culture | Mo.bi

South Korea’s Solution to the Plague of “Overtime Culture”: Shut it Down

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In South Korea, it’s not abnormal for workers to slave away for 12 hours a day. Workers burn themselves out to show they are diligent and dedicated. The country’s crazy work culture fueled South Korea’s economic boom, but it’s now taking a toll on its people — birth rates have plummeted (Korea stands at the bottom of the OECD countries for fertility rate), while suicide rates have risen.

The government has decided that things need to change. It’s already reduced the maximum working hours per week from 68 to 52. And now, the government has launched a mandatory shutdown of all employees’ computers at the end of each week —the ultimate target is for all computers to be shut off by 7 PM every Friday, the BBC reports.

The report doesn’t mention how, exactly, offices are supposed to implement the plan, nor penalties for employers and employees that don’t comply. But the measure, which will be rolled out over the next three months, doesn’t exactly seem draconian. So, what’s all the fuss about?

For comparison, let’s glance at some stats about workers in countries like Germany, Denmark or Norway. There, workers spend between 1363 and 1424 per year at the office. For workers in South Korea, however, that time at work looks more like 2069 hours. So for them, starting the weekend at 7 in the evening is a big shift.

Yes, South Korea’s situation is somewhat extreme. But it’s not the only nation that could do with a hard look at its work culture. Employees in the U.S., for example, spend an average 1783 hours at work every year. That’s more than the 1713 hours of the average worker in Japan, which is often labeled a “workaholic” society.

In the U.S., Amazon is free to impose “mandatory overtime” and push its employees to work up to 60 hours a week, according to numerous Glassdoor reviews (the policy came under scrutiny in countries such as the U.K.). The U.S. is also the only country in the developed world that doesn’t grant paid leave to new mothers, who face discrimination or financial hardship if they decide to take time off after giving birth.

Keeping people at the office for so many hours doesn’t mean they’ll actually get more done. After your productivity peaks, research shows, you get tired, are more likely to make mistakes, and may even get sick. But if the message isn’t sinking in, it’s mostly for cultural reasons.

In many countries, working longer hours is an indication of a better worker. The fact that you may just be spending half of your day on Facebook (or other social media site of your preference) doesn’t seem to make a world of difference to the average manager.

The post South Korea’s Solution to the Plague of “Overtime Culture”: Shut it Down appeared first on Futurism.

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The Best Company Culture Isn’t Elusive — It Just Takes Work

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Programmer working in a software developing company office

“Company culture” has received a lot of lip service over the past few years, with businesses striving to land on “Best Companies to Work For” lists and obsessively monitoring their Glassdoor reviews. As Millennials bypassed Generation X to become the largest segment of the U.S. workforce, Millennials’ valuing of company culture above everything else made creating an appealing company culture even more important.

Many companies, however, have continued to treat brand and company culture as something beyond their control, something established by “the powers that be.” What they fail to realize is that they are the powers that be — their efforts are what directly establish the very culture being created within their walls and beyond.

Developing the best company culture possible doesn’t require magic, and it isn’t something that belongs to the masses, independent of the C-suite’s mission or influence. What it takes is work and intentionality, two things any leader can invest in starting today.

Think Through Your End Goal

Raj Jana, the founder of JavaPresse Coffee Company, graduated from college and immediately began working long hours in pursuit of each promotion needed to climb the corporate ladder. Then, one of his mentors died three months prior to retirement. Realizing his mentor would never get to spend endless days woodturning, as he’d dreamed of, Jana was motivated to reverse this ladder-climbing mentality.

Rather than envision happiness as something he’d get around to “someday,” Jana founded his coffee company on the idea that happiness is an intentional choice made every single day. Inspired to help others appreciate — and stay in — the present, JavaPresse’s mission became to transform everyday coffee rituals into “extraordinary daily experiences.”

“I think, more than anything, our company vision has united our team to deliver messages, products, and designs with an air of consistency,” Jana explains. “Our core values are built around a desire to help customers stay grounded, and the energy we put out to achieve our mission returns itself 10 times with the right customers who are passionate and excited to be a part of our family.”

Mortality is a good reminder of what’s truly worthwhile, and it’s good for every leader to ask a simple question: Why should our employees spend a third of their day here versus somewhere else? Defining what makes your specific company the one that deserves people’s time and attention — whether it’s making coffee, building engines, or developing marketing campaigns — is the first step in creating a strong company culture.

Ask What Employees Want — and Need

The next step is going beyond the C-suite to consider what employees want — and need — from your company. As leaders acquire more and more resources, it can be easy to forget that employees often don’t have the money, time, or assistance leaders do. The next question they should ask: What can we do to make it possible for our employees to spend a third of their day here?

Grocery chain H-E-B was named one of Indeed’s “Best Places to Work: Culture,” and its achievement stems, in its employees’ eyes, from the brand’s ability to make every employee feel valued and receive help from people at all levels of the organization. “I love that the managers, all the way up to the store managers, are actually doing something,” one employee said. “They don’t just stand around and watch you work.”

And part of making employees feel valued meant making the work setting more flexible than in a traditional retail environment. Also named the top retail place to work by Indeed, H-E-B earned accolades from employees for offering flexibility in scheduling, generous bonuses, and employee development. The company has clearly considered what will make its employees stay for more than a season.

As every employer knows, employee needs can change with the stages of their lives as well. Affiliate marketing firm Acceleration Partners crafted a parental leave policy to ensure that its employees’ new circumstances didn’t impact their ability to contribute. The organization offers flexible re-entry for new parents in recognition of the fact that almost 75 percent of unemployed mothers would have returned to the workforce with a more flexible schedule in hand.

Find Ways to Spread the Love

The third question leaders need to ask themselves is simple but often overlooked: How can we ensure that our employees help each other while they spend a third of their day here?

One smart way companies have locked down employees who are devoted to each other’s success is through referral programs. Boutique app development company Appstem realized it needed a way to compete with bigger tech companies in San Francisco and implemented an employee referral program. The program has enabled the company to spread the word about its benefits, like a flexible work setup, and it’s helped with employee retention, too: Employees who refer friends and former colleagues are more invested in staying, and these close-knit relationships lead to more internal collaboration.

Other companies have done the opposite and cleaned house to ensure their highest-performing employees aren’t held back by those who refuse to engage in hard work. “Top performers want to work with other top performers,” explains Bill Sanders, managing director of consultancy Roebling Strauss, Inc. “Keeping low performers around directly lowers the moral[e] of everyone else, even average performers.”

Company culture is increasingly important in attracting — and keeping — the best talent, but it’s not elusive. If leaders ask themselves these three questions, they’ll create a culture that people will happily and successfully spend a third of their day in for a long time to come.

The post The Best Company Culture Isn’t Elusive — It Just Takes Work appeared first on ReadWrite.

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Find Your Art History Doppelganger with Google Arts & Culture

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Google found a clever way to make people pay attention to its already impressive Arts & Culture app: selfies. If you’re on social media, you’ve likely seen someone’s face next to a piece of art that looks eerily similar—they probably did that with the Google’s Arts & Culture (Free) app. Once you’ve found your doppelgangers, you can learn more about the artwork and the artist that created it. Aside from this really cool feature, there is an incredible reservoir of information available within the app. Anyone with an interest in art, art history, iconic figures, and culture will be delighted by the plethora of fantastic information from around the world and throughout time. We’ll go over more on what the app does and why we love it below.

Google Arts & Culture (Free)

What It Does

The reason most people (at least recently) have found this app is thanks to the selfie feature that’s become a trend on social media. To do this, all you need to do is download the app and open it. Then scroll down the Home feed until you see Search with your selfie. (If you don’t see this prompt on this Home feed, you’re likely in a country that doesn’t have the feature yet or you need to update the app.) Tap Get Started to take the selfie.

Once you’ve taken the selfie, you’ll see multiple results for your look-alikes. Some of them are impressively close, while others are hilariously off. Either way, you can tap the ‘i’ in the upper right corner of each result to see the full work of art and learn more about it and its artist, as well as see other similar works.

Why We Love It

The fun selfie feature is actually a gateway to art, and I think that’s what Google was hoping for. This fun feature is just the tip of the iceberg. In the Explore tab, you’ll find a huge database with categories like places, historical figures and events, art movements, mediums, and artists. The tab Nearby shows you the closest museums, the exhibitions currently running, and even the cost to attend. You can add pieces to your Favorites and create Galleries by grouping your favorites together.

If you’re not sure where to begin, the Home tab has hours worth of interest in and of itself. Near the bottom of Home you can Explore with Street View, which allows you to look at various different important places as though you were there with a 360-degree view. There are some museums you can virtually walk through using the app, just like Google Street View in the Maps apps lets you explore a city. Below that, you can explore starting with color and tap to see even more work with that main color.

It’d be impossible to fit all of the amazing features of this app into this article, but check it out for yourself. Take the selfie, see your doppelganger, and continue to explore the world and life through art with Google Arts & Culture.

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Obama: Social Media Is “Shaping Our Culture in Powerful Ways”

Not Invisible

In a new online video, former U.S. President Barack Obama criticized social media companies like Facebook for doing too little to protect the “public good.”

In an intended off-the-record speech at MIT’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, later released by the libertarian publication Reason, Obama expressed concerns that Americans are living in “entirely different realities.” Obama cited Fox News and the New York Times specifically when noting that major news stations report entirely different facts to fit the “Balkanization of our public conversation.” Social media platforms, he said, exacerbate that trend.

Facebook has specifically stated its platform is a neutral tool and not a media company. In the past, when confronting the spread of questionable content on the site, the platform placed blame on algorithms that decide what content is promoted. Obama argued that with social media becoming a breeding ground for not only divisive conversation but also terrorist activity, platforms claiming they’re neutral and offloading blame onto computers just won’t cut it. “ISIS can use that tool,” Obama said. “Neo-Nazis can use that tool.”

As CNET reported, Obama thinks platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are part of a much larger ecosystem. These platforms “have to have a conversation about their business model that recognizes they are a public good as well as a commercial enterprise,” Obama said. “They’re not just an invisible platform, they’re shaping our culture in powerful ways.”

Guide, Not Control

The former head of state isn’t the only person calling out social media’s dangers lately. A former Facebook executive suggested the platforms have become “tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.” The ongoing investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election has drawn significant attention to the role Facebook and other platforms played.

Fixing the problem, especially before the 2018 election, won’t be easy. A U.S. senator recently suggested that Congress might have to get involved, even going so far as to levy fines against platforms that don’t do enough to crack down on bots.

That’s a plan Obama himself could potentially be in support of. In his talk at MIT, he said that government should create “rules of the road” to help guide platforms — though, he noted that doesn’t equate to government control of media. “That’s not who we are,” he said. “And that’s not the society I want to live in.”

The post Obama: Social Media Is “Shaping Our Culture in Powerful Ways” appeared first on Futurism.

Futurism

Uber’s culture fixer, Frances Frei, is leaving the company

Frances Frei in the hot seat

The Harvard Business School professor will remain an adviser to the car-hailing company, but she’s off to educate other execs.

Frances Frei, who was hired to fix what ailed Uber’s broken culture and put its controversial CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick on the right path, is leaving the company. She will be working on a new leadership development program for companies, aimed at women and underrepresented minorities, before returning to Harvard Business School.

You might imagine she got some pretty good examples for her work at Uber, which had been Silicon Valley’s most obvious version of toxic culture. Not surprisingly, the ever-positive Frei did not see it that way, noting that the culture journey at Uber has been an important one.

“When I got here, my goal was to train and teach executives how to manage better, but it became super apparent that the training needed to go way beyond that,” she said in an interview today. “As soon as the executive team was calmer, I turned my attention to 3,000 managers whose jobs grew well beyond their skills, which I think was the real work.”

Over her tenure, Frei said she worked with 6,000 employees, who participated in the Harvard executive education program she created. And now, with Kalanick ousted amid much drama at the car-hailing phenom and new, more experienced executives in place, the need for the high-profile academic to coach its staff has become less critical, although Uber said she would remain an adviser and would continue to teach the Harvard program to its staff.

Frei was hired last June — yes, I know, it seems like an eon ago — as SVP of leadership and strategy, brought into the company to help manage the unmanageable Kalanick (she used the nicer “coach and complement” today, natch!).

Frei — who has had a brutal commute to San Francisco from Cambridge, Mass., where she lives with her wife and children — morphed into that broader charge, doing everything from training managers and top executives to helping HR head Liane Hornsey with recruiting and creating a zero-tolerance policy on sexual harassment.

The author of “Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business” had been consulting with Uber for several months before she was hired, and said in an interview with me last year that she was enticed to come on full-time because of the major challenges the company faced.

“[Uber] feels for me, given all the bad circumstances, as sanded, and that it is ready to have some education painted on it,” she said in an interview. “My goal is to make this a world-class company that can be proud of itself in the end, rather than embarrassed.”

Most of that embarrassment did center on Kalanick, of course, and she was quite certain she could help him in a podcast interview with me — in which she played Pangloss and I played pre-ghosts Scrooge — soon after she arrived. That task was not for the faint of heart, since the startup he had crafted had been infamous for its toxic pirate culture that included numerous allegations of sexism, ethical corner-cutting and a take-no-prisoners approach.

As I wrote when she arrived:

Well, Frances, welcome to your biggest challenge ever. That would be Uber of San Francisco, which has been mired in a burgeoning set of controversies around a range of issues that erupted after allegations made in an explosive blog post by former engineer Susan Fowler about sexism and sexual harassment.

Which is to say that a deeply inexperienced, siloed and yes-men management and a culture crack-addicted to breaking the rules, even the good ones, has led to a variety of indiscretions and outright bad behavior that have gone unchecked for far too long. And it’s not just sexism and sexual harassment that rears its always ugly head, but also a sense that too many of those above are just as flawed as those below. Which leaves the feeling that there is no one in charge who can stop it.

If you read Fowler’s piece carefully, it was much more about core management fuck-up-ery at the company, which seems to have been run in a “Game of Thrones” style, than about anything else. While the charges of pervasive sexism and too much sexual harassment are certainly serious, what ails Uber is a corporate structure that needs drastic overhaul.

It’s fair to point out that lots of Silicon Valley companies have had and continue to have these very same issues — from Google to Facebook to Microsoft to Apple. But none has those faults in the kind of unctuous quintessence you find at Uber.

That all changed after much internal and external drama. Kalanick was eventually ousted and replaced by former Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who has since brought in a new executive team.

“I think with Dara leading, a lot of our biggest challenges are in the rearview mirror,” said Frei.

One can hope — and there is no one I have met as hopeful as her, so fingers crossed.

Here are the memos that Khosrowshahi and Frei sent out to the staff at the all-hands meeting today about her departure. And below, you can enjoy the podcast of the interview I did with her.

Team Uber,

After nearly a year of leadership coaching and building a first-of-its-kind executive education program at Uber, Frances is leaving to develop … you guessed it … another first-of-its-kind executive education program before returning to teach full-time at Harvard. She’ll provide more detail in due time, but the idea is to marry her lifetime of experience coaching companies with some of what she learned on the front lines at Uber, with a focus on women and underrepresented minorities. Luckily for us, it won’t feel like she’s gone too far, since she has agreed to stay on as an advisor and will continue to teach the Harvard Executive Education program she designed. Since day one, Frances has been a breath of fresh air — an academic among techies, a coach for leaders, an enthusiastic instructor, and a patient listener. Because of her, Uber now has a world-class corporate education program that thousands of you have attended, and an enthusiastic partnership with one of the best universities in the world. I’m personally grateful for all of her hard work and I look forward to our continued partnership.

Thank you, Frances!

Dara

Thank you Dara, for the kind words. And to all my friends here at Uber — thank YOU for such a terrific experience and for being my teachers throughout the last nine months. If I look back on why I joined and when, it would have been impossible to imagine that we’d be where we are today. And it’s exciting to think where you’ll be nine months from now … the sky’s the limit! As I prepare to head back to live full-time on the East Coast, my heart is full. I’ve been inspired to see the Executive Education program (which happens to be the Harvard Business School “case method” approach) ripple through an organization at an unprecedented pace, scale, and absorption. I’ll miss everyone here, but I also can’t wait to apply everything I learned to my next project — while wearing an Uber t-shirt, of course.

As Dara said, I’ll still be around, and you’ll hear more from me on next steps as we grow Uber’s Executive Education program even further. I look forward seeing you “on the wall.”

With deep respect,

Frances

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Stayhealthy Leverages Pop Culture to Achieve Healthier Outcomes for Brands and Consumers

As difficult as it may be for some companies in the industry to admit, healthcare can be perceived as being exceedingly boring — especially for those of us needing to take appropriate steps to improve our own health.

Despite the fact that apps and mobile devices are now cornerstones of human entertainment, most apps and digital resources pertinent to healthcare somehow manage to suck all the fun and coolness straight out of our apps and mobile gadgets.

The vast majority of digital tools produced for our benefit simply aren’t entertaining or engaging enough to hold our interest. In the absence of games, celebrities, or cute cats, can you blame us for losing interest? Unfortunately, however, when we lose interest, we also tend to lose our chance at making real and lasting progress.

Thankfully, not every healthcare focused tech innovator on the scene is tone deaf on matters of entertainment, pop culture, and gaming.

Leading the charge for change in how modern consumer technologies are used to promote better health awareness and engagement, stayhealthy Inc. is putting more than twenty years of experience to use with their latest web and mobile based resources.

So if you’re expecting more of the same unremarkable and uninspired platforms and tools, you’re in for a surprise here.

To be sure, stayhealthy’s interactive health apps do precisely what you would hope a quality offering in the space would. If you’re needing to keep tabs on basic vitals, physical activity, and nutrition, stayhealthy lets you measure and track no shortage of stats, numbers, and other realities pertinent to your health in route to improving them. But remaining engaged in the modern world of fleeting attention spans requires more than a quality health tracking and management platform. Quite simply, you need to be better entertained to remain fully committed.

One of the primary ways in which stayhealthy is shaking up the unimaginative mobile healthcare space is through cultivating a social atmosphere that not only engages users but connects them with peers for the purpose of sharing stories, swapping motivational tips, and celebrating progress.

Beyond receiving encouragement from peers, stayhealthy is also facilitating opportunities for users to participate in celebrity backed activity-based challenges to win prizes. For example, major studious have committed access to some of their top-tier artists and many other perks to be used in the stayhealthy sweepstakes and challenges, including signed memorabilia, VIP concert tickets and even band/artist meet and greets.

Without question, the company’s innovative focus on edu-tainment gamification as the basis of encouraging a steadfast commitment to monitoring and improving one’s health is helping stayhealthy to attract and forge key partnerships that stand poised to enrich their resources further in the year ahead.

In effect, stayhealthy is engendering not only healthy outcomes for consumers but healthier marketing outcomes for advertising and branding partners.

Stayhealthy’s burgeoning program is prepped and ready to leverage celebs, opinion leaders, influencers, brands, retailers and corporations to create opportunities that beckon new partners seeking to co-produce and collaborate on influential/viral pop-culturally relevant content and brand awareness campaigns.

Influencer marketing may be among the trendiest buzz words in the advertising world today, but the number of companies leveraging influencers, pop culture, and social media to facilitate improved health and wellness for millions of consumers is frightfully small. This is yet another bright spot for stayhealthy as it continues to set itself apart from other companies in their industry.

“Brands and marketers have recently grasped how Influencer marketing is helping their bottom line and continuing to implement additional campaigns,” according to a recent report by Adweek, which cites research revealing that 67 percent of marketers think influencer marketing campaigns “helped them reach a more targeted audience, thus leading to more impactful results.”

Through their recent coupling with Augumently, Inc., stayhealthy is even set to harness the power of augmented reality to both dazzle users and entice brands into new and expanded partnerships. The arrival of AR in the healthcare space will unleash a torrent of create potential previously unheard of and unthought of, even in the modern mobile age.

“Our goal,” Paul Ring, head of stayhealthy’s marketing, explains, “is to help make your current and future customers healthier as they interact with your brand daily and use more of your products or services. While viewing these videos through their in-app camera, all users will be prompted to record or take pictures of your Brand’s AR experience and campaign, and share on social media with friends & family, further expanding your message in engaging and innovative ways.”

In the age of mass content, impersonal material that fails to resonate by feeling real will fall short of delivering an impactful experience to consumers and a lasting positive impression for brands. To that end, stayhealthy is rewriting all the rules for mobile-driven health and wellness resources. And the prognosis couldn’t possibly be better.

For an early invitation, please visit www.stayhealthy.com

The post Stayhealthy Leverages Pop Culture to Achieve Healthier Outcomes for Brands and Consumers appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

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Technostress is killing productivity. Culture is the cure.

Technology changes fast.

With each new change, employees are forced to adapt. That process of adapting is painful — physically and psychologically.

That’s why we seem to get a new health problem related to technology every few years.

I want to tell you about the Mother of All technology-related health problems: technostress. But first, a history lesson.

When computers broke our bodies

Business PCs went mainstream in the 1990s. At the beginning of the decade, most people didn’t use PCs in offices. By 2000, pretty much all office work involved PCs.

The use of mice and keyboards and the necessity of sitting and using a PC all day caused a pandemic of repetitive stress injuries, including carpal tunnel syndrome. It seems as if everybody got injured by their PCs at some point.

To read this article in full, please click here

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Why Silicon Valley has a bro culture problem — and how to fix it

“Everybody needs to lead on this issue,” says “Brotopia” author Emily Chang.

When Emily Chang interviewed venture capitalist Michael Moritz in 2015, she wasn’t trying to “trap” him. But when the Sequoia Capital chairman suggested that hiring more women might mean “lowering our standards,” he set off a firestorm — and gave Chang the idea for a book.

That book, “Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley,” comes out tomorrow. In it, Chang argues that the tech industry is deluding itself if it thinks it can really make the world better without representing women equally; while the biggest banks on Wall Street employ equal numbers of men and women, she says, women hold 25 percent of computing jobs and received just 2 percent of venture capital funding.

“I know the title makes a statement,” she said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “To me, it perfectly encapsulates this idea of Silicon Valley as a modern utopia where anyone can change the world or make their own rules, if they’re a man. But it’s incomparably harder if you’re a woman.”

Although Moritz’s foot-in-mouth remark might have inspired “Brotopia,” Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein also helped Chang find women who were willing to talk on the record about their experiences with harassment and discrimination.

“At first, I just wanted to figure out, ‘How did we get here? What happened?’” she said. “And then, in the middle of the process, Donald Trump was elected and the #MeToo movement exploded, and I saw the momentum of the reporting totally change. All of these women who I thought would never talk, who told me all these stories off the record, suddenly [talked].”

You can listen to Recode Decode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

On the new podcast, Chang called out the “hypocrisy” of tech leaders who talk a big game about their own ambitions and talents but have been reluctant to make simple moves toward equality, like paying women the same as men doing the same job.

“I think everybody needs to lead on this issue, everybody take a closer look at how they’re running their companies, how they’re are behaving,” Chang said. “The reality is, men right now have the power and the money, and they should be the first ones to change. They can do it today!”

“I interviewed Peter Thiel — this is a guy who’s pushing the bounds of space and building ocean communities and believes in immortality,” she added. “When I asked him about the lack of women, he said, ‘Yeah, you’re right, there really just aren’t enough. I don’t know what to do about it.’ Wait, what? I was shocked.”

Changing the bro culture for the better “has to come from the top,” Chang said: CEOs have to communicate the merits of diversity to everyone in their entire companies, venture capitalists need to hire more women, and the limited partners who invest in those VC firms need to pressure them to prioritize diversity.

If you like this show, you should also sample our other podcasts:

Recode Media with Peter Kafka features no-nonsense conversations with the smartest and most interesting people in the media world, with new episodes every Thursday. Use these links to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Too Embarrassed to Ask, hosted by Kara Swisher and The Verge’s Lauren Goode, answers the tech questions sent in by our readers and listeners. You can hear new episodes every Friday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
And Recode Replay has all the audio from our live events, including the Code Conference, Code Media and the Code Commerce Series. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you like what we’re doing, please write a review on Apple Podcasts — and if you don’t, just tweet-strafe Kara.

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Uber hires first chief diversity officer to further reform its culture

Last year, Susan Fowler, a former Uber employee, penned an essay detailing rampant sexual harassment and sexism at the company as well as a complete lack of interest on the part of administrators to do anything about it. That report led to an investi…
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Google’s Arts & Culture app is now top of the download charts thanks to its selfie-matching skills

It’s amazing what a powerful driver human curiosity can be. Just look at Google’s noble-minded but pretty unexciting Google Arts & Culture app — overlooked by most until it launched a feature last week that let users match their selfies to faces in famous artworks.

Now, since at least this weekend onwards, it’s been riding high as the most-downloaded free app on both iOS and Android. Heavy-hitters like Messenger and YouTube have been left in the dust. Even, uh, Sweatcoin (which apparently lets you mine cryptocurrency by walking somehow?) has fallen behind.

Google Arts & Culture at the top of the iOS free apps download chart.

The app itself has been available since 2016, and offers an impressive mix of articles and…

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