Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

How to Work Effectively on Project-Based Teams

Not long ago, employees would have ample time to build relationships with their colleagues while working together in the same office. But as organizations transition to more project-based work, workers need to understand the steps they need to take to foster trust and cooperation immediately.

That's where business owners and managers come in. Whether you have a full-time employee or gig worker working on a series of projects, you'll need to carefully consider the unique communication, inclusion, management and culture issues that arise with remote project work.

Communication

Even before the pandemic, the majority of project-based teams worked virtually. Organizations assembled teams from across locations and skill sets to solve specific business problems. Your team members most likely will be required to work closely with people they’ve never met before, and may in fact never encounter in person at all.

So much meaning is translated via body language, so working with someone entirely online adds a layer of communication complexity. When you don’t know someone, it's difficult to infer their tone, their motives or even whether or not they’re joking. Someone might perceive positive messages in email or instant message as neutral, and neutral ones as negative.

In the history of work, some of the most meaningful and rewarding one-to-one interactions have happened over chance meetings in the hallway or elevator. Many project-based teams don’t have such opportunities, so encourage team members to be direct and deliberate in communicating respect, collaboration and concern.

Inclusion

When most people worked in person for long time periods, the workplace could resemble high school. Some bosses would give the best assignments to their favorites, and it wasn’t unusual for some employees to feel left out when a clique of coworkers headed out to lunch together.

In other words, there were many ways to feel excluded and marginalized.

Virtual project-based teaming is a great equalizer. It provides flexibility for people, regardless of their situations. While webcams do offer a personal view into team members’ lives, people can purposely create the desired impression with dress, virtual backgrounds and decor—or simply choose to turn their camera off.

Project-based team members can still, however, be victims of microaggressions—statements, actions or incidents regarded as indirect, subtle or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized community.

New teams don't often have a reservoir of trust or comfort established at the beginning. Managers and leaders should be sensitive and mindful that microaggressions can occur and ensure that during online dialogue, all member's contributions are appropriately valued.

Make inclusion a value that's established through your hiring and onboarding process, and have systems in place that properly address any issue that does arise in a way that respects and affirms the harmed party.

Management

Many project-based teams are self-managed, meaning they have no formally assigned leader. About a decade ago, economist Elinor Ostrom received the Nobel Prize for her studies of self-governed communities in Africa and Asia.

Ostrom found that many human societies establish agreements among themselves for sharing and maximizing resources without the “help” of higher-order authorities. In other words, self-managed teams work. The best ones have several parameters:

• well-defined operational boundaries,
• access to resources to achieve their goals,
• a system for monitoring member behavior and performance,
• an internal process for dispute resolution and
• sanctions for rule-breakers.

According to SAP Success Factors (which refers to project-based, self-managed teams as "dynamic teams"), these groups are defined by the following:

• workflow that changes rapidly as new ideas are introduced and implemented,
• membership that is cross-functional and frequently in flux and
• the encouragement of failure in pursuit of innovation.

For the rest of the article, head over to the AMEX Business site.

 

Don't Be a Victim of the Great Resignation

By now, you’ve likely heard the term “the great resignation.” Anthony Klotz, a professor at Texas A&M University, coined the term in a May Bloomberg article to refer to the great numbers of workers expected to exit the workforce after the pandemic.

Klotz does his own research, but a recent Microsoft study, the 2021 Work Trend Index, mirrored his findings. Microsoft surveyed more than 30,000 people in 31 countries and analyzed trillions of productivity and labor signals across LinkedIn and Microsoft 365 to forecast the pending workforce departures.

According to Microsoft, over 40 percent of the global workforce are considering leaving their employer this year, 46 percent are planning to make a major pivot or transition, and only 38 percent of employees are thriving in their careers right now. The situation is worse for women. McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2020 study found that one in three working mothers have considered leaving the workforce or downshifting their careers because of COVID-19.

The Microsoft and McKinsey data suggest that the pandemic led employees to question their priorities and either transition to work they found more meaningful or decrease the focus on their job generally. But while this was certainly a factor, new data from Stanford University illustrated that how companies treated their employees also played a significant role.

According to Stanford, the pandemic had a cascading effect on organizations with unsupportive cultures. Companies that had historically laid people off, decreased compensation, held back promotions, or sacrificed psychological safety to preserve the bottom line engaged in more of these behaviors during COVID-19. Stressed-out employees who might have been disgruntled before were downright disgusted. And now they’re ready to quit.

Interestingly, food service, hospitality and retail – some of the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic – are experiencing the most resignations. A “We Quit” sign left on the door of a Nebraska Burger King restaurant after the entire staff walked out really said it all.

As reported by the Washington Post in June, 649,000 retail workers put in their notice in April, the industry’s largest one-month exodus since the Labor Department began tracking this data more than 20 years ago.

The so-called “great resignation” will collide with other demographic factors impacting who is available to work and where – including baby boomer retirement, a small population of midlife employees, and a young worker population plagued by stalled education and career growth. If this doesn’t point to a coming labor shortage, I don’t know what does.

If you’re an HR professional or manager, is there anything you can do to avoid becoming a victim? The answer is yes, and it starts with self-awareness of common employer blind spots.

Want to learn more? Catch the replay of my webinar on HR blind spots with SilkRoad!

 

A Futurist's View of the Post-Pandemic Workforce

Given that I wrote a book about the rapid transformation of work as we knew it back in 2018, people often ask me what has surprised me about how human capital is evolving today. As a Workforce Institute Board Member, I’d like to share my topline thoughts, some of which have been derived as the result of quantitative research, and others which came about through engagement with organizations and futurist groups such as the Association of Professional Futurists (APF), the Future Today Institute, the Grey Swan Guild, and the foresight certification program I recently completed with the University of Houston.

The Acceleration of What We Saw Coming

Pandemic or no pandemic, several workforce-related trends were inevitable, including the rise of the gig economy, the contract workforce, internal talent marketplaces, and talent assembly – in which teams are constructed from different types of workers to solve specific problems in hot areas of the business.

We also surmised that organizations would begin to look closely at how human capital quantitatively drives businessvalue; the use of Big Data, analytics, and executive dashboards to determine what is and isn’t working in talent acquisition, learning, scheduling, and performance; the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to combat unconscious bias and measure productivity; and the focus on data quality, integration, and governance.

The shift in the flow of work due to new players like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon entering the online collaboration market was expected, as was theincreasing popularity of curated learning content by in-house subject matter experts, personalized course recommendations, and targeted certifications and microcredentialing. Given the technology available today, there is no reason individuals shouldn’t upskill and reskill using all the resources at their disposal, and at their own pace and convenience.

What Has Surprised Me

There have been a few head scratchers along the way. The first involves digital transformation. It is a bit disappointing how, during the pandemic, some organizations have simply slapped in-office processes up online. That was fine for the first six months of the crisis, but now it’s time to move on. One size doesn’t fit all. We must permanently adapt certain processes to be antifragile and an effective mix of high tech, high touch.

Also, with respect to digital transformation, it surprises me that no one is talking about what we’ll do when we are entirely dependent on technology and it breaks, what happens when it gets seriously hacked, what happens when we have bandwidth challenges and access inequity, what happens when there are too many systems and usability and adoption falter, and what data and privacy concerns will arise with increased employee monitoring. In my opinion, these are issues that every company should be closely tracking.

While the labor shortages occurring as a result of demographic shifts like baby boomer retirement and smaller generational cohorts like X and Z were anticipated, organizational attitudes toward post-pandemic employee retention are not. Many companies are currently issuing decrees about exactly when people should return to the office and how and when they should work. After a successful 18-month trial of much greater flexibility, this is not going to fly with top (and increasingly rare) talent, and I fear a “great resignation” is about to take place.

Finally, I’m perplexed that more leaders aren’t acknowledging that they were caught completely off guard by the pandemic and are now engaging in strategic foresight to be adequately prepared for what’s certain to be future disruptions.

While we can’t predict the future, we have a responsibility to look around corners as best we can and plan for a variety of potential scenarios. I look forward to continuing to be part of this process!

This post was originally published on the Workforce Institute blog.

Everyone Can Have Good Brand Positioning

Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management professor Philip Kotler made a career breaking down brand management into its component parts. His 2003 book Marketing Management defines brand positioning as the act of designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market. Brand positioning is at the intersection of brand and product, and business owners must focus on both.

Why Companies Should Lead With Brand Positioning 

Simply changing an offering or releasing a new one may not be enough to affect purchase behavior because the customer has no reason to trust you. “Many companies put the product at the center of their organization. They lead with a laundry list of product features, and if the company has more than one category or wishes to expand, it can be tough to get customers to shop the whole brand,” says Sunny Bonnell, co-founder of branding agency Motto and co-author of Rare Breed: A Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous and Different.

"Plus," Bonnell continues, "when product overshadows brand, the company is always at the mercy of the market.” By also considering the mark a brand’s image makes on a customer’s heart, effective brand positioning primes customers to view new and improved products as favorable and credible choices. “A better bet is to put your brand’s point of view at the center of the business. The brand is the emotional hook that ties everything together, superseding the product," she adds. 

“Brand positioning is essential because it captures your unique proposition, value statement, essence, aesthetics and appeal,” says Liem Le, CEO and founder of virtual community Little Lion. “Often, it may be your first interaction with the customer, and you want to make an ‘amazing, I can't look away and want to hear more’ first impression. It may be your only chance to ‘pitch’ your audience, so you can’t skimp.”

“Brand positioning that means something special and appeals to your audience creates tremendous value and can work wonders for your bottom line, employee morale and customer loyalty,” says Bonnell. “Strong brands are like a magnetic force. They draw people in and become revenue-generating machines, yielding benefits like ability to charge a premium.”

When they feel connected and close to a brand, customers are also more likely to accept product mishaps and foibles. This is why some argue that you perfect your brand positioning before you adjust an existing product or experiment with a new one.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the AMEX Business site.

Career Durability: Ensure You Have a Job As Long As You Want One

You might remember that last fall, I helped DeVry University with a survey about workplace sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic. At a time when employees should be feeling recognized and celebrated, nearly one in four employed Americans said they believed that American workers are not valued. And, more than a third of survey respondents claimed that based on their employer’s actions since the start of the pandemic, they feel disposable.

Were these feelings valid? Could employers actually take or leave employees, not caring if they were successful or unsuccessful, contributing or not contributing, employed with the company or leaving to go somewhere else?

The workforce is changing in major ways. The pandemic sped up a movement from strict scheduling to flexible “work on your own time” engagements. Prior to COVID-19, we were already seeing smart machines and automation as part of daily work, and the tremendous growth of the gig economy.

Taken together, these trends show that the old ways of sustaining a career no longer work. In past decades, you could go to college or a trade school, get a degree, and use the skills associated with that degree to work for one – or maybe a few – organizations over the course of your working life.

That is no longer the case. Jobs – and the skills required for those jobs – are changing rapidly.

In these times, nothing is certain except change, and this is unnerving. In fact, Ceridian’s 2021 Pulse of Talent report, which surveyed more than 5,000 people across five regions, found that 66% of individuals are taking job security into account more now than before the pandemic.

Career durability is a ticket to long-term security

To avoid feeling – and indeed being – disposable, today’s employees need to be the leaders of their own careers. They must build what we call career durability.

Career durability involves acquiring the skills, mindset, and knowledge to be an engaged and productive member of the workforce – continuously. On LinkedIn, I explained career durability as including these five areas:

• Hard skills: skills that allow you to complete tasks in a specific job.
• Soft skills: skills for collaborating effectively with others.
• Applied technology skills: skills that allow you to leverage available technology to do your job better.
• Institutional knowledge: job or industry expertise gained through experience.
• Growth mindset: being willing to improve, learn, and reconsider existing ways of doing things.

For more where this came from, read the full article at the Ceridian Dayforce Wallet blog.

Building Your First Reskilling Strategy

According to a not-yet-published research study by Chief Learning Officer and DeVry University, only half of leaders feel their organization’s learning strategy is properly aligned to their business strategy.

In last week’s webinar with SilkRoad, I discussed why upskilling and reskilling are so important in the post-COVID era. As you’ll recall, upskilling provides new skills to workers in their existing domains, while reskilling trains workers for new jobs.

Whether your strategy involves upskilling, reskilling, or a combination of both, the first step in creating it is ensuring business objective alignment.

An aligned learning strategy includes an established process for mapping learning initiatives to business goals and outcomes.

In contrast, an unaligned learning strategy is piecemeal or ad hoc, with little consideration of overarching company objectives. In other words, someone in the business or in L&D said: “We should do a training on that” and someone else said, “sure, let’s make it happen!”

Eight Steps to Reskilling Proficiency

Alignment sounds good, but how do you achieve it in reality?

1. If you’re an L&D professional, sitting in on c-suite meetings and/or getting briefed on executive plans in real-time is a terrific start.
2. You might also try embedding members of your team in business units so you know immediately what roles or skills you need to upskill and reskill FOR.
3. Next, map the identified workforce needs against the competencies your employees currently possess.
4. Convene a task force to outline jobs that are mission-critical for organizational growth and assess whether any of these roles can be redesigned, reconfigured, or combined.
5. Use strategic automation, or determining where human and machine labor best fit, and match resources to tasks.  When plugging in human labor, don’t forget about contract workers, subject matter experts, and anyone else with an alternative work arrangement.
6. If you’ve determined that your human workforce has skills gaps, next you’ll need to determine the best way to address those. Fortunately, there are endless external training resources to supplement internal ones and developing learning content has become more of a curation than a creation exercise.
7. Technology can absolutely help. A human capital management (HCM) solution can assist you in upskilling and reskilling at scale, predict on-the-job success using skills assessments, drive personalization and social connection, and document skill acquisition.
8.  If used “skillfully,” HCM technology can also provide learners with a more immersive, impactful experience that resonates on an individual level, facilitate mentorship, deliver rewards for training completion and/or skill mastery, and leverage analytics to determine what activities have the largest impact on your people and business.

So, before moving forward, make sure you understand the people systems you have at your disposal, as well as additional offerings that integrate with your technology infrastructure and will enhance the learning experience.

Remember too that any new learning strategy should be accompanied by a robust internal communications plan. It’s important to ensure that everyone, including those who are being reskilled and those who aren’t, understands why you’re undertaking the initiative and how their jobs will (or won’t) be affected.

Did you miss the webinar? Please catch us on replay to learn more about how to upskill and reskill your workforce to mid-21^st century success!

 

Could the Pandemic Be a Springboard to Sustainability?

Large companies and organizations have been making good on their recent commitment to corporate citizenship by dedicating resources to help the globe overcome some of its most pressing challenges. Sustainability has been among these key areas of focus, leading to environmentally friendly corporate initiatives from Apple’s commitment to closed-loop supply chains to the development of Patagonia’s next-generation responsible business venture capital arm.

While it’s crucial for these organizations to make top-down commitments to sustainability, business units, groups and even individual teams within them can take their own steps in playing a key role in sustainability in the new normal.  

1. Commit your team to your corporate purpose.

At the corporate level, a clear statement of purpose from executive leadership has become a critical tool in supporting sustainability. The same concept can be borrowed by unit and team managers to empower their employees to find ways to take action.

The process of defining purpose makes it clear that businesses exist to serve society and not the other way around, and the link to sustainability becomes clear,” University of Pittsburgh School of Business professor CB Bhattacharya wrote in a May 2020 article for the World Economic Forum.  

In the pandemic era, Bhattacharya recommends that companies bring their purpose to life by pursuing concrete sustainability goals and focusing on a few material areas. Unit managers can follow up on that commitment in their daily work by asking themselves questions such as: What new sustainability developments will affect demand for our products and the supply of our raw materials? What type of sustainability do stakeholders expect from our part of the business?' By adding a sustainability variable to the business unit decision-making equation, middle management can help make good on big corporate promises. 

One way to do this is to evaluate your immediate team’s carbon footprint. Although you might have policies in place already, application may need some ground-level execution. You can start by examining how your electricity, gas emissions output, and water intake were measured in the past, and consider re-measuring with a new reduction target in mind.

Encourage your senior leaders to reiterate your corporate purpose, sustainability objectives and reduction targets to all constituents, but especially the employees who will be implementing them "on the ground." 

2. Empower your employees.

Getting employees buy in to sustainability measures is critical. Motivate your employees—and build enthusiasm for your efforts—by explaining why sustainable business practices benefit everyone. Tell them how they can make a difference by incorporating these new processes and tools into daily operations.

Empowering your team requires stepped up communication. It's something the leadership team at major home health product manufacturer Sunstar learned first-hand during COVID-19. 

“The pandemic developed with unprecedented speed, and the amount of information created confusion,” says Julia Linz, senior director of HR at Sunstar. “We tried to provide regular and clear communication to our employees—especially when conveying tough messages.”

Sunstar set up a dedicated online channel to share best practices on sustainable business practices, remote work, and other timely topics, to post updates on health authority regulations, and to provide a space for confidential questions. Company leaders have also learned to seek multiple perspectives on managing the crisis from local market leaders and departmental managers.

Encourage employees or teammates to brainstorm and implement new ideas that serve customers in a more environmentally friendly manner or generally make the office a greener space. A few examples employees can take ownership over include embracing electronic file sharing to reduce paper and ink cartridge use, using reusable coffee mugs and water bottles, or even bringing plants into their workspaces to recycle stale air. They may seem like minor contributions, but if enough employees across the globe deploy them together, the benefits can add up.  

Fracture, a medium-sized company in the Inc. 5000, allows customers to upload digital photos, have them printed on durable glass, and shipped in an eco-friendly, ready-to-mount package. According to CEO Abhi Lokesh, the organization’s employees are researching ways to offset the company’s carbon footprint from raw material shipments and receivables. “Fracture is also working with We Are Neutral, a partner helping us neutralize carbon emissions through offsetting and reduction initiatives like tree planting,” he says.

For the rest of the article, check out AMEX Business.

Are You Managing Data Responsibly?

New AI-driven health tracking technologies are being used by organizations to curtail the spread of the coronavirus by monitoring and recording patrons’ and employees’ temperatures and locations to determine whether they may be a high-risk of spreading the disease. With many data-related privacy and ethical questions about this approach still unresolved, businesses looking to reopen in the new normal will have to grapple with whether or not to deploy these technologies and, if they do, how they should go about it.

Technology

At a June 2020 virtual conference about the COVID-influenced economy, futurist Benjamin Pring of IT services consultancy Cognizant spoke about the inevitable rise of surveillance technology by governments and businesses. Much like the aftermath of 9/11, the new security systems implemented during COVID-19 will most likely be here to stay, he said.

One example of the technology he was talking about comes from French "3D semantic camera" company Outsight, who has developed autonomous laser technology that uses factors like bare faces (i.e. without masks), higher-than-average body temperature and proximity to other people to identify “high spread risk” individuals within large crowds. Companies, like real estate management or security firms, can use this technology to streamline safety enforcement in an effort to keep transmission rates low.

And as the Washington Post reported in April 2020, if you enter the City Farmers Market in Atlanta or one of the Wynn Resorts hotels in Las Vegas, you can expect to be discreetly informed if you register as feverish — and may even be asked to leave.

Even in public places that operate on a smaller scale, business owners and managers are deploying thermal “healthcams.” Organizations like pharmacies, banks and restaurants are using solutions like Vivotek, which checks the number of people entering and exiting a facility. The smart camera and analytics system monitors lines and points of entry with more frequent social interaction. Other businesses are using social distancing wristbands that ring when two people stand less than six feet apart. Fitted with Bluetooth, the band tracks the wearer’s physical connection points in case the establishment later needs to track an infection.

Privacy

The biggest concern with this type of surveillance involves informed consent — the responsibility of the organization to make the appropriate efforts to communicate to those being tracked what data is being collected and how it is being processed. Some customers may be uncomfortable with automated systems routinely follow individuals through public places and record their data, and the bigger the crowd, the less likely it is that every customer will understand how they’re being monitored, and the implications of the surveillance.

For the rest of the article, head over to the AMEX Business site.

 

Superjobs Are the Roles of the Future

As companies begin to spin back up, leaders are looking to refill the roles they may have had to cut to survive. But many new roles won’t look like the old ones —organizations can structure their workforces to most effectively distribute labor between employees and automation through newly defined roles called “superjobs.”

According to Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report, superjobs include components of traditional jobs to maximize the strengths of both humans and automated services. When thoughtfully deployed within an organization, superjobs can offload routine work to automaton to free up employees to focus on more strategic, revenue-oriented tasks.

"Calling for both hard and soft skills and cutting across typical departmental silos, superjobs require the flexibility to combine tasks and merge responsibilities as needed," the Deloitte report says.

While Deloitte's research on superjobs mainly focused on large enterprises, the concept is applicable to small and midsize businesses as well. No matter the size of your organization, superjobs can streamline operations in functions like supply chain management, accounting and marketing — really, wherever software exists to supplement human efforts. Indeed, Deloitte's research found that 41 percent of respondents are using automation extensively or across multiple functions. (The survey "polled nearly 10,000 respondents in 119 countries.")

To get started on this path, businesses must undertake an intelligent job design process, flatten their hierarchies to make room for flexible, self-managed teams and boost their arsenal of applied technology skills.

Intelligent Job Design 

Traditional roles are narrower in scope — the tasks an employee performs directly maps to what the employer outlined in the job description.

But automation and algorithms take over the routine and fixed aspects of work, business leaders can free their employees to use their critical thinking and feeling talents on tasks such as like data interpretation, problem solving, empathy, creativity and teamwork.

While you don’t have to throw out all your existing job descriptions, it’s worth looking at your workforce with a broader lens. Consider creating what Deloitte calls a “job canvas” — a more fluid and expansive way of examining the work you need done.

You can launch your canvas, which can be organized by team or individual, by thinking through the following questions:

• What core business problem does this team or individual need to solve?
• What should their outputs or deliverables be?
• What kind of supervision will the team or individual need to accomplish these objectives?
• What technologies can this team or individual use to augment their capabilities? Which tasks related to this business problem are best suited to people, and which should we automate?
• What learning processes can we put in place to target essential skill development for this team or individual?
• How will we measure this team or individual’s success?

Because you are now looking at your workforce at a higher level, you will likely find that your superjobs (or superteams) cross departmental fault lines of HR, IT, finance, sales, etc. Integrating data-driven insights with human intuition will be a central component of all superjobs. Depending on your business, your superjobs might include:

• a “customer experience architect,” who uses sentiment analysis to create stronger real-time engagement;
• a “case synthesizer,” who examines legal precedents mined by an algorithm and handpicks the most impactful ones; or
• a “supply chain effectiveness analyst,” who uses performance data to make recommendations that balance both cost and sustainability.

For more on superjobs, check out the full article on the AMEX Business site.

How to Build Relationships with Generation Z

 Generation Z, defined as those born 1996-2012, is a diverse and cosmopolitan group of young people that may be inexperienced, but appreciates unique opportunities to contribute. What else do we know about them, and what can we do to better connect with Gen Z?

They are city dwellers who stay put

Not only is Generation Z more ethnically and racially diverse than prior generations, but members reside in heterogeneous environments as well.  According to a late 2018 study by Pew Social Trends, Gen Z-ers overwhelmingly reside in metropolitan as opposed to rural areas. Only 13 percent of post-Millennials are in rural areas, compared with 18 percent of Millennials, 23 percent of Gen X-ers, and 36 percent of early Boomers at the same ages.

They are less likely, however, to move. Only about 11 percent of Gen Z-ers had a different address from a year earlier, compared with 17 percent of Millennials and 20 percent of Gen X-ers and Boomers at the same ages. Companies that want to learn how to reach Gen Z as employees or customers should integrate into the nearest metropolitan community by offering free learning and social opportunities.

They lack concrete work experience

Per the Pew report, Gen Z-ers are entering adulthood with less experience in the labor market than prior generations. Only one-in-five 15- to 17-year-olds in 2018 (19 percent) worked at all during the prior calendar year, compared with 30 percent of Millennials and 48 percent of Boomers at the same ages. A little more than half of Gen Z-ers were employed during the prior calendar year. 

I’m fond of saying that one can learn transferable workplace skills like sales, marketing, client relations, and finance in any job – even in retail or fast food. The trouble is, fewer Gen Z-ers are taking these positions as teens, and therefore enter the professional world less prepared to succeed. As a workforce futurist, I believe Gen Z-ers are less gainfully employed because they are spending more time in school and prefer to balance their time doing meaningful activities. Therefore, strategizing how to connect with Generation Z should include designing part-time or internship opportunities that expose them to the business and introduce essential skills.

For more where this came from, check out the full piece at AMEX Business.