about the challenge facing professions based on billable hours. For example 82% of the work of US law firms is charged by the hour (with rates of up to $3k per hour for senior partners). In the US industry regulations from the American Bar Association say that lawyers can only charge for actual time spent on work, even if AI makes it quicker. It’s estimated 44% of legal tasks will be automated potentially wiping out huge chunks of billable income. In the old days an NDA might take hours to write, now it can be generated with a single prompt. The suggestion is that the big firms will move to flat project fees to protect revenue - but it’s clear that there is huge scope for discounting and disruption

• Ever wondered what the culture of an organisation like OpenAI is like? In this post someone who left the firm three weeks ago breaks down the inner working of the organisation’s culture. (‘Everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack’). The place sounds simultaneously highly secretive (‘I couldn't tell anyone what I was working on’) and slightly chaotic (‘There must've been ~3-4 different Codex prototypes floating around before we decided to push for a launch. These efforts are usually taken by a small handful of individuals without asking permission’)

• In the UK bosses will be banned from using NDA’s to prevent disclosure of wrong doing - would be lively if they made this retrospective

• Canva gave all employees a week off to go and learn about AI

• Work from home rates are higher for younger and female CEOs:

  

• People should be free to do their jobs - especially doctors in a war zone. Please ensure you watch Gaza: Doctors Under Attack. It documents how medical staff have been routinely targeted by occupying forces in Israel. The murder of medical staff has often only exposed when phone footage has been uncovered on the bodies of victims ‘they didn’t have their emergency lights on, that’s why we killed them all’ is revealed to be untrue when video of multiple flashing lights is found for example. One day everyone will have always been against this - it's what you say today that matters

• ‘Oh no, they used the meeting before the big meeting to prepare the ways to sabotage your arguments in the meeting’

• Enjoyable TikTok about our work behaviour being the shadow cast by our real lives - I can definitely recognise some of this in the people I’ve worked with

• Have you been on the receiving end of the Gen Z stare? A vacant confused stare in response to something seen as stupid. There’s been a lot of chatter on this one this week (I have to say I do recognise some of it):

  

  @7newsaustraliaThe so-called 'Gen Z stare' has divided the internet - and even generations - with people arguing that it has become a real problem in the workplace. #genzstare #stare #genz #workplace #debate #internet #7NEWS

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