Written for the leaders, owners and professionals of the 11 million businesses with between $50,000 and $50 million in revenue.

The unemployment rate is still relatively low, but more workers expect to become unemployed than at any time in the past 10 years, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Its survey also found that job-hunting has “increased to 28.4% — the highest level since March 2014,” which is a 9% uptick from a year ago. Perhaps not coincidentally, employers have had an easier time filling hourly retail positions lately.

For more on the labor market, read business.com’s deep dive on why recent graduates are struggling to get hired.

Theatre kids: Hiring them can dramatically improve performance

Improvement: Should you be getting better all the time?

Mr. & Mrs. Smith: A cautionary tale of mixing work and love

(Source: Applause)

While hosting this year’s 15th annual Jimmy Awards in New York City, which celebrates high school actors with Broadway dreams, Grammy-nominated crooner Josh Groban delivered a passionate monologue that went viral. He made a case for non-entertainment businesses to invest in showbiz people.

“When you need someone who can work on a deadline, you hire a theater kid,” Groban said to cheers. “If you need somebody who can take over a job in a pinch and act like they’ve been doing it the whole time, and do it on almost zero budget, hire a theater kid.”

He’s right, and here’s how I know: I wrote a book titled Theatre Kids. (That’s our preferred spelling, which I’ll use from here out.)

In the book, I make a case for why my BFA in Performance was not, as my dad feared, a waste of time and money but an unorthodox education in navigating modern corporate America, which I’ve done with over a decade of experience building and managing creative teams for digital brands. Here are five reasons why hiring managers should give BFAs a look:

#1. Theatre kids thrive within hierarchies

Working on a play is a top-down process: There’s a script, a director, and then the cast. Theatre prepares you for office life by knowing how to perform within a pecking order without losing your identity. A good actor does what a director asks, but still contributes their own unique ideas. 

#2. Theatre kids learn from failure

Every audition is an opportunity to sell your talents. Part of the training is accepting you’ll get turned down more than you get cast, but each lost role is an upskilling opportunity that brings you closer to your goal. This encourages an attitude of risk-taking and self-improvement.

#3. Theatre kids are camera-ready at all times

You can bet anyone with onstage credits is ready to talk to an audience at a moment’s notice. Whether leading an impromptu Zoom meeting or giving a high-stakes presentation, they will nail it.

#4. Theatre kids improvise under pressure

The rehearsal process involves solving a series of constant problems, big and small, while opening night — the ultimate deadline, which your team cannot miss — looms in the distance. And even then, a malfunctioning prop or missed technical cue requires instant adapting. Need someone who’ll hit their marks no matter what? Hire a theatre kid.

(I promised five reasons, so here’s another: During company off-sites, theatre kids are always the first to volunteer for karaoke.)

Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway is available now.

Today’s workplace is anywhere and everywhere, but your team still needs to collaborate and provide your customers with exceptional service. Zoom connects your business to employees and customers here, there, and everywhere.

More than just a video conference platform, Zoom offers complete business communications systems with top notch features like voice over internet protocol (VoIP), contact center support, and virtual customer service agents. Zoom doesn’t just support your business’s communications, it helps bring them to the next level.

Ready to upgrade how you stay in touch with employees, customers, and partners?

(Source: Shutterstock)

Dr. Ben Baran is an associate professor at Cleveland State University and co-founder of Elevating What Works.

Who doesn’t want better ways to do their job? Doing things more effectively or efficiently always seems desirable. And it is valuable.

But managers should know that there might be a cost to encouraging people to spend their effort on figuring out better ways to work: A recent set of studies found that people who did so experienced lower mental performance at the end of the day.

This presents a bit of a tricky situation for managers. After all, workers themselves are excellent sources of insight regarding how to do work better. At the same time, if managers encourage this too much, they might be sacrificing performance in other areas.

The answer isn’t to stop improving. Instead, managers should stay mindful of their workers’ overall mental fatigue. If possible, focus on process-improvement efforts when there’s less demanding (or dangerous) work to do later in the day.

Managers can also strategically schedule breaks into the workday so that workers can recharge after some tough mental effort.

You can think about it in terms of the “cost of quality,” which is a well-known idea, particularly in manufacturing: At some point, the effort to take quality up another notch is simply not worth it. We actually can make ourselves less effective and efficient if we strive for perfection.

(Source: Prime Video)

In Prime Video’s fresh revival of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, John (Donald Glover) and Jane Smith (Maya Erskine) are two strangers who forsake normal lives for high-octane careers as secret agents. It doesn’t take long for things to get heated between the two, which creates all kinds of problems for them.

Couples counseling identifies a recurring theme: their work life is interfering with their love life and vice versa. Personal arguments lead to missteps on spy missions; those missteps lead to more arguments on their days off.

This cycle might sound familiar to couples who are striving to run a business together (minus the occasional assassination assignment).

When your romantic partner happens to be your business partner, you should: establish roles early on; trust each other to handle respective shares of the workload; and learn to turn “work brain” off at home and on date nights. Compartmentalizing those dynamics might be necessary for both to survive, even if it’s not a matter of actual life and death like on the show.

Written by John DeVore and Ali Saleh. Comic by John McNamee.