Surviving the Workday

I’m going to compile a list of trends you may see in the workplace in the next year:

• adoption of sustainable practices (some greenwashed and some sincere);
• increase in age discrimination lawsuits and stories of Boomers forced out of jobs;
• increasingly crappy health insurance including increasing premiums and decreasing benefits all around.  

If you’d like to make a prediction about a workplace trend, feel free to leave it in comments, and we’ll check back in a couple of months.  

Resources

Workplace Trends of 2008

Pay more for healthcare, again

Family Leave, Boomer Retirements Could Gain Steam in 2008

Those of us who have worked retail or in the food service industry know that an employee’s needs are always subservient to the customer. We aren’t all lucky enough to work for Continental Airlines.

 So we grit our teeth and help even the  cranky customers–the ones who demand a refund for a book they poured coffee on, or who yell at you as though you personally made the computers at the credit card processing service go down. The ones who insist on a new pizza being made because they arrived three hours too late and it’s cold.

It’s hard to take pride in your work in such humble circumstances, but a lot of us do (or did.) There is the satisfaction of helping a customer find exactly the right Christmas gift, or the item they have been trying to locate for ten years. Or in making twenty pizzas for a party at the retirement home down the street. The customer smiles gratefully, says “thank you so much, you made my day,” and suddenly your day is made, too.

Too bad they don’t all leave us $50,000 and a car.

Evidence of the Decline of Civilization: KoKoMo the preacher-clown scares us (at least one of us). Must we remind you of the deadly combination of clowns and Beach Boys references? It’s simply too much for church.

Fun: Which Jane Austen heroine are you?

News: Santa is crucified amid mixed reactions (GhostGirl: Cool! Ms. Theologian: Gack! Anne P. I’m vacationing). Frightening past and present advertising continues to intrigue us. Piercings may get you fired, but, in an article about your firing, your boss’s wardrobe will be critiqued, so it might be worth it after all because he comes off as a stodgy buffoon. Employee reviews are not reviewed well by actual employees. No one is surprised. And traffic patterns can be mathematically modeled and it’s not traffic volume that’s the problem, it’s crazy braking. And we’ve discovered a workplace trend!: Animals in the workplace, at least the sorta domestic variety. LAPD hires cats and Cat Given Golden Handshake.

Notes: Ms. Theologian is not a workaholic. If she says this over and over again, it will be true. Just in case repetition doesn’t help, she is thinking of joining Slow Down Now, because surely they can do something.

Religion: Ms. Theologian continues to pray to famous people to help her understand the mad world. Oddly enough prayer to famous people and prayer to God seems to be equally effective.

Spirituality: What exactly are you giving when you give a virtual gift? Soul Bytes threatened to make at least one reader’s head explode.

Tips: Interesting ideas for tax-deductible donations.

Treehugger has selected candidates for Greenwasher of the Year.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of greenwashing, it’s basically the idea that you can adopt vocabulary of the environmental movement (e.g., green, sustainable, eco-friendly, natural) and use it in advertising regardless of how green, sustainble, eco-friendly, or natural your product is is. For example, Crude Oil! Straight from the ground! Totally natural!

I find the “fur is green” pretty contemptible. Fur is most green when it’s on its live untortured owner. However, it’s BP’s continued marketing campaign that makes me the most sick.

I definitely sense a Cats and Dogs in the Workplace trend (as does GhostGirl). I’m not sure what it means, but I can think of a half dozen news stories about the working lives of cats and dogs (Cat Given Golden Handshake, Working Class Cats, Bringing Your Dog to Work, okay that’s only three, but they’re all very recent).

From LAPD enlists feral cats for rat patrol:

The Working Cats program of Voice for the Animals, a Los Angeles-based animal advocacy and rescue group, has placed feral cats in a handful of police stations with rodent problems, just as the group placed cats in the rat-plagued downtown flower district several years ago — to great effect.

Six feral cats were recently installed as ratters in the parking lot of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Southeast Division, and another group will be housed at the Central Division early in the new year.

Their reputation as furtive and successful exterminators grew after feral cats were introduced to the parking lot of the Wilshire Division nearly six years ago. Rats had been burrowing into the equipment bags that bicycle officers stored in outside cages; inside the facility, mice were sometimes scurrying across people’s desks.

“Once we got the cats, problem solved,” said Cmdr. Kirk Albanese, a captain at the Wilshire station at the time. “I was almost an immediate believer.”

You can read my prayer to Benazir Bhutto here at Cathy’s Heart Happy blog.

It’s part of a larger poem, an evolving collection of five prayers to famous people (Oprah, Ryan Seacrest, Jamie Lynn Spears, Johnny Depp, and Benazir Bhutto). And, yes, it’s prayer to famous people, not for famous people, and it is a theologically significant shift, but poets should not really explain too much.

I think Jerry Falwell might be tomorrow’s prayer.

The year is winding down. Even if you are Scroogey McAsshole, you should still be trying to get in your charitable donations before the end of the year, for maximum deductions. Here are some of the more interesting ways I have found to donate to those less fortunate:

• Flood the World With Bees: Something Awful is asking people to donate money towards sending bees to Africa. These bees will help pollinate crops (or strike fear in the hearts of Africans, take your pick.)
• Donors Choose: Allows you to fund whatever educational program(s) strike your fancy. Or, you can create a challenge to fund a pet project of your very own.
• Child’s Play: Provides toys and games to children’s wards in hospitals across America. Started by gamers, this is a charity near and dear to my heart.
• Adopt-a-Platoon: Regardless of what you think of the war, the troops deserve a little love. Send a care package or donate money directly. Or, fund one of the many charitable programs they have created, such as toys for kids in Bosnia.

Filed under “I wish I’d thought of it first,” this guy displayed a crucified Santa on his lawn for Christmas. I liked the response of one Christian, who was not offended because she knows “Christ is no longer on the cross.”

I don’t know how I feel about Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. On the one hand, they make their money selling soap that is supposed to make you look Ten! Years! Younger! if I recall my childhood ad campaigns correctly. On the other hand, they have this wonderful web site geared towards encouraging women to look to their inner beauty.

One short film called “Onslaught” shows a young girl, and then an onslaught of images showing just what women go through to look beautiful. “Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.” “Evolution” shows an ordinary woman transformed into a supermodel by makeup, lighting, and Photoshop.

Check these shorts out for yourself here.

so it’s time for a quiz: Which Jane Austen heroine are you?

I was so afraid I was going to be Fanny Price. Thank god I’m Elinor Dashwood.

After twelve years of service, Nin the Cat retires from Mount Washington to live with park ranger companions down the mountain.

Nin’s praises are sung far and wide:

Nin was never fazed by the gusty wind and bad weather. He trotted down the peak with the rest of the crew during a fire in February 2003, going straight back to work when the time came. He was a welcome pal to legions of meteorologists and scientists passing through during weekly stints taking weather measurements in hurricane-force wind and heavy fog.

Nin will be replaced by another friendly non-weathering fearing cat. I hope he is treated well and enjoys retirement.

I read How to break the work addiction with interest as I fear I am becoming a workaholic. I worked just about every day in November and December with the exceptions of Thanksgiving and Christmas and the day after each.

But it turns out I’m not actually a workaholic; I’m just self-employed.

Here’s the definition of workaholism:

Workaholism, or compulsive working, takes many forms, according to Workaholics Anonymous literature.

These include: “deriving our identity and self-esteem from what we do; keeping overly busy, neglecting our health, relationships and spirituality; seeing everything as work-related; having no desire to do anything (work avoidance or burnout); procrastinating; postponing vacations and rest; doing unnecessary work; perfectionism; avoiding intimacy and being controlling.”

Resources
Workaholics Anonymous
Twenty Questions: How Do I Know If I’m a Workaholic?
Avoiding Workaholism
Slow Down Now

People are spending millions on things that don’t really exist. Can it really be consumerism if nothing is consumed?: Reality-check or rip-off?

It also raises issues that came up in a  Ms. Theologian question about the nature of giving. I assume that most gifts benefit both the giver and receiver even if they are virtual gifts.

I’m not actually sure that much has changed in advertising messages.

GhostGirl, who found the link, notes that she doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Both? I think.

I should first state that I’m not objective about tattoos and piercings because I know a fair number of people with them do they don’t strike me as bizarre or the markers of laziness. And GhostGirl found this link, and she lived in Santa Cruz, which is the land of the tattooed and pierced.

A worker in Florida got a nose piercing although the worker’s boss told her beforehand it “wasn’t in her best interests” (Why does this sound like an episode of the Sopranos?). Whether she then resigned because of the piercing or was fired is not clear to me (or her or her boss, apparently).

Pasco County Tax Collector Mike Olson [Ed note: her boss] said having the public served by someone with a nose piercing is not his idea of public service.

“We are a professional organization,” Olson said. “If you choose to have that, work somewhere else.”

And the last paragraph of the article summarizes the dress code of Olson, the boss, who only wears suits, and has for decades.

GhostGirl found that when annual reviews are reviewed by employees, the reviews “need improvement”:

Almost half of employees think that their boss is dishonest during appraisal processes, while a third think the whole process is a waste of time, according to research by productivity body Investors in People.

The survey found that 44 per cent of workers had had appraisals in which they thought their superior had been dishonest, and 29 per cent had had ones which had been a waste of time. A fifth had had appraisals that they said were unfair.

As I read this article, I was reminded of my annual review at a non-profit agency where I could clearly see my score had been changed so that the points didn’t add up to enough to get a 3% raise. I don’t think this sort of dishonesty is uncommon.

So if you’re a manager (or just someone in charge of reviews), I think you can take the following ideas from the article in order to improve your review or appraisal process:

1. Think deeply about the process and the actual employee before the review, and communicate some of your thinking to the employee so he/she doesn’t regard the review as a box checking exercise and knows that you’ve been paying attention.

2. Give regular feedback throughout the year so that employees are not surprised by any issues that come up in the review.

3. Follow-up on anything that is said or done in the employee review meeting. Don’t just drop the issues out of relief that the meeting is done.

I should note that the same issues with employees and reviews come up with students and report cards. And GhostGirl may say more when she’s back from vacation as she conducts lots of reviews. We’re actually having lunch soon. I’ll ask her what she thinks.

Oh, how lovely that the corporate overlords have taken an interest in the worst employees! God bless you, Career Builder and CNN for singling out the exceptions and making a huge deal about them: Worst Employees of the Year.

As Workplace Fairness points out, Where is the list of worst employers from Career Builder and CNN?

Back to the old commute today? I’m not trapped in traffic at the moment, but remember the questions I always had in traffic jams: Why are we slowing down? Where is the accident? And who the hell started this?

According to recent research, light breaking allows cars behind you to prepare for any slowing down or traffic hazards, but heavy breaking disrupts traffic for miles. Of course, if you need to break, you should break. Here’s a summary of a mathematical traffic model:

Drivers and policy-makers have not previously known why jams like this occur, though many have put it down to the sheer volume of traffic. While this clearly plays a part in this new theory, the main issue is around the smoothness of traffic flow. According to the model, heavy traffic will not automatically lead to congestion but can be smooth-flowing. This model takes into account the time-delay in drivers’ reactions, which lead to drivers braking more heavily than would have been necessary had they identified and reacted to a problem ahead a second earlier.

So pay attention out there and I will too. We’re all responsible for traffic.

Just in case you’re itching to go back to work now (or are at your workplace now or sneaking work at home), you might read Slow Down Now: the almost certain antidote to workaholism.

I’m partial to the essay: Should I Get Up?: pondering the burning question and The Beginner’s Guide to Slowing Down (Hint: You begin with a cuppa).

Soul Bytes are provocative sayings with follow-up questions that can be displayed in your office on an index card or, if you’re like me, read on-line. They are made by Spirituality at Work and are a nice way to pause and reflect.

Here is the most recent one:

Learning is holy, an indispensable form of purification as well as ennoblement. Rabbi Abraham Heschel

• What have you learned lately?
• What new experiences could you plan for your life this year?
• Do you encourage those around you to continue to learn and grow?

It may be time to admit to the world that…drum roll….

1. Clowns scare me in a really deep primal way;

2. I loathe the Beach Boys and think they may be evidence of the decline of civilization.

So a Clown-Preacher named KoKoMo spreading the gospel would be enough for me to run from church screaming.

Yes, this is my Christmas gift: Kokomo the Clown-Preacher.