To get workers back to the office, you could follow the Amazon CEO route of threatening to fire holdouts. Or, you could get creative like beloved PB&J brand The J.M. Smucker Co., which has introduced “core weeks” for half the year when employees must show up to its Ohio-based office. Otherwise, they’re free to (ahem) spread wherever they please.

“Our corporate hybrid workplace model was developed thoughtfully and intentionally to ensure it would meet the needs of the business and our employees,” explained CEO Mark Smucker on LinkedIn, “offering an expectation and guidance, not rules … empowering employees to adopt it in a way that works best for themselves and their teams.”

Employees dutifully show up when asked, according to Smucker. You jelly, Amazon?

This particular hybrid (hy-bread?) model won’t work for every business, but the key is discovering what works best for yours — or, specifically, like with Smucker’s products, what sticks.

Mandatory vacation: The case for minimum PTO

Customer service recovery: Because mistakes happen

(Source: Shutterstock)

Summer is almost over. Did you take your break?

More than half of U.S. employees don't use all of their vacation days, according to Pew Research Center. That’s because workers don't want to fall behind (49%), feel bad about co-workers picking up their slack (43%), worry taking a vacation might impede career advancement (19%), and fear it will cost them their job (16%). Yikes.

The irony is that nonstop work makes people worse at their jobs, and stress can be a productivity killer in the long run. No business owner wants their employees to constantly disappear with vague excuses, but a zero-relaxation office culture will hurt the bottom line eventually.

So if your employees won’t voluntarily take paid time off (PTO) due to workaholism or paranoia, should you force them to do so?

Starting this year, Goldman Sachs requires employees to take at least three weeks off annually. It’s a trend that’s been gaining momentum at smaller companies, such as SimpliFlying, which saw productivity, creativity, and satisfaction all rise significantly after instituting mandatory vacation.

“You come back refreshed,” SimpliFlying CEO Shashank Nigam told CNN. “You come [back] with smarter inputs and are more creative.” (Nigam is so serious about taking time off, SimpliFlying employees will forfeit their vacation pay if they contact the office for non-emergency reasons during their PTO.)

It remains a bold experiment, but minimum PTO could help attract top talent and foster employee loyalty, reducing turnover and recruitment costs by demonstrating a commitment to work-life balance. Either way, don’t forget to set an example by taking some much-deserved time away yourself.

Life can’t be all play, no work. What is a reasonable PTO policy, anyway?

Dr. Steven Rogelberg is a chancellor’s professor at UNC Charlotte, former president of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and author of Glad We Met: The Art and Science of 1:1 Meetings.

If you run a restaurant, sooner or later you’ll serve an undercooked meal. If you run an e-commerce store, you’ll accidentally send the wrong product (or the correct one with a late delivery). Despite our best efforts, these and other mistakes occur and lead to customer dissatisfaction.

However, this does not mean you will lose the customer. In fact, mistakes provide an incredible opportunity for customer service recovery.

When we fix mistakes effectively and humanely, we can engender customer satisfaction by demonstrating that we do right by them, even when things go wrong. A customer who experiences this will often find themselves more loyal to the company than if there wasn’t a mistake at all.

Here are best practices for correcting inevitable mistakes: 

• Train employees on the importance of service recovery, taking responsibility (even when others may be to blame), acting quickly in accordance with customer needs, and being creative to find an excellent and expedient solution.
• Make it easy for customers to report a problem and receive help; don’t force them to jump through technical or bureaucratic hoops.
• Empower your customer service providers to act. Eliminate barriers for them. Create processes and procedures that are nimble and allow for quick resolution, fixing the customer’s problem in the short term and building tremendous loyalty in the long term.

Learn why "customer delight" is the new standard in customer service.

(Source: Paramount)

The dual Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes have shut down TV and film production industry-wide, but animation is excluded. That’s convinced Cartoon Network and Warner Bros. Animation production workers and Marvel visual effects artists to unionize.

Even by Hollywood standards, animated and VFX projects can have especially grueling hours. More than 100 artists quit working on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse “because they couldn’t take it anymore” and “went through hell,” one crew member told Vulture.

So, it’s notable that working conditions were different for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Director Jeff Rowe said in an interview that he noticed how producer Seth Rogen’s staff had “really good work-life balance,” and Rogen told Rowe, “We want to make sure that our people have time away … and that it doesn’t become their entire lives.”

Rowe extended that philosophy to his Ninja Turtles animators, letting them work half-weeks and remotely if needed. With a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score, the film has earned double its budget at the box office, proving you can make a hit without making workers quit. Cowabunga!

Are you a Leo or a Raphael? Check out our Ninja Turtles Guide to Business.

• 1795: James Gordon Bennett, founder and publisher of the New York Herald, was born. You can thank him for making cash-in-advance advertisements standard practice for newspapers.
• 1878: Emma Nutt became the first female telephone operator. Women dominated the field until automatic switching technology made it obsolete in the 20th century.
• 1960: England legalized off-course casinos for betting on animal races. Ironically, the ensuing decline in attendance at the tracks put many courses out of business.
• 1989: The U.S. required auto manufacturers to install airbags on the driver’s side, although they had been invented nearly 70 years prior.

Written by Skye Schooley, Dan Ketchum, and Ali Saleh. Comic by John McNamee.

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