TOI.News – Here’s a story about customer service and communication with a lesson I thought was obvious but apparently wasn’t.
Department News
Articles about activities within the academic departments
BAPM Grad Students Assist Atlas Air With Pilot-Retention Analytics
In the highly competitive international air-transportation business, ensuring on-time delivery of passengers and cargo requires elaborate strategic planning, precise scheduling, flexible and timely maintenance, and extraordinary teamwork.Continue Reading
Remote working soars in Connecticut, exceeding the national average. It’s ‘a trend that is going to be with us,’ an expert says.
The number of Connecticut residents primarily working from home nearly quadrupled in 2021 compared with two years earlier, new U.S. Census figures show, some of the most compelling evidence yet about how the pandemic has reshaped the state’s employment landscape.
In 2019, 5.6% of employees in Connecticut, or 1 in 18, worked from home, but that climbed to 19.5%, or 1 in 5 in 2021, as employers adapted to COVID-19 distancing precautions to keep running their organizations, according to an analysis of Census data released by the Connecticut Data Collaborative.
In Hartford County, the percentages were even higher, at 20.5% in 2021 compared with 4.8% in 2019.
The percentage of employees working remotely in Connecticut in 2021, exceeded by nearly two percentage points the 17.9% registered nationally, according to CTData, a public-private partnership that advocates the use of data to drive policy and improve programs and services.
“While we know rates increased during the initial year of the pandemic, what is striking is that well into the pandemic rates of working from home have persisted, at levels three times as high as the pandemic,” Michelle Riordan-Nold, CTData’s executive director, said.
“To me, it’s indicative of a trend that is going to be with us,” Riordan-Nold said.
Connecticut also was in the top tier of states with at-home workforces in 2021, coming in behind Washington (24.2%), Maryland (24%), Colorado (23.7%) and Massachusetts (23.7%), according to CTData.
CTData’s analysis was based on the U.S. Census American Community Survey, which are one-year estimates released by the Census Bureau. The sample size for the ACS survey was 19,518 in 2021, compared with 20,291 in 2019. The survey was not conducted in 2020 because of the pandemic.
The Census survey for 2021 also marked the highest number and percentage of people working from home recorded — both nationally and in Connecticut — since the community survey began in 2005.
Greg Reilly, a professor of management and a department head at the UConn School of Business in Storrs, said it was clear remote working, to some degree, will remain part of the employment culture even after the pandemic wanes. But he cautioned the survey was taken while a broad-cross section employers had not called back most workers back to the office and so the percentages could come back down a bit.
Nevertheless, Reilly said the pandemic demonstrated some jobs are particularly well-suited for remote working. Certain jobs in all pay categories — ranging from information technology to customer service may evolve such that people who choose those jobs will take into major consideration the flexibility of working from home, Reilly said.
There are costs to a workplace with a remote component, and the lost interaction, especially that is by chance, Reilly said.
“It may be less the ‘hard to connect,’” Reilly said. “The more important, powerful negative is the serendipity that is gone when you are not in the office. You do start conversations that you don’t intend and those conversations can lead to a variety of positive, problem-solving outcomes.”
Reilly also noted that trust is built by a string of often chance, in-person conversations.
CTData also found other striking shifts in working patterns in Connecticut.
As would be expected, the percentage of workers commuting to work — by car, truck or van — dropped to 74% in 2021, compared with 84% two years earlier. The percentage taking public transportation was cut in half, to 2.5% from 4.5%.
Kenneth R. Gosselin can be reached at kgosselin@courant.com.
©2022 Hartford Courant. Visit courant.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Source: https://www.courant.com/business/hc-biz-working-remotely-census-20221012-ygtmhsehvbbqzo2s7ufnki7nre-story.html
Real Estate Alum David Wharmby Returns to UConn As Program Director
UConn Today – As a new business student, David ‘Dave’ Wharmby ’89 (BUS), ’02 MBA took an introductory real estate course that changed his life.
“Professor Byrl Boyce was a very personable guy, with a dry sense of humor, who really wanted to make sure we understood the material,’’ Wharmby says. “He took some complex financial math and went over it again and again, until students really felt like they were masters of difficult material.’’
Corporate Tax Rate Report
WalletHub – Is the U.S. leaving money on the table with the current corporate tax structure?
The U.S. faces a balancing act in setting its corporate tax rate high enough to support government activities and prevent abuse, but not too high to encourage firms to shift operations overseas or to discourage business growth.
School of Business To Offer Fully-Online Master’s Degree in Human Resources Management
UConn Today – In their infancy, corporate Human Resources departments hired and fired, and made sure employees got their paychecks on time.
But the profession has taken on much greater importance in recent years, with the HR executive becoming an essential strategic leader, recruiting, hiring and developing personnel that will shape the destiny of a company.
Surprise Outcomes When Little Consumer Secrets Kept From Loved Ones
UConn Today – Do you keep secrets from your loved ones, family, or friends? It turns out that many people do. Whether ordering something online and hiding the package when it arrives, hiring a cleaning service and not telling your roommate, or eating a pizza instead of dieting, we often have secret purchases that we just prefer not to divulge.
Why going green makes good business sense
Nine ‘Enthusiastic, Well Qualified’ Faculty Join School for Fall 2022
The School of Business is welcoming nine new faculty members this semester, continuing a trend of successful recruiting. Many of the new hires already have strong research accomplishments and awards for teaching excellence.Continue Reading
Management’s Professor John Mathieu, and Protégé, Recognized for Exceptionally High-Quality Research
UConn management professor John Mathieu has received the Academy of Management’s RMD Distinguished Career Award, recognizing his high-quality research and methodology expertise.
Additionally, one of his former students, UConn alumna Margaret Luciano ’15 Ph.D., now an associate professor of management at Pennsylvania State University, won a similar academy award as an early-career researcher.
“These awards are a testament to the highly respected research we do at UConn,” Mathieu said. “Scientific research has to be done well or it is of no value at all. We set a very high standard.”
Mathieu is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at UConn, the highest honor that the university bestows on faculty. He has repeatedly been recognized with lifetime achievement awards for his work in the field of leadership and organizational management. His groundbreaking research on team dynamics, for example, has been used by NASA to prepare astronauts to reduce conflict during long trips, such as a future journey to Mars.
As a UConn doctoral candidate, Luciano’s dissertation addressed the dynamics of cross-unit coordination of patient “handoffs” in a busy hospital setting. She won multiple awards while she was a student, was inducted into the School of Business Hall of Fame in 2015. Subsequently, she has also collaborated and mentored other UConn Ph.D. students in the organizational behavior field.
In addition to the Academy of Management award, Luciano also recently received an INGRoup (Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research) early career award, which is presented to a researcher whose work makes a distinguished contribution to the study of team behavior, dynamics, and outcomes.
“Margaret’s success in winning these early career awards is a reflection of how hard she works and the quality of her research,” Mathieu said. “Our doctoral students have won all sorts of awards involving big, ambitious, creative research studies. Margaret’s recognitions, along with those of other management Ph.D. graduates, is also evidence of the quality of training and preparation that our students receive here at UConn, not only from me, but from the entire program. It does take a village.”