Dear members—
Dealing with conflict can be especially difficult when working remotely, particularly for those of us not used to it. Our most recent Quartz at Work workshop was about how to communicate effectively while working remotely, including how to disagree and manage conflict.
Amy Gallo, a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review, offered four steps for handling work conflicts:
- Understand where the other person is coming from.
- Know what you’re disagreeing about.
- Determine your goal.
- Decide how to proceed.
She and Quartz executive editor Heather Landy discussed how to go through this process remotely, and Dustin York, associate professor of communications at Maryville University, offered tips on nonverbal communication over video calls. (He says you’ll be perceived as more trustworthy if you lean forward slightly.)
You can watch the whole video or read all the tips here, and summaries and recordings of all our past workshops are here.
STREAMING WARS, CONT.
This week’s field guide for members was all about Netflix and the many new streaming services that it now has to compete with. In the mere four days since the guide published, a new rival launched: HBO Max. In this article, Quartz’s Adam Epstein explains why it matters and what it does well:
A product of AT&T-owned WarnerMedia, HBO Max allows users to stream all HBO shows alongside a variety of content the WarnerMedia owns or has licensed, including movies from Warner Bros. and shows from Cartoon Network, TNT, CNN, and more. Altogether, WarnerMedia says the service offers more than 10,000 hours of content—roughly double the amount available on Disney’s streaming service, Disney+, when it launched last year.
Check out the full guide to learn about Netflix’s other competitors and how it is responding.
A SIMPLE RULE FOR DECISION-MAKING
“If the choice is between action and inaction, and you’re genuinely unsure about what to do, choose action.” That’s the upshot of this article by Quartz’s Sarah Todd, describing recent research by Steven Levitt, the University of Chicago economist of Freakonomics fame. The study had people make decisions with a coin flip, and those who got heads and made a life change turned out happier for it, on average. There are plenty of caveats to the study, which Sarah describes, but the intuition behind it should sound familiar: “We’re biased toward upholding the status quo, but it’s a bias that hurts us.”
Best wishes for a restful weekend,
Walter Frick
Membership editor, Quartz