Move to Switzerland if you want a pay rise, being the "only one" at work, and more top insights

What’s happening in the world of work: The Saturday edition of the Daily Rundown highlights the business trends, perspectives, and hot topics you need to know to work smarter. Read on and join the conversation. 

Are pods the fix for open offices? Forget table football and bean bags, the hottest new office item looks more like a phone booth. As companies adopt open-office plans to spur collaboration (and trim real-estate costs), pods are filling a growing need for quiet spaces. They also help offices adapt to a “broader shift in office culture,” notes CityLab, in which workers prize flexibility and choice of their environment over the corner office. ? Here’s what people are saying. 

For young employees, relocating pays off. For workers aged 18 to 34, relocating abroad boosted their earnings by 35%, according to HSBC’s new Expat survey. The benefits were smaller for older workers, with those between 35 and 54 seeing a 24% bump and those 55 and over gaining just 9% from moving overseas. Switzerland was ranked the top destination to live and work after Singapore held the top spot for five consecutive years. ? Here’s what people are saying. 

You Asked:  “When is the right time to change jobs? And how do you know it is the correct thing to do?” — Sio T., U.K.-based creative director in the publishing industry

• “There isn’t a right, or a wrong, time to change jobs. There are so many different factors involved – job responsibilities, job security, salary, benefits, work schedule, promotion opportunities – that it’s a very personal decision. Your job satisfaction and how happy you are in your current role is an important consideration as well. One way to help validate whether the timing is right is to spend some time checking out the job market, looking at what jobs are available and how appealing they are to you. Interviewing is a good way to take it a step further. You can then compare the pros and cons of your current position compared to the new opportunity. It can be challenging to know when it’s the right time to make a change, but carefully researching the new job and company can help you decide whether a new position is a good fit for the next step in your career.” — Alison Doyle, job search expert at The Balance Careers

Looking for career advice from the pros? Submit your questions in the comments with #YouAsked and we’ll take care of the rest.

It’s not easy being the “only one” at work, argues an essay in The New York Times. Minorities in the office have fewer role models, lack a sense of community and are under pressure to keep up and outperform their peers. Female employees who are the only women in the office are 50% more inclined to quit their jobs, per a McKinsey & Company/Lean In.org survey of 64,000 workers. Some ways to embrace being an “only” in the office are recognising the bias and creating relationships with allies over time. ? Here’s what people are saying.

When it comes to collaboration, it’s all about assembling a team with the right mix of thinking styles, according to research from Carnegie Mellon. In a study of 98 teams playing a game requiring coordination, researchers found the best performers had just enough cognitive diversity to develop and act on creative ideas but not so much that collaboration broke down. The researchers grouped thinkers into three categories: verbalisers (common for lawyers and journalists), spatial visualisers (typical for engineers), and object visualisers (common among artists). ? Here’s what people are saying. 

One last idea:  We all have them: those “nagging tasks” that just keep sitting at the bottom of our to-do lists. That’s why author and habits expert Gretchen Rubin sets aside a “power hour” each week, where she tackles “only tasks where I had no deadline, no accountability, no pressure, because these were the tasks that weren’t getting addressed.” 

“That’s another Secret of Adulthood: Something that can be done at any time is often done at no time. But although no one else cared when I replaced my office chair with the broken arm, or donated my daughters’ outgrown clothes to a thrift store, it made a difference to me.” 

What's your take? Join the conversations on today's stories in the comments.

— Scott Olster, Katie Carroll, Riva Gold