Burnout and a lack of career opportunity during the pandemic is leading to a "rage quitting" trend as employees are looking to take back control of their lives and shift to jobs that offer more flexibility and empathy from leadership. "If agencies are only now thinking about the flight risk of staff, they're too late," says Bailey Lauerman CEO Greg Andersen, adding that "the most important thing is empathy and dialogue."

The coronavirus pandemic appears to be taking a toll on teachers, who are more likely to have frequent job-related stress and are about three times more likely to experience depression symptoms as their peers, according to a study by researchers at RAND Corp. Data shows that 1 in 5 teachers say they are having trouble coping with the stress.

The hybrid model of work emerging because of the pandemic will require an overhaul of the employee experience and benefit employers by giving wider access to talent who can work from anywhere, writes Cheer Partners' Aidan Willner. Successful employers will focus on employee wellness to boost productivity and retention, and an additional boon is the reduced environmental impact companies will experience, Willner writes.

Pay-for-performance systems sound good in theory but have failed to deliver the promised benefits in practice, in part, because they create incentives outside of management's control, redirect behavior in undesired ways and are difficult to coordinate, argues strategy adviser Roger Martin. "If you default to the blunt instrument of PfP, you will get blunt results -- and you won't like them," Martin writes.

Few of us are savvy and agile enough to successfully navigate office politics and gossip, whereas working hard and staying out of the fray can actually earn you more esteem, recognition and situational power, writes Keith Danko, founder of Witherspoon Partners and a former CEO. That said, if you're at a company "where the office politics start at the very top and are completely infused throughout the business," you'd best head for the exits.

A friend of mine is a paralegal and a single mother of three -- two in college, one in high school. The high-schooler is a freshman. He’s old enough to be left home alone safely but, during the school closures, he needed her oversight and help to do his schoolwork. He’s a bright young man and usually a good student -- bringing home A's and B's -- but he struggled with remote learning. Her remedy: work from home.

Her employer -- I’ll call him Joe -- was apprehensive. “Isn’t he old enough to stay home alone? Can’t he get his teacher to help him? Or a family member? We really need you on-site at the office.” I fumed when I heard. His response revealed not just a stubbornness (“I’ve always run my firm like this.”), but also how ignorant he was to the real issues his employees were suddenly confronting.

She remained firm. “He needs me at home right now.” She proposed a hybrid situation where she would come into the office two days a week and work from home the other three. Joe reluctantly agreed.

And everything worked out fine. Joe’s office continued running smoothly and he eventually gave her more flexibility. To his credit, he relaxed and learned to trust his employees to get their work done even when they weren’t in the office.

Hybrid work models are effective as we see in today’s Success from TrainingMag story. They open doors to an expanded talent pool and reinforce to employees that their needs matter.

Are you implementing a hybrid format for your teams? Let me know! And send this link to others who could benefit from this brief.