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There is no escaping it: too much news is bad for you. It should come with a government health warning: “This intellectual diet is fine taken in small doses, and preferably in weekly instalments, via a well-balanced newsletter, such as 10 things from William Montgomery." So, as another week slips by, here are 10 things which caught my attention and may have escaped yours. Please feel free to share on social media and forward to your colleagues and friends so they can also subscribe, learn and engage. I would be very grateful if you did. William Montgomery 1. How to achieve greater engagement. Employee engagement is a foundational component to workplace outcomes. If you want to talk about wellbeing, manager development, performance, and more, you also have to talk about employee engagement. It’s important to cultivate a belief in the power of engagement across your entire company and the first step is making engaging leadership part of your culture. READ MORE 2. Are Mondays best spent in the office? More bosses are pushing staff to start the week in the office, arguing that beginning the week in person boosts productivity. Not all workers agree: Mondays trail Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays for office attendance. While some consider Mondays a chance to start fresh, others want a ’gentle’ start to the week. The Wall Street Journal 3. PM accused of ‘stealth tax’. Rishi Sunak is being accused of a “stealth tax” after official data showed that the number of higher-rate taxpayers has soared by 40% in the past three years. Almost 5.6 million people, or one in six taxpayers, will pay the higher rate this year after the prime minister froze the threshold at which people start paying it. This means that the higher rate is “increasingly hitting middle earners including teachers and nurses”. The Times 4. Hottest June ‘pounded nature’. Environmental groups have warned that the UK’s hottest June on record caused record deaths of fish in rivers and disturbed insects and plants. Nature is being “pounded by extreme weather without a chance to recover”, said the Wildlife Trusts. The Met Office will announce if the high temperatures were linked to climate change. The meteorologist group said that “above-average temperatures” could be experienced from July 12 to July 26 with a “correspondingly higher likelihood” of heatwaves. The Daily Mail 5. Happy people are social people. Happiness doesn't just happen. It's impacted by our emotional, physical, spiritual, intellectual and relational well-being. As it turns out, the quality of our relationships is what helps make people self-identify as "very happy." A study found very happy people, compared to those who are not, socialise 11 more times with relatives, seven more times with neighbours and five more times a year with friends. Ultimately, strong relationships are built with elements of kindness, positivity, love and vulnerability. The Atlantic 6. Beginning of the end for low-calorie food and drink. The World Health Organization is set to declare that an artificial sweetener used in thousands of popular food and drink products including Diet Coke may cause cancer. In updated guidelines due next month, aspartame is expected to be classified as a “possible” carcinogen, meaning there is some limited evidence linking it to cancer in humans. The IARC has two more serious categories, “probably carcinogenic to humans” and “carcinogenic to humans”. Reuters 7. Earth tilting due to our water use. Groundwater extraction to provide communities with drinking water and irrigation has pulled so much moisture out of the earth, it's tilting the planet's axis. The Earth's axis shifted about 31 inches to the east over the course of about two decades - roughly 1.7 inches a year - because of our need for groundwater, according to new research. While people do not feel the Earth rotating, shifts to its rotational axis could cause further changes to the climate and impact GPS systems for cell phones, weapons and planes. CNN 8. Vienna is the world’s most liveable city. The world’s most liveable city is Vienna, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, followed by Copenhagen. London ranks 46th on
the list, falling 12 places from 2022. Healthcare, education and infrastructure scores improved globally in the past year, but stability dropped in part due to inflation. The Economist 10. The bottom line. A record 2.5 million Brits are not working because of long-term sickness, an increase of 400,000 since the pandemic. The Times |