Work

GMO Internet, which operates a range of web-related businesses including finance, online advertising and internet infrastructure, will start paying up to 100,000 yen (£660/$890) monthly by Bitcoin to its employees in Japan from February this year.

“Employees can receive salaries by Bitcoin if they want to,” company spokeswoman Harumi Ishii said. “We hope to improve our own literacy of virtual currency by actually using it.”

The offer will be open to around 4,000 employees of the GMO group in Japan, she said.

Once upon a time, the American dream was built on the ideal that hard work leads to success. But today, with the rise of technology, the message has become: work all the time or you will fail, Melinda Gates argued in her first column on LinkedIn. 

This workaholic culture is particularly harmful to women, Gates writes, because women are still being told by society that home care and child care is up to them as well. She explained:

"We’re sending our daughters into a workplace designed for our dads... The American workplace was set up based on the assumption that employees had partners who would stay home to do the unpaid work of caring for family and tending to the house. Of course, that wasn’t always true back then, and it definitely isn’t today."

One of my favorite economists, Dan Ariely, tells this story about a locksmith. When the locksmith was new at his job, when he was an apprentice, he took a really long time to open a lock. And people saw him working away, struggling, really having a hard time. And often they'd end up giving him a tip. But then when the locksmith got better at his job, when he got so good at his job he could open pretty much any lock in just a minute or two, then his customers started complaining. They were like, you want $200 for that? This took you, like, 30 seconds. And you can see why, right? I mean, we tend to think the harder someone works, the more they should get.

But, it's also kind of ridiculous. I mean, this guy was better at his job. When you call a locksmith, you want to get into your car or your house as fast as possible. And that was what he was doing. He was giving customers what they really wanted. But they felt cheated. His bills suddenly felt unfair.

A growing number of companies are combining vacation and sick time into one bucket called "paid time off", or PTO.  Employees will decide whether they're going to use the days for vacation, when they or a relative are ill, or for family events.

According to a report from World at Work, an association of human resources professionals, 51 per cent of private companies, including small and mid-size businesses, offered PTO last year.

One of the biggest pluses about PTO for small business owners is eliminating the administrative chore of tracking how many sick days versus vacation days their employees have used. That can be particularly helpful in the growing number of states, counties and cities where employers are required to allow staffers to accrue sick time, usually up to 40 hours a year depending on how many hours they work. With PTO, there's no need to track hours worked or accrued.