When AI Decides Raises, The Best Startup Employers And Finding Meaning In Work

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Knowing what you do best—what your skills, strengths and passions are—often sets the stage for what many of us choose to pursue for our careers. Like anyone’s career path, success requires hard work, constant learning and dedication. Of course, natural-born talents also help. Did you know Taylor Swift is related to the 19th century poet Emily Dickinson? That’s according to genealogy company Ancestry.

But career success also requires contentment. For this week’s Q&A, I interviewed the author of Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life about how we can all find work purposeful and feel fulfilled. Find that advice below.

Elsewhere, four ex-Twitter executives, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, are suing Elon Musk over severance pay. And fast food franchises are using AI to monitor employees and choose who gets bonuses.

Read on for more workplace news and career tips. Have a great week!

WORK SMARTER

Practical insights and advice from Forbes staff and contributors to help you succeed in your job, accelerate your career and lead smarter

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Here’s what to do if you are ghosted by a recruiter.

CAREER ADVICE Q&A

David Bahnsen spent eight years at Morgan Stanley as a managing director and six years at UBS as a vice president before starting his own venture, The Bahnsen Group, a financial services firm. Bahnsen is also the author of the newly released Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life. I spoke with Bahnsen about his book, career and advice for finding purpose. Excerpts from our conversation below have been edited for length and clarity.

I wrote it throughout the first half of 2023, but really it’s been a passion of mine for many years. During Covid, it just sort of became accelerated—my belief that the idea of work as a really cathartic, therapeutic, motivating and healthy component of our lives was now becoming a foil as a reason to explain the bad parts of people’s lives: people’s stress, anxiety, depression or mental health. I see work as a solution to those things.

I felt it was time to take the three or four things I care most about and combine them into different angles of the same topic: the economic need for work, the cultural need as a person of faith, the theological need, and then ultimately just that kind of human, emotional, psychological reality—all of it. I blended [it] together and wrote Full-Time, making the case for a more meaningful understanding of work.

I’m really open about my own story. I was a very, very young man about to start college, and my father passed away. He was 47, I was 20. He was my best friend, my mentor, my hero, and I had no choice but to begin working. My mom was already gone. There was no money. Life was really coming at me fast. And so I embraced work, not only out of necessity, but really because it became something that I could channel my energies into and become a productive and happy adult, as opposed to sort of wallowing in the kind of difficulties that life had dealt me early on.

I found work to be a very healthy diversion from some trauma and from some challenges. And then ultimately in that work, not only was it a distraction and not only did it produce the livelihood I needed to get by, it also gave me a purpose. It gave me something that I could channel my energy and do to feel better about myself, to serve others and to grow in my own confidence.

That view of work became kind of a model for me and how I believe a lot of people can look at it. I didn’t like every job I ever had. I didn’t like every boss I ever had, but I liked being busy, I liked being productive, and I liked feeling successful.

I didn’t get a college degree, and even though the way I thought my young adult life was going to start off went differently, I had the self-confidence to go get hired at a Wall Street firm. And now here we are 30 years later and running a more than $5 billion business.

There are going to be different circumstances for different people, and everyone has to deal with, cope with and process things in their own way. I believe that one rule of thumb that is more universal is to try our very best to feel content in all things: to not feel sorry for ourselves, even in situations where maybe we have a little bit of a right to feel sorry for ourselves, to resist that temptation because nothing good can come of it. All we can do is just focus on how we respond to things.

The other universal advice is really working on a focus on the journey, not the destination. To me, it is something I think is so meaningful that someone can look back on their career and they’ll be able to highlight those moments that were very stressful, challenging and difficult, but really helped pave the way to a successful and satisfying outcome. You have to just see the journey for what it is: part of our story. The destination can be very rewarding, but it comes as a result of a journey. That focus helps get you through hard times.

TOUCH BASE

News from the world of work

KFC, Taco Bell and Dairy Queen franchises are using AI to track workers: The AI system, dubbed Riley, monitors and analyzes employees’ interactions with customers and assigns bonuses to those who are able to sell more.

America’s best startup employers: Forbes released its annual list Tuesday. Thumb through it here.

Klarna says its AI assistant is doing the job of 700 workers: Klarna partnered with OpenAI to improve customer service interactions. In just one month, Klarna says the ChatGPT-inspired bot is managing two-thirds of customer service chats, about 2.3 million conversations, in 23 markets and 35 languages.

Majority of workers at largest U.S. Mercedes plant signal union support, UAW says: Most of the employees at Mercedes-Benz’s Alabama facility have submitted cards in support of joining the United Auto Workers, setting the stage for a possible union election, amid a broader effort by the UAW to organize workers at major non-union plants—despite mixed results in the past.

Labor group drops campaign for Starbucks board of directors as company makes progress with union: After years of negotiations and allegations of labor violations, the coffee company appears to be making progress with its organizing workers.

Elon Musk sued for severance: Four ex-Twitter executives filed suit against Musk on Monday, alleging he owes them more than $128 million in severance pay after he fired them following his 2022 takeover of the site for “gross negligence” and “willful misconduct.”

CHECKLIST

Add these books and videos to your to-do list

• In Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, author Charles Duhigg explores how to best communicate at work and in life.
• In this video, Forbes speaks with David Kennedy, a professional hacker who built two cybersecurity firms in his 30s, about his career journey.

NUMBER TO NOTE

That’s the number of jobs the U.S. Army is planning to cut as part of its restructuring plan.

QUIZ

In the latest example of an individual state’s efforts to eliminate DEI initiatives from public institutions, which university last week eliminated positions affiliated with DEI and closed its office dedicated to diversity, according to an administrative memo?

1. Vanderbilt University
2. University of Florida
3. University of Georgia
4. Tulane University

Check if you got it right here.