Surviving the Workday

Apparently when it comes from Southwest.

Here’s the press release from the CEO of Southwest regarding the unofficial dress code:

“From a Company who really loves PR, touche to you Kyla! Some have said we’ve gone from wearing our famous hot pants to having hot flashes at Southwest, but nothing could be further from the truth. As we both know, this story has great legs, but the true issue here is that you are a valued Customer, and you did not get an adequate apology. Kyla, we could have handled this better, and on behalf of Southwest Airlines, I am truly sorry. We hope you continue to fly Southwest Airlines. Our Company is based on freedom even if our actions may have not appeared that way. It was never our intention to treat you unfairly and again, we apologize.”

Kelly took an additional step and is sharing his direct comments about the incident by recording ads for national radio. Those comments detail a national fare sale launched today featuring “mini-skirt” fares.

What do you think? Sincere? Ha, ha. Hot flashes. So funny.

Via Feministing

From Transitioning into New Jobs and Genders about the transgender job expo this weekend in Atlanta:

The etiquette of transgender resumes was just one of the myriad challenges facing job seekers who packed the Atlanta convention hall. For transgender people — at Friday’s expo, they ranged from cross-dressers to those who had changed their gender through hormone therapy or surgery — the workplace can be a minefield.

Many cannot find jobs. Even those who come out after they have settled in with a company risk losing their job. No federal civil rights protection exists for transgender employees, but 12 states have passed legislation ensuring employment protection. The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote this month on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would prohibit discrimination against employees on the basis of gender identity.

The Career Expo — organized by the Southern Comfort Conference, the country’s largest annual gathering of transgender people — drew recruiters from more than 20 major corporations including Microsoft Corp., Deloitte & Touche LLP, Ernst & Young, American Airlines, Hewlett-Packard Co. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

In general, it sounds like job seekers skeptical of how transgender-supportive policies actually play out in the workplace. Still, the expo seems like a very good idea for corporations to step up to the plate and behave as if they support the inherent worth of each employee. Opportunities are good. Follow through is impresses us more.

Does your profession have a code of ethics?

If you don’t subscribe to a code of ethics, do you think it might help if one existed? Would you behave better? Would you turn to the code to help you evaluate with ethical isues?

These are the issues in Britain surrounding a proposed code of ethics for scientists:

• Act with skill and care, keep skills up to date

• Prevent corrupt practice and declare conflicts of interest

• Respect and acknowledge the work of other scientists

• Ensure that research is justified and lawful

• Minimise impacts on people, animals and the environment

• Discuss issues science raises for society

• Do not mislead; present evidence honestly

These principles sound fairly basic, so basic in fact that the Ethical Paleontologist suggests a simplification: Don’t be a dick.

I try not to use male and female genitalia terms pejoratively, but that works for me.

We have a new quiz to the right. Confess your office supply sins here. Anonymously, please. I’d like to compare data gathered here to some other data, but first I need data.

This week, we explored the trend of play in the workplace in The Monkey Really Builds Team Spirit and then play in the natural world in Play During the Workday.

We discussed praise in the workplace (be specific), how to be thorough in a critique, and a number of approaches to criticism in the workplace.

We discussed gossip in the workplace by defining the problem (or attempting to), and an example of gossip. More to come with gossip.

In Too Much to Bare and Southwest Objects to Breasts Too, we learned more about the conflicting messages to women about appropriate attire in the workplace (and out of the workplace). Take it off! Cover it up! No! Yes! No! It’s enough to drive a sane woman to use Nair.

Speaking of which, my corporate disgust grew just a bit with Nair, which has chosen the middle schoolers as a target for their “first hair removal experience.” And then Toys R Us let me know that it’s looking out for me.

And, on a personal note, we had a CD release party for my husband, which is our first attempt to honor our artistic achievements rather than waiting for corporate America to notice.

And if you haven’t read the feel good story of the week about bullying in schools, you should. It’s about high school kids standing up to bigoted bullies. Love that. We should all take notes.

Led by google, some workplaces are trying to infuse fun into the workplace. Does this sound like fun?

THE attack monkey has struck again. So far the hornyheaded sock monkey has killed 45 employees at Appriver, an e-mail security firm based in Gulf Breeze, Florida.

Gulf Breeze is famous for a wave of UFO sightings in the late 1980s – but these attacks are more easily explained.

The monkey first struck three years ago after Hurricane Ivan ripped the roof off Appriver’s headquarters, forcing it to set up shop in a temporary location. Software developer Erik Forsberg used a digital camera to film his monkey – a doll made out of stuffed socks – attacking a colleague. The film was a big hit with staff and a wave of copycat killings ensued.

So far the evil monkey has killed staff members by electrocution, strangulation, poisoning, and a hit-and-run. The attack monkey finished off chief executive Michael Murdoch during a job interview. Murdoch appeared to suffer a fatal heart attack after reading the monkey’s salary requirements.

I’d like your opinion on this monkey in the workplace. Fun? Not fun? Extremely odd? Is this going on in your own workplace? Read Forget Work, let’s just have fun for more “fun.”

A while ago, Jim and I decided that we would celebrate our artistic successes. It sounds like a little thing, but as artists we found that birthdays and graduations are honored with parties and praise, while artistic accomplishments tend to fall by the wayside unless they result in a corporate financial deal or entanglement. Since that hasn’t happened to either of us, and since we don’t actively look for corporate relationships, we haven’t celebrated often. We’re trying to change that.

So today we’re having Jim’s CD release party, so I’m going to be cooking and hosting, but not blogging. You’re welcome to listen along at his web site where he added 20 songs that stream when you load the site. We’re starting at 1 p.m. PST, so feel free to play along at home, listen, and drink a beer or lemonade.

My favorite song is the third one on the site, In Abyss, which is an anti-war anthem with sort of a Neil Young spirit. I also like Wanderer’s Waltz. And Without a Trace. I’ll stop now.

with Nair Executives.

As a Greek-Italian person, I know body hair very well, and would be covered in a fine pelt if I did not remove it. That said, I think there is a special place in one of the inner circles of hell for Nair, who is aggressively marketing its chemical ooze to middle school girls. And, Nair? Why wait that late? Why not start with kindergarten girls? That way they never show those unpleasant secondary sex characteristics.

The product comes in kiwi and peach scents, in packages that show illustrations of doe-eyed teenage girls, and for the first time Nair is marketing directly to middle-schoolers. Ads for Nair Pretty, which are running in magazines like CosmoGirl and Seventeen, make no mention of boys or romance, but rather suggest that the depilatory is a stubble-free path to empowerment.

“I am a citizen of the world,” reads the ad copy. “I am a dreamer. I am fresh. I am so not going to have stubs sticking out of my legs.”

I am a dreamer too, and I dream of a world without the world’s grossest hair removal product, Nair. You could read Dipilatory Market Moves Beyond Short-Shorts Wearers if you want to feel ill. You’ve been warned. Hair removal is not empowerment.

Via Gawker

Let’s Hear It for Humanity. Or at least Canada.

Last Wednesday, a grade nine student at Central Kings Rural High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was beat up for wearing pink to school. Two grade twelve students decided to do something about it. Using the Internet, they encouraged at least half of the 830 students in the student body to wear pink.

Travis [one of the grade twelve students] said the bullies “keep giving us dirty looks, but we know we have the support of the whole student body. “Kids don’t need this in their lives, worrying about what to wear to school. That should be the last thing on their minds.”

When the bullied student put on his pink shirt Friday and saw all the other pink in the lobby, “he was all smiles. It was like a big weight had been lifted off is shoulder,” David said. No one at the school would reveal the student’s name.

Kudos to those students for standing up to bullies in their school. You might want to read the entire story at I’ve Stood Around for Too Long.

Can you have friends at work? I certainly thought I could. I have a coterie of friends from former jobs. The job is long gone, but the friendship remains. At least I thought this was the case, until I read this in Are Workplace Friendships Healthy?:

Ken Siegel of Beverly Hills, a psychologist and president of the Impact Group, a psychologists’ group that consults with business management, says he doesn’t believe workplace friendships are real. True friendships, he says, can’t exist when there are issues such as money and status at play.

“It’s a myth, desired but not achievable. When you inject money and power into the equation, it changes things. Friendships at work are an oxymoron,” Siegel says. “People try to create workplace friendships out of their own vulnerability, and the more companies talk about friendships at work, the less real it is.”

My work friends must not be real friends! That’s it. Actually, my work friendships have almost entirely been with people who earn roughly the same and are at the same level, so I think that Siegel does have a point about equality between friends.

Since Plato, philosophers have debated the requirements of friendship. It’s one of my pet topics. To make a huge generalization, I will say that many of the qualities that philosophers value in friendships (intimacy, equality, kinship, virtue, reciprocity) are qualities that are now seen mostly in friendships between partners in the modern marriage.

Results from a recent career quiz bring up a few random careers(sports instructor and taxidermist), but actually seems fairly accurate for who I am and what I want to do (and what I currently do in work and volunteer life):

1. Association Manager
2. Ecologist
3. Biologist
4. Environmental Consultant
5. Marine Biologist
6. Actor
7. Zoologist
8. Industrial-Organizational Psychologist
9. Forester
10. Sports Instructor
11. Professor
12. Recording Engineer
13. Coach
14. Lighting Technician
15. Health Care Administrator
16. Management Consultant
17. Director
18. Industrial Engineering Tech
19. Botanist
20. Comedian
21. Critic
22. Casting Director
23. Economic Development Officer
24. Public Policy Analyst
25. Print Journalist
26. Lobbyist
27. Musician
28. Veterinarian
29. Market Research Analyst
30. Translator
31. Economist
32. Composer
33. Taxidermist
34. Veterinary Technician
35. Special Effects Technician
36. Technical Writer
37. Communications Specialist
38. Activist
39. Political Aide
40. General Contractor

I have no memory of buying anything from Toys R Us on-line, but apparently I must have (baby shower gift?) because of this helpful email from the CEO assuring me that they are setting a high bar for product safety as a retailer. They claim to have introduced:

- a new Safety microsite to help you find all product safety and recall information;
- the introduction of an email notification system for product recalls;
- the addition of bilingual recall notices should there be future recalls; and
- the introduction of new Safety Boards in all of our stores, which will contain important product safety information, including recall notices.

It seems like this is basic stuff that I would have assumed that they already do. I hope some of it is useful to some of you.

The best way to praise a child is to be specific. I would guess this is also the case with workers. How often are we specific? Perhaps not often enough.

“You did a good job” is generic for a workplace task.
“You did a good job with the analysis on page 2″ is specific.

Finally, a question on male bathroom etiquette to Prudence (we covered some female bathroom etiquette earlier). Read the question and answer at Dear Prudence on Slate.

I read Praying for Gain in The Economist this morning on the increase in demand for workplace chaplains and experienced a squeamish sensation.

I like the trend toward chaplains in the workplace. So was my reaction toward The Economist itself (I was forced to read it as a child)? Was it the meatpacking industry, which formed part of the context of the article (I’m a vegetarian)?

I fear there are other issues that provoke squeamishness. Care to guess as I’m not in a deconstructing mood? (Readers did an excellent job of deconstructing my dislike of Al Gore when we played this game before.)

I’m always interested in how non-traditional approaches begin. Q & A with Robert Alter explores the evolution of his literary approach to Biblical translation:

IDEAS: Why did you get so strongly drawn to the Bible as literature when you did, in the 1970s?

ALTER: Since my late teens I’ve been fascinated with biblical narrative - why it seems so great and yet also so simple. I couldn’t explain that. Then, in the late ’70s, when I was writing regularly for Commentary, the idea popped into my head that maybe I could say something about biblical narrative.

I wrote a piece arguing that biblical scholars lacked any sort of literary approach, and got a shower of letters. Then I wrote a second article, and my book “The Art of Biblical Narrative,” all the time thinking, this isn’t my field, I’m going to get this out of my system. But I found the intrinsic literary and intellectual interest of the Biblical stories and poems so compelling that I’ve kept working at it ever since.

If you haven’t read The Art of the Biblical Narrative, you’re missing out. Read the entire interview in Q & A with Robert Alter.

Via Maud Newton

Some days it’s very difficult to find work that affirms the dignity of human beings. An example? Here’s the rundown on a “typical day” from a job description for a community champion for a web site (excerpted from Craig’s List):

You wake up feeling totally jazzed and alive.

You drive to our office, most likely listening to a great book on CD to keep learning (or great music to get you pumped up).

You get to the office and jump right on the site to see what’s new.

You send several welcome emails, comment on the new posts, and answer people’s questions, all with a great friendly tone and articulate language.

You churn out the messages, and everyone on the site is relieved to have you there, singing your praises. (Someone proposes a parade in your honor, but they’re all talk).

After the morning you look at your notes and talk to the community director about trends on the site, how we can improve the experience and ways we can offer better help.

You head to lunch in the break room, joking around with the crew, laughing so hard that your VitaminWater comes out your nose.

Lunch is making you a bit sleepy, so you go to jump on the mini trampoline for several minutes, perhaps while listening to “Eye of the Tiger” on your ipod.

After an afternoon of more comments and responses, you switch gears and contribute a story about how you overcame what seemed like an impossible situation, balanced by a lighter blog post about when you choked on a tofu skewer and managed to get a date with the person who gave you the Heimlech maneuver.

Midway through writing the story, a crisis comes up. Never one to panic, you stop typing and confidently say, “I’m on it” like you’re Bruce Willis taking on Russian terrorists in Die Hard.

Crisis solved. You shoot off a few emails telling a few friends or colleagues about some posts they might like, and then wrap-up and head home. This time you drive in silence, thinking about the people who are really putting it out there to change their lives… The ones who have had enough, the ones who want more, the ones who are not afraid to create their own happiness, and…all the crazy and wacky ones that every online community has! You laugh to yourself and then think… “How might I help them out tomorrow?”

Are you ready for this? This an opportunity with a high potential to grow. And to grow big, one must start small. Our starting compensation is $1400 per month.

Via LA Observed, but priceless comments on Gawker

It’s not a parody. It only reads that way. Good luck creating your own happiness and dignity in Santa Monica on $8.75/hour.

Two things right off the bat:

1. These outfits aren’t the sort of thing I would wear.
2. My opinion and taste regarding these outfits doesn’t matter one bit.

What exactly is going on with Southwest and their supposed dress code? Yesterday, Southwest stopped another passenger, Setara Qassim, and told her to “cover herself” with a blanket. Her breasts seem to be the offending objects this time (not the entire outfit as with Kyla Ebbert). Who were the breasts offending? Another passenger? The flight attendant? And where is this supposed Southwest dress code?

I took 12 Southwest flights last summer and can vouch that many passengers were dressed for the beach with far more skin exposed than either Ebbert or Qassim. I saw underwear. I saw butt cracks. I saw cleavage. What’s more some folks smelled, some folks were extremely loud, and some folks were drunk. Nothing happened to any of these people. So why does Southwest seem intent on jumping on the shaming-women-bypolicing-their-attire bandwagon? And who makes the decision about how much skin (or how tight) is too much?

This is complete and utter nonsense from the airline that used to advertise its primary attraction as flight attendants in hot pants.

Via Feministing

The Department of Justice has regional seminars on religious freedom as part of the First Freedom project. The next workshop (and last scheduled) is September 19 from nine to noon in Chicago.

Muslims see more inclusive workplaces suggests that post 9/11 there have been considerable improvements in religious accomodation for Muslims in the workplace. Lina Sayed’s story is particularly compelling in terms of her own advocacy for her needs as well as her employer’s ability to hear and address her needs:

“A place to pray, that was a big thing for me,” says Sayed. “But I walkedinto my boss’s office and told him and he went to human resources and figuredout a place where I could pray. It’s the Muslim’s responsibility to expressthese things. If I hadn’t told them, then I’d be sneaking in and out of conference rooms trying to find a place and people wouldn’t understand what I was doing. Then you start to feel people are looking at you weird. When you’re open about things and people can ask questions, it’s less likely that they’ll be discriminatory.”

Read 6 Years After Sept. 11, Muslims See More Inclusive Workplaces.

So if you choose to critique someone’s work in the workplace, how can you be Oh So Thorough? After all, you see what’s wrong immediately and you’d just like to say it and hear your glorious words of truth ring throughout the land! Just because you see what’s wrong doesn’t mean the writer will hear what you say (or agree with you). If you’d like to be truly heard, then you need to demonstrate that you’ve thoroughly evaluated the positive attributes as well as the areas that need improvement.

God help us all, I fear I’ve critiqued more than a thousand writers in on-line workshops, in person workshops, and for paid editing work (only a few of whom have come to hate me). I believe this is because I really try to understand the work before I say anything about it. I try to get it. I don’t just lambast, because frankly, lambasting is easy.

There are always general elements that you can make specific comments. I’m going to focus below on critiquing in fiction, but much of this also applies to non-fiction and poetry.

• characters

• diction (word choice)

• logic

• pace

• passage of time

• point of view

• plot

• setting

• structure

• tense

You could make up your own list in your own field and I bet it would have as many if not more elements. Again, there are always positive things going on in someone’s work. You just need to find them and explain what is right before delving into what may not work. And when you go into what may not work for you, remember that it’s only your opinion.

And, writers? If someone can’t find what’s right in your work (as well as what’s wrong), don’t let that person read it. Period.

As a student in the field of correction, I’ve noticed a few approaches to criticism in the workplace. I’m going to focus on editor-writer interactions, but I think this actually applies to many other jobs in which criticism has to be given:

Let the Brutalizing Begin Many writers request this treatment (”Please be brutally honest with me. Does it suck?”) Being brutal isn’t helpful to most of us, even when we request it. As an editor I refuse to brutalize a writer, because brutalizing fundamentally ignores that my opinion on a work is just that. My opinion. And you know what opinions are like, right? Everyone has one. And as a writer, I run away shrieking if I sense I’m about to have my work brutalized. I just don’t think this works in the long term unless you’re into some intellectual version of S & M.

The Cursory Positive Assessment This approach seems generally well-intentioned, but poorly executed (”Thank you for all your hard work (overall it was fine), but I’ve found 42,310 things wrong with it.”) I think this is lazy on the part of the editor though it is terribly widespread as a practice. As a writer, the list of 42,310 things wrong always leaves me feeling hen pecked.

The Sandwich This is an often recommended approach for correction in the workplace in which you sandwich the criticism between two pieces of fluffy white bread praise. (”You did this well (the top bun), but there is an issue with blah-blah (the meat), and finally you also did this well (the bottom bun))” If the praise is superficial and fluffy, I can sense that as a writer (I can also sense that I’m being manipulated).

The Oh So Thorough This is my growing edge for giving criticism in which I thoroughly address and describe all the positive aspects of a work before going into anything that might be able to be improved. As an editor, it’s a ton of work, but it leaves me feeling I was fair to the writer’s work. And as a writer, it’s the only one of these methods that leaves me excited to revise, which is truly something else.

That is all I got.