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To run a successful business, we bring together a diverse group of people with different skill sets to cover all areas of the business. This results in people who might have very different values and beliefs spending a large amount of time in close proximity, which can create potentially stressful environments. Add to the mix that were encouraging people to “have a voice,” “speak up and be heard,” “bring your whole self to work,” and “be vulnerable.” These are all incredible things and fantastic for growth in our workplaces. However, the more “voices” and “whole selves” we have present, the more differences in values, beliefs, and neural pathways, which leads to potential conflict. Our IQ is the “what we know and what we can do.” Its the part of our brain where logic prevails. Our EQ and emotional intelligence, on the other hand, is the “how and why we do it,” and where emotions run the show. Information and skills without emotion just exist. It has little bearing on whether two people get along. However, how we communicate, how we interact with people, why we believe in something, our opinions, and the values that are driving us tend to be the common factors in most workplace conflicts. Its all about our wiring Our emotions drive these factors, and every individual is different in how they respond to them, thanks to our unique brain wiring. Thats due to the experiences, values, habits, and memories that weve created and developed over our lives. We call this the neural pathways. These pathways drive how and why we do what we do. We personally believe our pathways to be true and the best way to be, I mean, why else would we do things the way we do them? In our mind, theyre not only the best but, sometimes, the only way we think is right. When someone else questions or challenges it, our emotions respond with the “fight or flight” mechanism. This is why many experts are saying that emotional intelligence is the top skill for workplaces: having the ability to own who we are, and how well we face and manage our emotions. Its about understanding how the people around us are feeling, how well we communicate with them, and the effectiveness of our personal drive. Emotional intelligence isnt a personality type or something we are born with. Its a skill that we develop, and, in every situation, we have a choice to either respond with emotional intelligence or without. Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we dont. Like any skill, when we focus on building and applying, we see the benefits. 3 tips to decrease workplace conflict Own and face the reality that every human being is different with varying values, beliefs, and opinions. And that is okay. Note every situation needs to have a “winner and a loser” or “a right and a wrong.” Take a deep breath and count to three. And remember that the only thing in this world you can control is how you choose to respond. Get out of your own head and understand how the other person is feeling. Ask questions and be curious. Perhaps we can learn something from them or maybe just appreciate our differences. Work together to drive forward. Its unlikely that either of you will leave the workplace, so find a way to work together rather than against each other. How do we fix this, together? Work smarter, not harder, and focus on the end result rather than the differences that are triggering our emotions. We dont have the power to change anyone but ourselves. We do, however, have the power to choose how we interact, the influence, and the impact that it has on the people around us. Workplace conflict is the outcome of poor choices and a lack of emotional intelligence. And it becomes a conflict when there are two or more people involved. Remember, you can always choose how you respond. And often, this is the way that people notice and remember you, not the event that caused the emotional trigger in the first place. Next time you find yourself in an emotionally charged situation, ask yourselfwhat role are you playing in workplace conflict, and how emotionally intelligent have you been today?
Category:
E-Commerce
In the fragmented home renovation business, where small subcontractors handle many of the most common door fixes, window replacements, and bathroom facelifts, one company is using AI to scale its operations across the country to the tune of nearly $1 billion in annual revenue. West Shore Home was founded in 2006 in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and has grown from a single location to operating in 40 U.S. markets with more than 3,000 employees. Over the past few years, the company has tapped into artificial intelligence and a growing number of technological tools to greatly accelerate the process, scheduling, pricing, and even design of the most common home renovation projects. Its an example of how a workaday segment of the home design industry is being reinvented. West Shore Home founder B.J. Werzyn says home renovation was ripe for disruption. The norm in the industry is to outsource the actual renovation work, using subcontractors who deal with the material sourcing and the labor. Technology has enabled Werzyn’s company to streamline project scoping, planning, design, and construction, and doing it all in-house. Despite the seemingly bespoke nature of each customer’s home renovation quirk, the most common types of renovation jobs are actually pretty similar, Werzyn says, making them possible to systematize. “If you were comparing us to a restaurant, we’re more like a fast-casual restaurant. A Chick-fil-A or a Chipotle. Very consistent, very repeatable,” he says. [Image: courtesy West Shore Home] West Shore Home follows a project from beginning to end with its own employees, tracking every step and decision along the way. That means the company knows how long it took to do a given project, how many installers were involved, what skilled trades were required, what permits had to be pulled, what the job cost analysis was, and how the job actually turned out compared to what was originally planned. For a project like a bathroom renovationof which West Shore Home has done more than 300,000experience creates the potential for systematization. “The data is invaluable,” Werzyn says. The data from all those jobs has become the training material for AI systems the company has created. Since all West Shore Home technicians are employees, they do every job by the book, collecting data on each project using iPads and sending it all back to a big company database. They also have recently begun using a proprietary Lidar-based scanning tool to capture the minute details of every customer’s project space, even those who only have the company out for a consultation. The company also has its own visualization software, allowing customers to design their project using the detailed scan, giving them a sense of what the future state of their project space can look like within minutes. Werzyn expects some of these tools to become consumer-accessible, taking away the need for a technician to physically visit a job site before the work begins. AI tools are used to process all this information rapidly. Instead of a technician taking the scan and the customer’s wishes back to the office for pricing, sourcing, and scheduling, West Shore Home’s AI tools do it all on the spot. “The moment that the customer decides exactly what they want, within 30 seconds we have processed all of that information. We know what the permitting requirements are, we know when we’re going to have inventory in hand, we know when we’re going to have the right installer with the right skill capability,” says Eppie Vojt, the company’s chief data and AI officer. “Artificial intelligence is doing all the heavy lifting to get us to the point of creating a vastly differentiated experience for that customer.” Werzyn sees his company’s use of AI and the automation of the renovation process turning into an Amazon-like digital marketplace for home services, from bathroom renovations to countertop installations to cabinetry to roofing. “Instead of selling products, we will allow a consumer, if they want to on their own, to scan, design, schedule, and take a home remodeling project, put it in a shopping cart, and check out,” he says. AI is enabling this new approach to renovation work that’s often handled by small operators. Werzyn says the key to his company’s success may connect back to one of the first things he did when starting to expand West Shore Home beyond its original location back in 2010. Instead of relying on subcontractors in new markets, Werzyn insisted on making everyone an employee, making it possible, in the age of AI, to be collecting the data the company is using to inform its machine learning. “That decision was more around controlling the quality of the install, giving a better customer experience, Werzyn says. “But, thinking back on it now, that decision that I made 15 years ago was kind of the beginning of our AI strategy, to really own the process from end to end.”
Category:
E-Commerce
There are 565 “best pizza” spots in NYC. Junior’s Cafe in Queens has the “best pizza in town.” As does Rosario’s in Lower Manhattan, and Big Daddy’s Pizza in Brooklyn. At least that’s the case, according to the establishments’ respective signs. We know this because Brooklyn-based artist Yufeng Zhao has built a searchable database of all the words across the New York City streetscape. Think of it as a search engine for every visible word that’s appeared on streets, storefronts, buses, or construction fences in the city, since 2007, when Google Street View launched. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] The result is a linguistic map of the city that never sleeps, distilled from 17 years of Google Street Views, and more than eight million images. The database includes everything from business signs and street signs to flyers posted on windows, and even recognizable graffiti. And the verdict is clear: New York City is a city of “bests.” [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] “A lot of restaurants claim they have the best pizza or the best restaurant,” Zhao says with a laugh. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] A time capsule of NYC A city is a palimpsest. New flyers replace old flyers. Businesses die; shiny signs go up. VC-funded coffee shops erase self-made mom-and-pop shops. All Text NYC, as the search engine is called, launched in December 2024, which means it hasn’t yet caught up with the Zohran Mamdani poster craze. Nor has it seen the billboard ads for this year’s Tony Award winning musical Maybe Happy Ending. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] But if the city remembers, so does its search engine. For Zhao, All Text NYC is a time capsule of the city between 2007 and 2024, and the data supports it. “Never forget” shows up 363 times while “Covid” appears close to 10,000 times. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] There is a lot to learn from the words that make up a city, especially when it is as verbose as the Big Apple. Zhao, who recently moved from Brooklyn to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to pursue a Masters of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, identified a whopping 138 million snippets of text in the city. He thinks the number would be significantly lower in Cambridge, and likely higher in Shanghai, where he grew up. A vast majority of the top 10 most frequently used words are related to parking: “stop,” “one way,” “no standing,” “no parking.” Traffic aside, the word “deli” is high up on the list, as is “ATM,” and “Fedex” and a certain A/C company called Fedders that appears almost 60,000 times. The database lets you search individual words and word combinations (like “best pizza”). You can see the results through images where the words appear, as well as on a heat map of New York City. “Sabrett,” the hot dog brand, lights up most in Manhattan, especially in Times Square. While “preschool” is most prevalent in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] Sometimes, it’s more interesting to see where certain words do not appear. Take “NYPD,” for example. The word appears almost 80,000 times. It lights up a little everywhere, but wealthy, predominantly white neighborhoods of the citylike the Upper West Side, the Upper East Sideas well as the outer boroughs remain unmistakably dark. (Meanwhile, the map around Midtown and the World Trade Center is glowing in white.) Google takes photos every year at the same location, so Zhao points out the map is not necessarily representative of where NYPD goes on any given day, but when you accumulate the data as he has over the past 17 years, you begin to notice patterns. “There are certain neighborhoods where NYPD is almost never captured,” he says. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] A similar pattern shows up for businesses that accept food stamps. The word “EBT” (for Electronic Benefit Transfer) shows up more than 56,000 times, but the map highlights how big of a desert Manhattan is on that front. Parts of Brooklyn, including the now-gentrified-beyond-recognition neighborhood of Williamsburg, are also conspicuously dark. Of course, low-income people do live in Manhattan, which highlights just how far they might have to travel to reach a grocery store that serves their income level. An underutilized resource When Google Street View first launched, it allowed people to virtually explore any location, creating a 360-degree map of the world. Over the years, it has been used for navigation, real estate research, and virtual travel during COVID, but for Zhao, it remains an underutilized resource. “It’s such a vast dataset,” he says, “The images contain so much data.” In 2018, the research collective Slab used Google Street View to create Culture Map, a cultural and ethnic map of Los Angeles. By mapping the city’s signs, posters, and flyers, they found 58 different culture hubs, which they noted was far more than those officially designated by the city. Slab’s algorithm, which folded in data from eight years (from 2011 to 2018) could detect many languages. For technical reasons, Zhao could only use languages that use the Latin alphabet, which means that areas like Chinatown, Little India, or the Eastern European enclave at Brighton Beach might not be fully represented. Still, the platform could become a goldmine for researchers, policymakers, urban planners, anthropologists, or anyone interested in the fabric of a city, and the patterns that only become visible when we listen to our streets and storefronts speak. Zhao says he plans to update the database at the end of every year. What will the city tell us then?
Category:
E-Commerce
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