People who struggle to be understood might be speaking too fast or too quietly, or they might be trying to show off their authority and knowledge of big words, writes Calendar CEO John Rampton. This article offers several possible steps for improving your spoken communication, including writing more, consulting a thesaurus and avoiding jargon.

Employers should consider their legal and tax obligations before giving employees the green light to work remotely from a different country. Asking various questions can help, including how long the employees will be staying abroad and whether they will be considered tax residents of the countries in which they reside.

Workplace culture surveys should try to reach the entire team, as sampling establishes a precedent that everyone will be heard and everyone held to agreed-upon values, says S. Chris Edmonds in this blog post and video. "Sampling 20% of your team member population requires that you exclude 80% of team member perceptions about respect in their workplace," Edmonds writes.

To help remote work meetings, the Zoom platform offers noise cancellation to filter out background noise and improve audio, but employees could benefit from further tech improvements. Newer platforms use AI tools to monitor body language and faces and can position participants along a stereo spectrum to make the audio sound more like a conference room.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society released guidance to help employers determine appropriate work shifts to maintain productivity while reducing the risk of fatigue. "Rather than providing a single, generic recommendation, these new guiding principles involve taking a more holistic view when setting customized shift durations for each individual workplace, considering not just physical fatigue, but mental fatigue, time of day, job requirements, safety risks, lifestyle factors, and health," said Dr. Indira Gurubhagavatula, one of the paper's authors.

There is a lot to learn from this piece that outlines the swashbuckling ways of pirates during their high times on the high seas. It turns out the leadership norms that governed most pirate ships were surprisingly progressive and bred leaders whose skills and commitment were valued over their pedigree.

The relative importance to employees of financial compensation has dropped 11% in the last 10 years, but benefits that doubled in importance in that time include medical, life insurance, dental, vision, wellness and childcare, according to analysis by PwC and TrueChoice Solutions. Factors such as work-life balance, career progression and training have tripled in importance, write Andrew Curcio and Alastair Woods of PwC, who offer advice on how employers can bring their benefit and reward packages in line with what workers want.

Most people would have never guessed that the highest concentration of snakes ever recorded on a single piece of land would be on property connected to San Francisco International Airport. The San Francisco garter snake has been called "the most beautiful serpent in North America."