Archive for the 'Workplace' Category

Archives for Workplace

How loyal are you to your employer? Would you be willing to cut pay, benefits, or hours to help keep your company afloat? Do you feel as if you and your company are “in this together”?

If you said “No way!” to the above questions, you’re not alone. A new study by research giant Ipsos Loyalty found that only about 30 percent of us feel loyal to our employers. About the same number of us feel that our employers have earned our loyalty.

So why does loyalty on the job matter?

Because our loyalty as employees impacts our happiness at work. According to the landmark Ipsos Loyalty Study, employees with the highest levels of loyalty to their job also characterized themselves as happiest.

What Is Loyalty—and Why Does It Matter?

Loyalty is the realization that we need each other to be whole and happy. It’s well known that people who are happy at work are happier overall.

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Archives for Workplace

Disabled workers are known to fly under the radar of unemployment statistics and recruiters. But in a fast-growing job market, companies may be eager to explore new ways to tap their talents.

There’s no issue on the supply-side. New studies show that disability payments are increasing at “an accelerating pace,” with a 51 percent rise in people on Social Security Disability Income over the last decade, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The cause? More and more, it’s unhealthy lifestyles – namely poor diets and not enough exercise. Still, back and joint problems, cancer and heat disease remain among the top reasons for disability. Some companies try the carrot and stick approach to promoting good health.

But because of the high cost of replacing personnel and fewer qualified candidates to fill open positions, companies are investing in accommodation.

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Archives for Workplace

Everyone knows a bully. It’s the schoolyard tyrant who swoops in on a target, pushing him around while spewing threats and belittling him in front of others. But childhood isn’t where it stops – it’s also on display in the workplace.”Workplace bullying” is repeated, health-harming mistreatment of a person through verbal abuse, behavior that’s threatening, humiliating or intimidating, and/or sabotage that prevents work from getting done, according to the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Wash.

Recent research and a U.S. court case have spurred interest in the issue.

About 54 million people, or 37 percent of American workers, have been bullied at work, according to a September 2007 survey conducted by Zogby International on behalf of WBI. Bosses account for 72 percent of bullies, and women are targeted more frequently, according to the survey: 57 percent of those bullied are women. When the bully is a woman, 71 percent of the targets are women.

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Archives for Workplace

Most professionals find their day fractured by interruptions. What you need is a bulletproof chunk of your workday. You need a Quick 10.

Shave off ten minutes — say, from 11:00 a.m. to 11:10 a.m. — with no interruptions allowed. Period. No phone calls. No visitors. No e-mails.

Establish this pattern over the course of a week. At 11:00 a.m. every day, announce you’re taking a Quick 10. If you need an official reason, say it’s to catch up on work, fine-tune a report, return e-mails. Whatever. Action is the strongest course. Ultimately, the magic of your Quick 10 is that it’s your business.

When people interrupt, tell them how it’s going to be: “I’m in the middle of my Quick 10. I’ll be right with you.” What’s next? See how many more precious minutes you can grab for yourself before the interruptions overwhelm your dam. Maybe in a couple of weeks, your Quick 10 becomes a Quick 20. If you’re skilled, in a month, you’ve gained a quick half hour. Once your immediate coworkers realize there are ten minutes when you’re not interrupting them, the clever ones will see the light and want their own Quick 10.

Why does this work? It announces that what you do is important enough that for some period during the day, you cannot be interrupted.

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Archives for Workplace

One evening in May 2006, the president of the China division of a $10-billion-a-year multinational locked himself out of his office. Using his handheld, he fired off a nasty e-mail to his secretary, ordering her to start checking with her superiors every night before she went home. He also CCed others in the company before hitting send.

She replied, CCing the company’s entire China staff and asking him to remember his manners. “Even though I’m your subordinate, please pay attention to politeness when you speak,” she wrote.

The Chinese press caught wind of the exchange and because the president was from Singapore, it sparked a fury about cultural imperialism. He later resigned.

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Archives for Workplace

This hasn’t been a good year for jerks in the workplace. Apart from the usual controversies about egomaniacal politicians, baseball managers and CEOs, a popular new book recommends zero tolerance for assholes and a research report by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Management School underscores the toxic organizational impact of emotions in the workplace.

Experts who study emotional intelligence, also called EQ for emotional quotient, gather data proving that highly empathetic rather than insensitive people excel in business or personal relationships. The emerging ’science’ of EQ is gaining traction among recruiters and HR executives, many of whom screen potential hires for these ’soft skills’.

What hasn’t been well understood until now is how intense emotions, especially in the workplace, impact productivity and spread from person to person.

“We engage in emotional contagion,” contends Sigal Barsade, a Wharton professor who studies the influence of emotions on the workplace. “Emotions travel from person to person like a virus.”

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Archives for Workplace

Somewhere between bankruptcy and profitability the airlines lost their way. And somewhere between the tarmac at JFK and the friendly skies, the thought strikes me that the time for sympathy has long since passed.

In response to heavy losses earlier this decade, management sought to balance the books by reducing quality and costs. They cut back on customer service – often in petty ways – and slashed pay for airline workers, and then, despite high fuel prices, they slowly crawled back toward profitability. And investors are happy – air travel is growing by 7 percent each year.

Of course, I’m neither a shareholder nor an employee – I’m just an economy-class customer struggling to work on a six hour cross-country flight. I’m average height; my knees are buckled against the seat in front of me. If the guy in front of me leans back any more my laptop keyboard will be on my chest. And if I don’t work, I won’t get much sleep tonight.

The government regulates safety, but personal comfort and productivity is a free market issue. “We do not mandate comfort. It is up to airline how they want to configure seats,” says Alison Duquette, FAA spokeswoman. “As far as how many seats an airline can cram in there or configure it’s up to them.”

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