Long live the mall — as your new office workspace. With shopping centers becoming obsolete, one former mall in Birmingham, U.K., has a new lease on life as a co-working space. The 130-foot-long building called The Mailbox houses communal areas for open-office working, while one-time stores serve as meeting rooms. Some of the larger spaces are rentable for private office digs, and there are even recreation areas and a cafe for employees in need of a break.

As a mixed-use property, the building is also home to a movie theater, high-end retail stores, apartments and hotels, and more than a dozen restaurants. By creating “a truly unique office, leisure and retail experience,” design firm Studio Sutton has solved multiple problems facing businesses today. Malls needn’t sit empty as e-commerce takes over and companies don’t need to shell out for more office space than they need. Further, business owners may have better luck incentivizing workers to come back to the office by offering such an appealing, modern workplace.

Our only question: Can we still get an Auntie Anne’s pretzel?

Grand exit: How to offboard employees the right way.

It’s all relative: Don’t brand the workplace as a family.

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Organizations tend to spend a lot of time and money on recruitment and onboarding, but what happens when those employees inevitably leave?

Although employe turnover impacts industries at different rates — whether they’re leaving voluntarily for greener pastures or involuntarily due to layoffs — your organization has probably seen some workforce shifts this year. How did you react: by sending workers a copied-and-pasted “I wish you the best” email or by putting each through a standardized offboarding process?

While the latter can take time and resources, it’s worth the effort. You’re probably not going to stay besties with former employees. And that’s OK. However, an effective offboarding can soften the transition and benefit both sides.

? DIVE DEEPER:

• Why You Should Pay Your Employees to Stop Working for You

Here are five reasons why you should create an intentional off-boarding process:

• Protection: Nearly half of organizations have experienced loss of company-issued property — or, worse, unauthorized access to cloud resources — after employees have left, according to YouGov Research. An offboarding process can help ensure workers don’t depart with your technology or sensitive company data.
• Morale: Offboarding isn’t just about the employees who leave. A strong offboarding process can signal to remaining workers how they will be treated when it’s their turn to move on.
• Insight: Exit interviews give you a chance to learn why people are leaving. Is turnover only affecting one team or department? Are there cultural issues that need to be resolved? An exit interview can provide valuable insights to improve your org.
• Reputation: A departing worker may become a competitor, client, customer, or even regulator. If your relationship stays positive, the former employee is less likely to hold a grudge or tarnish your name.
• Recruitment: You never know when an employee might come back to you. (Boomerang employees are a thing.) To further maintain these relationships, consider launching a platform or alumni network program for workers to stay in touch — or just add them as LinkedIn connections if you haven’t already.

Offboarding employees can be a time-consuming and emotional process. The best way to overcome these challenges is to create a plan or checklist to follow every time.

Think about what you want your relationships with departing employees to be in five days, five months, and even five years. What steps do you need to take to achieve those goals?

To learn more about employee offboarding, watch our interview with George Mason University’s Dr. Sarah Wittman on how to improve your offboarding process.

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Dr. Steven Rogelberg is a Chancellor’s Professor at UNC Charlotte and former president of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

“We are a family.” It’s not uncommon for senior leaders to express this sentiment to their workforce as a way of communicating desired (or perhaps even realized) cultural characteristics of the organization. While the intent is often benevolent or aspirational, unfortunately it’s problematic for a host of reasons:

• Organizations are organizations; they are not families.
• Families can mean so many different things to different people. They are not always positive and can be quite dysfunctional.
• Many people are not looking for organizations to be their families. After all, they typically have families. (Is a manager supposed to be a direct’s “parent”? That can turn people off.)
• It signals that the organization does not value work-life boundaries. After all, family members are typically available to other family members at a moment’s notice.
• Feeling extreme loyalty to your work “family” can increase the chances of engaging in questionable and unethical behavior as a way of protecting it.
• Personnel actions — such as performance plans, accountability, goal setting, and firing — just don’t fit well with a “family” concept. It’s OK if people leave a job they are not fully thriving in; we typically don’t do that in families. We want healthy turnover in a healthy organization.

Here’s an alternate approach: Brand your organization as a high-performing, supportive, and efficient team. We all enjoy being part of a great team. Fostering commitment and enthusiasm toward team goals, coupled with stressing and enacting healthy team values, can drive the types of positive behavior and culture you are looking for. This means you can reap the benefits of the “family” concept without the downsides.

When it comes to working alongside your actual family, check out our tips for working with your spouse without filing for divorce and working around your kids without losing your mind.

• 1809: Mary Kies became the first woman to hold a patent in the U.S., which was granted for a new weaving technique. President James Madison personally signed the patent.
• 1893: The Panic of 1893 started on this day. It led to 500 banks closing, a stock market crash, 15,000 business failures, and unemployment rates as high as 40% during a five-year depression. 
• 1900: Billboard began publishing. The weekly magazine covered events at carnivals, fairs, burlesque shows, and the circus. Today, its Top 100 chart is the music industry standard. 
• 1921: Fashion designer Coco Chanel released Chanel No. 5. It remains her namesake company’s bestselling perfume.
• 2008: Baskin-Robbins cofounder Irv Robbins passed away. He cofounded the world’s most successful ice cream chain with his brother-in-law, Burt Baskin, in 1945.

Forget the celebrity-branded tequilas during Cinco de Mayo; many are unethically sourced and loaded with unnamed sweeteners and flavorings. However, Paladar’s blanco uses estate-grown Blue Weber agave that’s fermented and distilled the ancestral way, as they say. You can really taste the Jalisco terroir with floral, earthy notes and a hint of fruitiness.

Written by Skye Schooley, Ali Saleh, and Aaron Goldfarb. Comic by John McNamee.