I often come across random things that I would like to recycle, but can’t quite figure out how.

Here’s How Can I Recycle This? with a searchable database for your queries as well as your suggestions.

Check out uses for audio tapes, old calendars, and dried up pens.

My favorite? Out of date condoms. Not exactly an office supply, but funny nonetheless.

I can always tell when a company engages in brainwashing (ahem, I mean greenwashing) because I have these thoughts when I read their propaganda (ahem, I mean ad):

Oh, I didn’t know this company were environmentally friendly…..wait, wait, they’re not environmentally friendly at all….this is an ad with greenwashing.

BP is a real corporate baddie, but they launched a huge advertising campaign to color themselves green and improve their image. You’ve probably seen their ads in the New Yorker (along with Exxon’s) saying that they love their employees so much (and their employees love them so much they would die for them), and they love solar energy and butterflies, flowers, and jellybeans and can’t wait until we no longer rely on oil because they want (nay, need) to be out of jobs.

So, now their name isn’t British Petroleum. Oh, no. It’s BEYOND Petroleum. Yes, because they’re planning ahead with their 200 million dollar advertising campaign. But at last there is some hope, some truth in journalism beyond

Finally, a Safety panel slams BP over refinery blast and clarifies matters a great deal. Their refineries aren’t safe. And when their refinery blew up in 2005 in Texas, 15 people died and 170 were injured.

There’s a myth in our culture that you should keep your personal life separate from your work life—it’s for your own good, the good of your coworkers, and the good of the company.

The problem with this particular myth is although it’s exceptionally popular (I see it in the comments section on this blog periodically) it simply isn’t true. In fact, the authors of 12: The Elements of Great Managingdescribe how many executives do not immediately accept the “I have a best friend at work” element of the 12 elements. They argue, they complain, they deride, but they don’t accept that the 12 elements are based on something like 10 million interviews by Gallup. There’s a lot of research that suggests having a best friend at work is a really good thing.

Having a best friend at work predicts your performance at work. Your sense of affiliation with the people in your team, and your best friend, nin particular, encourage you to do positive things that you would not otherwise do. People look out for their friends. They don’t steal from their friends, thus avoiding the dreaded “shrink” in retail. This makes having a best friend at work very important to your own satisfaction, happiness, and productivity.

At other times in Western history, people had greater connections to their neighbors, their families, and their friends outside of work. But now with the number of hours people spend at work away from home combined with the number of hours they spend watching TV at home, people need friends at work or they are lonely, isolated, and miserable.

So, do you have a best friend at work? I do.

One of the challenges of integrating your sense of spirituality (that is, what is moral, good, worthy, and whole) into your work is that many of us cannot really quit our jobs to go serve food to the homeless or campaign in favor of compact fluorescent bulbs. Well, we can, but down the road we would be hungry.

So one of the things that is worth celebrating is someone who could see beyond the all (Must quit job and live in yurt) or nothing (Must shop at Wal-Mart) thinking that often traps us.

Beo of Someday Gardens (as in, Someday we’ll have the eco-garden we want) did just that with his green cottage business. He kept his job, which keeps the bills paid, and started his business on the side:

As we waited for our own Someday, when we could live a simpler life on a small acreage in a purpose built Green Home, we decided to start a Cottage Business installing ecological gardens, native plantings, and rain gardens to help some of neighbors lessen the footprint of their lawns. When we bid out our own new rain garden, it came to $5000, a staggering price that I certainly couldn’t afford, and I doubted any of my neighbors would pay either. One of the goals of Someday Gardens is to provide ecological gardening services at prices regular people can afford. We are not trying to get rich; we are doing this because we care about changing the world which means getting as many of these gardens out there as we can.

And isn’t that what spirituality in the workplace is all about? It’s about caring for the world and bringing it into your work.

Via Groovy Green

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, I thought I would post on a business model that uses community building to end hunger. It’s the Pay What You Can model and it’s social action at its finest.

At the One World cafe in Salt Lake City, you can get a meal in exchange for money or you can give an hour of your time to weed the garden, wash dishes, or sweep floors. You choose how you want to pay and you choose your portion size. This means that everyone who has money or an hour of time to serve can eat.

This is the model used at the SAME cafe in Denver. The food served in both cafes is wholesome, healthy, and organic.

Equally impressive, because you choose your portion size and the food is all fresh (not stocked or pre-prepared), only one garbage can is emptied at the end of the day at the One World cafe. I think Dr. King would be proud.

Read more in Time Magazine.

Via Groovy Green

Big Boss: What’s a topic that appeals to middle grades kids for our newest product?

Stephanie: Well, our most recent survey shows that other than celebrities and TV, they’re into video games, athletic shoes, collectible cards, sports figures, pets….

Little Boss: We could do something on monkeys.

Big Boss: I love the idea of monkeys!

Stephanie: Middle grades students can be very into pets like dogs, cats, even snakes. Monkeys are generally covered frequently in elementary school.

Little Boss: Let’s do monkeys.

Big Boss: I love monkeys. Once I saw a monkey in the zoo. I just love them.

Little Boss: I love them too.

Big Boss: So, we’re doing monkeys.

Little Boss: That’s such a great idea!

No doubt some of you can relate to this slightly exaggerated account. I’ve had a job where my opinion didn’t really matter. I’m not sure why I was hired, because any expertise that I brought to the job was totally ignored. You may have had this experience too and it’s extremely frustrating.

It’s the seventh element in 12: The Elements of Great Managing: My opinion seems to count.

Managers succeed when they take into account the opinions of those that they manage, especially those who are in the trenches. At a fundamental level, we all want to feel as though we contribute and are heard. When managers listen to our opinions, they validate us as workers.

Information overload? It can happen to anyone. Between reading multiple news services and staying on top of new information in your field, it’s easy to have a reading list a mile long.

In a paleontology class at Smith, we had to get through a hundreds of articles and there wasn’t time to read them all. Fortunately, the professor encouraged scanning, skimming, and reading (if necessary). This was my first encounter with these skills, but I’ve since applied them to the workplace, particularly with science and education journals.

Scan: For articles where you start with a lot of prior knowledge and you just need to know the point of the article and see if it offers anything new, read title, subtitles, and summary

Skim: For topics where you need to understand the actual research and end result, read titles, subtitles, and beginning and end, and anything else that seems interesting

Read: For topics where you want deep understanding, read the whole thing, but scan and skim first

In Scientific American’s Why a Quick Look Can Be Better Than A Deep Study, we learn that we can pick up things in a quick look that are lost in a much deeper appraisal. So scanning and skimming for information are ideal.

The study gave 650 people a chance to play, “Which one of these is not like the others?” (Remember that from Sesame Street?) People were able to identify the odd one out in less time.

“I think that what this paper really shows is that very early on in processing you’ve got access to that information that then gets hidden by that larger context,” he explains. “It points toward different stages in [the] visual process where different bits of information become available at different times.”

So I’ll continue to scan and skim, and not feel guilty about not reading the whole thing. Does anyone else do this?

If not, you might want to read 10 Tips to Improve Your Reading or 3 Steps to Improving Your Reading Comprehension

Dear Ms. Theologian

Can’t fathom why they think toddlers’ pants would go in a women’s category.

Dear Can’t Fathom:

Ms. Theologian has also worked for companies that employ their programmers in India to save money. She found that people on the U.S. side of the company were then always saying things like, “Yeah, the guy in India didn’t know what I meant. Ha, ha,” or “The guys in India left us this silly note!” or “You should have seen the way the guy in India wrote it!”

Ms. Theologian thinks that part of what is going on is that we are all a little afraid that all of our work could be outsourced. Why are we afraid of this? It’s just about possible. So we try to make ourselves think that our work is so superior and those folks in India don’t know what they’re doing. The problem? They do know what they’re doing and they’re getting better at it company by company. Ms. Theologian doesn’t know what to say to appease fears of outsourcing.

However, she does know that part of what confuses us in the workplace is that we often feel that our “work” is the end product (and this harkens back to what she was saying about productivity, the Industrial Revolution, and comparing our productivity to that of machines).

Really our “work” is the entire process, which includes misunderstandings and miscommunications from people everywhere. So communicating and straightening out misunderstandings is actually part of your work. That’s the short version of my answer.

The long version is that you can tell a lot about yourself by how you treat people who are different from you. And by different, I mean that maybe they live in a different country and speak your language with an accent or maybe they live two doors down from you and are a woman who used to be a man. Use the Golden Rule.

-Ms. Theologian

P.S. If you’d like to ask Ms. Theologian a question, send an email to ms dot theologian at gmail dot com.

Oh, Costco, I am laughing at your expense because you’re so silly with your denials of glass ceilings! I mean, yes, you have stores with 50% female staff, but only 13% female management, but there’s got to be a good reason…..

In the past, Costco has denied any discrimination. The company gave the judge statistical studies asserting that women were not underrepresented in managerial positions and that if they were, it was limited to two regions. Two experts hired by Costco asserted in declarations that any gender disparities that might exist were based on factors like women’s lack of interest in jobs requiring early morning hours.

For the record, Costco has a great reputation in the megamarket marketplace because they pay signficantly more than competitors (such as Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club) and they have a relatively small turnover.

However, I don’t like the spin they put on their glass ceiling suit. Rather than saying that Costco requires managers to work early morning hours and is inflexible about work schedules, they’ve decided to blame the women and their unwillingness to work in the morning. Again, I’m laughing at you, Costco, and your attorneys, because that’s absurd.

Read more about the Costco Bias Suit

In my interviews with people about their spiritual practices during the workday, I found that lots of people keep a photo or keepsake nearby their desk during the workday. I’m starting to consider buying an icon. I’m not particularly Christian (I’ve heard post-Christian applied, but I’m not into that label), but I find these images absolutely transcendent.

Icons are very important in the Eastern Orthodox Churches and often with non-practicing members. When I was growing up, we had a number of icons in the house (my Dad is Greek), but I wasn’t aware of their religious significance. Funny household, no? Especially because icons are thought to be a way to experience God through the images of saints and Christ.

There’s an excellent exhibit at the Getty Museum of icons of Saint Catherine’s monastery. Now that name meant nothing to me, but this is the monastery near Sinai, where Moses received the ten commandments, and houses the majority of older icons. Note the placement of fingers, which spell letters in Greek denoting Jesus Christ.

Historically, of course, there are some challenging theological issues with icons, such as the second commandment (no graven images) seems to conflict a tad with the overwhelming presence of icons in the daily lives of people. But those commandments are funny that way—some seem really to be followed, and some are completely ignored.

In any case, it’s a spectacular exhibit at the Getty with enough background that you understand that the significnace of these icons, the risks involved in their preservation.

See more icons here.

In a study released five years after it was promised, we see that procrastination seems to make us fatter, poorer, and unhappier. That sounds pretty bad to me.

I wasn’t a bad procrastinator until I realized somewhere along the lines that deadlines weren’t carved in stone; they were flexible. Even so, I’m not a serious procrastinator, as some apparently are (and you know who you are).

Something has to be done about it, sooner rather than later, University of Calgary professor Piers Steel concludes. His 30-page study is in this month’s peer-reviewed Psychological Bulletin, published by the American Psychological Association….

The causes of procrastination combine temptation, sense of immediacy, the value of doing the job, and whether you believe you can get the work done, Steel found. He even created a complicated mathematical formula, complete with Greek letters, to figure out when a person is likely to procrastinate.

And, why is procrastination worse than ever?

Oh, just the infinite number of ways to kills time. My favorite? Blog surfing. I read about 100 a day.

Your favorite? Post it below.

And lest I forget, the article describing the study has tips in the side column for preventing procrastination, including my favorite: the five minute rule (commit to five and only five minutes of the task, just to get you started).

Please check out the new Femminista della casa blog started by my dear friend, Elizabeth. We first knew each other at Smith College, a long time ago. That was during the Frangelico period of Northampton (I’ve divided our friendship into periods to make life easier for biographers And then there was the Earl Grey Tea period of New Mexico, where we both lived (and she still lives).

Her blog, Femminista della casa, is about domestic activism. I’ve learned about composting, lightbulbs, and cleaning. Not to mention cadavers. You’ll enjoy it. Take a look.

I’ve been writing a lot about productivity at work, and I wanted to make a few notes:

First and foremost, I don’t think the point of spirituality at work is to make you more productive so that you get to cart more money home (or more likely, make more money for your employer). In fact, that notion of spirituality as a vehicle toward higher productivity is rather sick. The point of spirituality at work is to make you more open, more vibrant, and more alive (my inner biology teacher wonders exactly how I could be “more alive”. Ssshh…inner bio teacher) in your work.

Second, productivity is highly overrated. Since the industrial revolution, we’ve come to quantify our productivity in terms of units and often compared ourselves against machines. This is sick. And wrong. I just spent the last half hour puttering in the kitchen while trying to figure out how to use decimals in Ancient Greece (a long story). Productivity and creativity has a unique relationship. Often when you are creating something, you cannot be productive (i.e. produce something) because you are being creative (i.e. creating something). They seem like similar processes, but often we find we cannot do one while doing the other.

I’m posting part of an email from a reader with her permission. She describes situations relating to caring for her coworkers:

Thanks for your posting on “Does someone care about you at work?” When I started at my present job, nobody invited me to lunch or came up to me to find out about me and how I came here. I really felt left out of everything. So, I decided to get over it and get out there. I would go around to each department and find out about my co-workers. I invited THEM to lunch with me.

Over the two years that I have been here, as new people come in, I try to introduce myself and take them out to lunch from time to time. I don’t want the new people feeling what I was feeling when I started.

One of the funny things that has come of my extroverted behavior is that I know everybody in the company, whereas people who’ve been here for years beyond me don’t. One example is I was referring to another co-worker about my friend Carrie ho is in a different department, both have been here for two years more than I have. He had no idea who she was or what she looked like. We only had 60 people at the company at the time and she worked on the same floor he did.

The company was started by a bunch of young men straight out of college. Though they are getting better about being more human, they don’t quite understand what it’s like to be a new kid on the block at the workplace. They don’t understand how showing you care about your employees (besides good health insurance or a holiday party and summer picnic) will help the employees.

I feel it’s a mission of mine to help them see that. I am making some progress I think. For example, the CEO had a birthday recently. I was the only person who sent him a card (besides the execs who know him well.) Another time, one of the head’s had a baby. I gave him a present, and he was blown away by my thoughtfulness. I didn’t do it for brownie points. I did it because I care. Be kind to your co-workers. Is that so hard to do?

Here at Surviving the Workday, we do not claim to be “all natural.” We know that our computer isn’t that natural, nor is the office chair (though it was hauled out of a dumpster at Harvard, so we consider it “recycled”).

But, of course, some products, like 7UP and Capri Sun think “all natural” means “appealing to your healthy side, but actually meaning nothing because we are loaded with artificial crap, including high fructose corn syrup.”

If you’re wondering what high fructose corn syrup is, yes, it’s vaguely made from corn, and it’s sweeter and cheaper than sugar. It’s a product that is often discussed alongside a picture of someone’s fat ass because frankly high fructose corn syrup makes you fat. Quickly. But it’s made by human beings and it’s only vaguely related to corn at the end of the process. It’s not natural.

Kudos to Kraft, who has decided to remove “all natural” from Capri Sun after a pending lawsuit. Apparently someone now needs to sue 7UP in order for them to remove “all natural.”

Via the Accidental Hedonist

I started a subscription to Plenty Magazine a few months ago and have been really pleased with the articles.

In the February/March issue, there is a focus on the Plenty 20, twenty companies that are pushing the ecological envelope. Some of the companies are heavy hitters, which you’ve heard of, such as Toyota and Whole Foods, and others are companies you’ve probably seen in passing, like Domini and Green Mountain Coffee, but others are ones you might want to look out for like Nanosolar, Ormat Technologies, and Konarka.

It doesn’t look like the Plenty 20 is on-line yet, but there’s also an interesting article on Plenty’s web site, including a blog on food, eco-eats for travel.

I’ve been playing around with a couple of new templates to see what might improve readability in terms of color of page, type, and line length.

The haloscan comments seem gone for the moment, but they’re still in haloscan….

In any case, I’m figuring it out, but in the meantime, I’ve exhausted my capacity for new for the morning, so I’m going to have to actually do some more familiar work.

Opinions?

So here’s something interesting from 12: The Elements of Great Managing, which I forgot to return to the library today:

More than half employees 18 to 24 say that someone at work encourages their development.

For example, when I had an assistant editor to help, I took her out to lunch and we talked about where her life was going and what her skills were and what she was working on. She was nineteen. It’s what we like to do with the kiddies. And by kiddies, I do mean 18 to 24 year-olds.

But then something happens….the mentorship, the encouragement, it lets up as we grow older and stay with the company. By the time you’re with a company for 10 years, only 1 in 5 people say someone encourages their development. Good Lord!

We’ve had letters on mentoring here and there as far as coaching goes, but it’s time to take on mentoring head on.

Here’s what doesn’t work: forcing people to pair up mentor to mentee and assuming that something good will happen. I could give you Sister Magdalena as an example. She was my teaching “mentor,” because she was the other math teacher at the school. We were teaching opposites. I like exploring, hands-on work that involves communicating and some noise. She likes drill and practice. She thought I sucked. And the better I got as a teacher, the more she thought I sucked. She also was a praise miser, but that’s a different story.

So here’s what may work for you: choosing someone that you admire who has a skill set that you covet and trying to work with them more than you already do. Yes, that’s general, but the relationships between mentor and mentee are varied and you need to treat the relationship not as a formula (need help = get mentor), but as a long-term relationship that you want to build.

At the worst job I had when my favorite coworkers were sick, it was as if I had a different job: I was unhappy, less productive, and considered quitting.

It turns out that according to 12: The Elements of Great Managing, employees are happier when someone cares about them as a person at work. They want to feel as if they are supported and as if they belong. That was why my entire job seemed to change when my favorite coworkers weren’t there. I no longer felt as if I belonged and supported.

Unfortunately some types of culture in organization run counter to that idea. There are cliques and groups. You might be “in,” but you also might be “out.”

One of the kindest gestures I’ve experienced was when someone asked me at my new job to have lunch with a group of coworkers in the cafeteria. They were giving me the option to belong to their group.

Consider how you might show that you care about employees as a person. It’s everything from asking questions about their lives (not deeply personal questions) to making sure when you give gifts that they are personally chosen to reflect how you know them as a person.

Well, an entire workday passed and not one person said anything vaguely recognition-esque or praisey about my “work.” (I did pick up one nice blog comment via email and one piece of praise from the spouse. And one person thanked me regarding work. No praise though. Just acknowledgement of an email.)

According to 12: The Elements of Great Managing, a culture of recognition is rare because the deepest human emotions are essentially selfish. And equally damning, our brains are programmed to be ever watchful for anything bad out there—argh, those survival instincts.

But, of course, if you are managing people, or just managing yourself, you have to override these instincts in order to praise others and give recognition for good work. Managers, are you listening? Praise and recognition of good work are important. Heck, recognition of existence is important. We could start there.

So, I’m going to keep my game of watching for recognition through the week, at which point, I may just have to write some recognition and praise for myself.

I’ve been reading 12: The Elements of Great Managingon and off. It requires some reflection to read it, so it’s not the sort of book that can be read all at one time. Now, I can’t give you the list of elements of great managing, because I’m informed in the book that they are trademarked and I need permission from Gallup, which seems like a lot of permission for a blog post.

Nonetheless, I decided to play a game today with the fourth element: recognition and praise. This is where lots of managers come up short. For some reason, we tend to zero in on the negative far more often than the positive. And when we don’t give praise, which triggers a nice release of dopamine in folks’ brains, they find their dopamine elsewhere.

The example that the book gives, which I love, is the employee, who half-asses a spread sheet because she never receives any praise for making work-related spreadsheets, but creates an elaborately perfect spreadsheet for the office betting pool. She puts her energy into the activities in which she gets praise.

I have a hypothesis that one of the reasons working as a freelance writer is difficult is that I do not get a lot of praise on a regular basis. So today I’m going to keep track of any praise I get today, Tuesday. You’re welcome to play along.

My list begins here for praise for today:
(It’s currently empty, and, yes, it’s now 12:30 p.m. Hmmm.)