workplace – ManagersMag

April 21, 2023

MANAGERS INVESTMENT IN DATA CENTRES, CRUCIAL FOR GROWTH OF AFRICAS DIGITAL ECONOMY

Recently, the United States injected $30 million into African data centers [ADC] to expand its facilities in Nairobi, which provides digital data storage services across east, central, and southern Africa, to support the African continent’s journey towards digital transformation and economic growth. As the world moves increasingly to the web, users and businesses demand quick information. The closer a business is to a data center, the higher the performance of the service. So far, the steps by most firms to eliminate their on-site infrastructure and in turn replace it with hybrid, public and private cloud infrastructure has to a huge extent defined how well data centers are thriving in Africa.

In 2019, only 28% of the population of Africa had access to the internet, according to the international telecommunication Union research. The continent had 34 mobile broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants compared with 97 in Europe and 104 in America. It also lagged significantly in terms of international bandwidth usage per internet user.

A server room in one of the data centres in Africa. Photo| Pool

However, figures from 2021 show that there has been measurable growth, relative to that of the developing countries: where the continent moved from 28% to 33%. But still, with the developing countries financing for the upgrade of their broadbands willingly and very handsomely, the continent remains a hugely underserved market when it comes to internet connectivity and hyper-scale-ready tier 3 data centers. With the population of Africa expected to double by 2050 and again by the end of the century, and the internet driving economic growth and digitalization, there’s a growing need to host enormous volumes of data. Africa has 17% of the world’s population, 13% of the world’s mobile connections, and only 5% of the world’s broadband connections, and connections, and accounts for only 1% of the world’s data center space, according to cisco’s annual international report [2018-2023]. So certainly, the bolstering of data centers in this continent would significantly transform this continent

Even though Africa has been lagging four to seven years behind developed-world economies, the explosion in the number of data centers is now hitting the continent’s shores. There has never been a better time to provide organizations and countries with access to the speed, storage, and scale that these centers deliver and the United States is conversant with this gap. Through financial aid totaling $30 million, the United States through its ambassador to Kenya meg Whitman flagged the disbursement of the funds to the Africa data center ADC as part of a $300 million commitment by the US government to help ADC expand in the continent. The commitment whose part of the money was disbursed ate last year, is earmarked to aid the finalization of the construction of an additional facility to triple the previous facilities from 4.5MW to 15MW. According to Africa Data Center Market Report 2022: Africa is Attracting Significant Investments in Recent Years, Led by South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Nigeria, and Ethiopia – Forecast to 2027

Although ADC is one of the leading data centers in Africa, the continent has more than 9 data centers that have added a white floor area of around 30,000 square feet area or more each in 2021. Several country governments including Kenya are taking initiatives by developing special economic zones, and industrial parks, which provide tax exemptions for data center development. A data center’s main task is to centralize an organization’s shared IT operations and equipment to store, process, and disseminate data and applications. Because they house an organization’s most critical and proprietary assets, data centers are vital to the continuity of daily operations within organizations

While Africa’s biggest constraint from an effective transition to the digital economy mainly emanated from the usage of outmoded data storage methods and facilities even on the internet, data centers will provide the reliability of storage by eliminating these glitches of using portable technology. For example, some experts believe the U.S. economy loses between $200 billion and $570 billion a year due to power outages and other disturbances, a loss that would have otherwise been averted if there existed a more upright culture of adoption of data centers. In turn, this suggested that Africa’s loss was colossal as its financial capabilities can’t directly support the creation of several data centers. Components of setting up a data center include routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems, servers, and application-delivery controllers, and often are egregiously expensive to the extent that African governments would have to desperately rely on foreign aid to successfully launch and maintain data centers.

SIGNIFICANCE

As the world moves increasingly to the web, users and businesses demand quick information. The closer a business is to a data center, the higher the performance of the service, as the data centers provide the stable foundations required to drive the delivery of data services on the continent. Around the world, the elimination of on-site infrastructures by firms to invest in hybrid, public and private cloud infrastructure has led the majority of data centers to thrive.

Technologies such as the cloud, big data, and IoT generate more data through high-end applications and need more efficient systems for data processing. These technologies are growing the demand for advanced IT infrastructure in the African data center market.

Moreso, enterprises prefer servers that can reduce space in the data center environment without affecting performance. The competition between branded and ODM [original device manufacturer] server suppliers will continue because multiple enterprises opt for server infrastructure based on open community designs (OCP). The increasing demand for server shipments will continue to grow moderately as enterprises move to the cloud or colocation platforms for their IT infrastructure operations. Global cloud services providers such as AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle are expanding their presence with new cloud regions. So, there is an opportunity for vendors to grow in suburban areas and fuel the demand for hyper-scale data centers in Africa. In December 2021, Equinix announced its plan to acquire the Main One data center with a sum of around USD 320 million to expand operations in Africa. The new entrants have a strong opportunity with new innovative technologies of infrastructure in the African cloud data center. In addition, the threat of acquisitions is to be also high since global data center operators acquire existing data centers in the region.

Key growth factors for data centers include growing of Smart City Initiatives, Government Support for Data Centers, growing Artificial Intelligence Adoption, migration from On-premise to Colocation & Managed Services, and adoption of Advance IT Infrastructure. The increase in submarine cable investment and fiber connectivity is likely to attract more data center investments in the region. South Africa has the highest number of submarine cable deployments, followed by Nigeria and Kenya.

April 21, 2023

Intellectual Health. Minding The Welfare Of Your Intelligence.

“My brain is my garden. If I feed it – it will grow; if I nurture it – it will thrive; if it thrives – so will I.” – Jen Chastre.

Many people think the key to being well is focusing on physical wellness – that you need to eat right and exercise to be healthy. While that is true, there are actually multiple factors that affect your overall well-being.

Intellectual Health defines the quality of your mind at a particular time of your life, be it while you are young, during old age, or at any other age. It includes the ability of your brain to change, adapt, learn and grow with time. Intellectual health emphasizes the importance of having regular intellectual activity, taking care of your mental fitness, and practicing life-long learning

Intellectual health is essential for overall good health and life. Diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are the result of changes in brain chemistry and function. Taking care of your intellectual health can keep your brain functioning well for longer. This is also why it’s so important it is to be well-informed about education and intellectual wellness overall

The International Wellness Institute defines wellness as an active process through which people become aware of, and make choices toward, a more successful existence. This aligns with the six dimensions of wellness model, which includes physical, social, emotional, spiritual, occupational, and intellectual wellness. Though unlike with others like spiritual or emotional intellectual wellness mostly concerns with being open to new ideas, thinking critically, and seeking out new learning opportunities and challenges. It’s being creative and promoting mental stimulation, and involves commitment to lifelong learning.

Mostly activities like the learning of a foreign language, reading for fun, working out puzzles such as jigsaws, crosswords, or Sudoku, Playing a board or card game, writing a journal or even playing a musical instrument are very core to keeping someone’s intelligence in good shape. In some other ways, participating in these activities has been shown to stimulate the brain and increase the connections between brain cells. According to the latest findings in Neuroscience, your brain reaches its peak performance at age 16-25 years, and thereafter, cognitive functioning declines. Exercising your mind gives you faster thinking and reaction time, increased focus and concentration, better memory, less stress, sharper vision and hearing, and a more positive mood.

However the activities that involve building someone’s intelligence like working out puzzles or reading books are deemed by far as hobbies hence the negligence by most people who argue that their hobbies are elsewhere. However given the much benefits the habits have on someone’s intellectual Wellness one can’t keep on avoiding them. To clearly gauge that you have greatly began to chart a good path towards intellectual wellness you should be able to a discern a development of good study skills and time management, an ability to challenge yourself to see all sides of an issue or even when you notice yourself becoming a critical thinker.

Others signs that mark good progress with development of intelligence include an advancement of your own ideas, views, and opinions and more appearance of situations where you are exposing yourself to new ideas, people, and beliefs that are different from your own

How To Improve Your Intellectual Health

However because it’s not a walk to develop intelligence through habits that hinge on innate factors like passion here are some ways to improve one’s intellectual health. The listed notes underpin how one can maintain Healthy Levels Of IQ And Intellectual Function.

For example, boosting your Intellectual Health By Learning a new Language, bonding with your family, keeping good track of time and ensuring that your physical health is okay can really come in handy in maintaining healthy levels of IQ and a human being’s intellectual function. Nonetheless, someone who is up to improving their intelligence will more often practice curiosity and will try to engage In discoveries if not proposing to safeguard all the aspects of their health for the entire days they live on earth.

April 21, 2023

Workplace in the Age of Gen Z: The rip off.

Gen Z Remaking of the workplace through silent revolt.

In a normal setting and context, the office is a place of utmost reverence where jokes and unserious business is highly shunned. It has distinguished itself as a strict structure through it’s set of standards and codes which throughout history have been exercised fully giving the office what is now labeled an official look. Until now the ideal workplace is where employees have a regulated dressing pattern, a strict operating schedule, a summoned technique of behavior alongside other many regulated laws. It has with time become customary and has helped firms yield good results through observance of mannerism and limiting one from acting against the codes. . It is the sole duty of the employee to not only present himself in a decent way but also act modestly to bring up the impression that he is a worker in a certain organisation without the telling it out verbally.. The positive observance of the customary rules by all the outgoing generations has successfully achieved a durable and traditionally-run workplace that through less questioning the involved organizations have been able to trace credible results. Transgressions like lateness, improper dressing and passivity therefore beg for punishments like summons, suspensions or expulsions.

However, with the emergence of gen Z (people born between 1995-2010) – the right age of technology, the ideal workplace that for decades helped companies get the top is bound to transform for good. With all the existing generations having persevered the regulations, this one specifically finds it hard to pull the strings and operate in such authoritarian environs. While research affirms that previous pairs of offspring’s held a decisive anticipation for work, the current gen z feels pessimisti about work, c made wearyt by the unlike work procedure, and given shivers by the fact that their conditioning is weaker upon pressure. Their upbringing has been a concord of pampering which added up to the technological effects has enveloped them in a modest culture of unruliness, laziness and social queerness. For the generation, status is not rewarded for obedience but rather for rebelliousness. And this has added to their in capability to fit in to the present world.

“I find office life hard and I would prefer it to self employment, where I can work with zero supervision and with no regulations”. Says Eddy Mwenda a student at Meru university of science and technology. Eddy 21, a data science practitioner who is in his final year, believes that their parents who grew up with minimal distractions in the social sphere are agreeably fitted for the current rigorous office system. In it, there exists numerous constraints like time, dressing behavioral which have a regulated protocol that bars their creativity and fantasy to fully deliver upon tasks. “ like it or not our programming is exotic, and of all the generations we not comparable to any other”. Adds eddy.

Generation Z which the worlds youngest set of adults, is charting a different approach to work, where they deliver the results but in more self-reliant space. Their call for breaking the stereotypical yokes of the existing workplace being fashioned by natural factors like their growing-up environment, manner and how they were handled it, fully contrast that of the previous generations begging the dire change of the system.

The generation is informally referred to as zoomers and is the demographic cohort succeeding millennials and preceding generation alpha. It is famous for erratic stunts of unruly behaviours, irrational laziness, less worry some about their future and it’s the cohort nicknamed media zombies for their addiction towards tv and social media. Born between 1995/and 2010, the oldest of the generation has already graduated from university and have have already tasted the bitterness of the workplace. Previously, focus on how incoming generations manage the workplace had been on millenials, who seemed unusually underprepared, but now the utmost of it is on the generation Z who for quite some time have shocked the local workplace scene. Their conduct and their pleasure-pursuing reaction, will in many ways reshape the conventional workplace.

How the civilized manner of the Gen Z will reshape the workplace.

a recent Gen Z survey proved how challenging it is for the two generations to navigate work at turbulent and difficult times.

According to Deloitte, its latest global 2022 survey across 46 countries revealed a clear picture of how this generations rede

fine working behaviors and “strive to balance their desire to drive change with the challenges of their everyday lives.”

Aside from financial concerns, the Deloitte survey also revealed that four in 10 Gen Zs and almost a quarter of Millennials like to leave their jobs within two years, and approximately a third would resign without having another job lined up, indicating “significant dissatisfaction levelsI in a trend known as ‘quet quitting th youngsters gradually start retiring without a notification by declining to work slowly until they are out of the door.

The youngsters are all-day vibrant, unrestricted, blissful and are sticklers for the finest things of life. They look for pleasure in every single activity of their life hence developing an indifference towards work which is lesser activating and more of draining. Reports indicate that they burn out quite fast upon work. Their level of commitment towards tasks and their capability to handle pressure is minimal compared to that of millennials, alphas and the previously arisen generations. In a report conducted by Asana, a work, -management platform in 2021, showed that the GenZ showed more signs of burnout easily than all other generations and age groups. It is therefore apparent that while millennials (generation born right before gen z) portrayed lesser endurance to long working hours, gen zers went overboard to wear out faster upon even deficient tasks. It is more upsetting gen zers have reporte the burnout signs mainly at the wee stages of their careers. This aspect of gen zers thereby will alter the 8:00-5:00 working schedule to a more relaxed roster if they have to deliver top+notch work. Although although the Kenyan government has not fully flagged in the four day working schedule, it was intended in the USA in a bid to save the millennials and gen zers from dying at work. “46% of Gen Zs and 45% of millennials feel burned out due to the intensity/demands of their working environments,” the organization said, citing its research. “44% of Gen Zs and 43% of millennials say many people have recently left their organization due to workload pressure.”

Also while surveys present these youngsters as lovers of booze, their management will be difficult, and their allegiance upon pleasures will overtake that of work. The toll of their laxity will rip off an important chunk from the additional prosperity that organizations used to garner from the hard work of previous generations who through their devotion- working extra hours to see the goals are attained, pu their respective organisations at the top To the detriment of the workplace, their alarming quest for pleasure will cost the workplace momentous time for meaningful office work.

Therefore studies place their alcoholism at the center of the workplace suggesting that reternchment will act futile as the numbers will will be huge. With most of generation zers being ardent lovers of enjoyment, alcoholism mentioned in place of other substances is one major problem challenging their concentration to tasks.. Most of them through peer pressure, desire to engage in unruly vices and rebelliousness begin the habits in high school and college and right when their career begins the majority are in an addiction crisis which they have to relive by either drinking at work or taking a day off. Although some employees in the prevailing employment scene are alcoholics the high number of college and high school alcoholics suggest that the number will definitely surge by the time the workplace is fully flocked by generation Z. Unlike previous generations, gen zers commence their drinking career in high schools largely and partly in primary schools. By the time they get to college, the bondage of an addiction has easily slipped into their lives unlike other generations who start drunkenness later in their lives.

Asides all other troubles, breaking of the customary office dressing code the ‘official wear’ will be first to be discontinued. Generation zers confidently believe in some dressing codes like suits to being archaic and not adding up to their favorable levels in dressing. While ancient suits pertained extremely baggy trousers, prospective generations reduced the sizes to skinny pants. So far current standards emphasize slimmed pants raised a level over the ankle donned with a tight shirt and a bow tie. Some of generation zers have seemed to like this code while others still perceive it as outmoded, and levels in This modification can be explained clearly by the example of the luxurious sneakers

April 20, 2023

CREATING BONDS, GETTING CONNECTED, FOR A PROFITABLE WORKPLACE.

The existence of good bonds between employees creates a comfortable niche for workers an organization as they find it more satisfying to work together as a family. In the case where such bonds are nonexistent, employees lose focus and concentration as their minds are always clouded with unnecessary tensions and stress.

Every individual at the workplace shares a certain relationship with his fellow workers. Human beings are not machines who can start working just at the push of a mere button. They need people to talk to, discuss ideas with each other and share their happiness and sorrows. Mostly this is close to what is called human bonding, a process of development involving a close interpersonal relationship between two or more people. However, while human bonding concerns more with filial ties like between family members or friends, it can also develop among groups, including sporting teams and workmates more because these people spend quite a huge period of time together. Bonding is a mutual, interactive process, and is different from simple liking as its the process of nurturing social connection. In a human workplace it’s very key.

Because an individual cannot work on his own, they will always need people to be around to assist in tasks or even to chat with to speak up on some disturbing issue. If an organization is all empty, it is obvious that employees will not feel like sitting there and working. This emanates from the concept that isolated environments do demotivate people and even go further to spread negativity around them. That is why it’s very necessary that people become extremely comfortable with each other and work together as a single unit towards a common goal.

Bonds especially those between blood-tied people like family members is characterized by emotions such as affection and trust. However even with employees who over a long period of time sit alongside each other in the office, the likelihood is that their bond grows to something big relatable to that of family members. Shared activities also compel them to forming a personal relationship which in turn confers the workplace with a ‘family feel’ culture who’s usefulness include more satisfied staff, improved productivity and retention levels and better workplace accord and dynamics. Ultimately whether employees in an organizations ever gets to choose to embrace such a culture is entirely dependent on the decisions of their workplace as well as on its organizational goals.

However employee bonding is not something to surmise, as it can help coworkers learn more about each other and facilitate a more open work environment. That’s why it’s so important for teams to find ways to bond with one another. Understanding the ways employee bonding keeps your team communicating effectively, can help you determine the best ways to build stronger connections.

Employee bonding is particularly about that moment when coworkers connect, grow their relationships and become better collaborators in the workplace. Often its policies can lead to happier and more productive employees, which is important to creating a positive work culture and strong, effective teams. Employers, managers or supervisors can schedule opportunities for employee bonding for whole departments or organizations, but team members can also plan employee bonding events for small groups and teams, too. According to a CIPD survey, over half of employees want a workplace culture with a ‘family feel’. Yet despite this, just over a quarter describe their current workplace as such. This is because employees must coworkers get to know each other better possibly through ways like learning more about your coworkers’ work styles, personalities and personal interests so as to collaborate and work together better.

When such familial scenes are allowed to breed within offices, they improve team performance as workmates can relate in different ways including through understanding and respecting each other’s strengths, weaknesses and interests, which can help you all delegate and complete your work more efficiently. Also unlike when someone is on their own, team’s are more suitable to celebrate a workers achievements which greatly boosts an employee morale by enabling them to feel more satisfied with their workplace.

Through building bonds, workers are more inclined to not only maintain a focus in their line of work but to also think creatively by thinking innovatively. group brainstorming sessions as an example of how bonding stimulates innovative thinking can be wielded in the office, easily in occasions like conference room conventions.

Bonding in remote working

Companies with remote workers should find ways to have these kinds of meetings. There are many ways coworkers can get to know each other on a deeper level while at work, after the workday ends or in another professional setting. Team-building games, Team lunches, Personable meetings, Regular acknowledgments, Game tournaments, Charity events, After-work meetups

Team building and employee bonding may look different when working from home, but it is still possible and useful for employees. Ways through which remote working employees can pull up this very important bonding thing, entail Video conferences, Coffee talks, Team meals and Water cooler chatroom. However, video conferences are the more richer form of bonding than all the others as people can talk on video conferences and their peers can see their nonverbal cues such as posture, facial expressions and physical gestures. Video conferencing may help employees communicate better since nonverbal communication can improve the way people relate, engage and establish meaningful connections with one another. Holding regular meetings via video conference helps team members feel connected while brainstorming, making decisions and providing progress updates.