Career changes can be difficult to navigate, but it's important to look past immediate changes such as a new city or job title, writes Dinuka Gunaratne, who works with graduate students in career and professional development. Gunaratne uses Suzy Welch's 10-10-10 approach, asking how the change might feel in the next 10 minutes, next 10 months and next 10 years.

It's all right to give your direct reports feedback on their performance, but include some "feedforward" as well, giving them advice on how to enhance their skills, writes Joel Trammell, a former CEO and the owner of Texas CEO Magazine. "Keep your employee from dwelling on their failures and instead help them see how they can improve outcomes in the future," Trammell writes.

A formal "servant purpose" that clearly spells out what your company does and how it serves customers can help employees feel more engaged and inspired to do their work, says S. Chris Edmonds in this video. "Formalizing your company's servant purpose -- its present day 'reason for being' -- helps employees understand how the work they do contributes to improving customers' quality of life," Edmonds says.

A paper presented at a recent Boston Fed research conference showed the COVID-19 pandemic did not cause lasting disruptions to the labor market, which suffered mostly temporary layoffs in early 2020 and recovered by spring 2022. "I think if we were going to see large scale changes, we would have seen them by this point," said Lisa Kahn, an economics professor at the University of Rochester and a study co-author.

UPS, which plans to hire more than 100,000 extra workers this year to cope with business upticks during the holiday season, is using all the technology it can muster, including a no-interview system that uses QR codes. One of UPS' hiring managers, Anissa Zambruno, says the process must be smooth because applicants "just do not have the patience to sit on this."

Dealing with a difficult colleague may mean you have to be willing to examine your own biases and behaviors and remember that all you can truly control are your own thoughts and actions, writes Amy Gallo, author and co-host of Harvard Business Review's Women at Work podcast. "[Y]ou may not be able to change how a colleague behaves, but you can change the way you interpret and respond to their behavior," Gallo writes.

In observance of Thanksgiving in the US, SmartBrief will not publish Thursday and Friday.

In Monday's issue, the Water Cooler item gave the incorrect name for the Buffalo Bills' stadium. They play at Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park, N.Y. The Detroit Lions, meanwhile, play at Ford Field.