Surviving the Workday

You’re in good company.

In California, 40% of the workforce (around 6 million people) do not have the right to a paid sick day.

For maybe five times in the last 15 years, Manuela Mendez has had to drag herself to work at a fast-food restaurant in La Mirada, coughing and congested.

“I go to work because we need the money,” she said in Spanish. “It’s difficult to work. I carry microbes that contaminate my work mates, and that’s a problem for the customers.”

The 40-year-old mother of two does not think it is fair that she and an estimated 6 million California workers — about 40% of the state workforce — do not have the right to take a day of paid sick leave to recuperate from an illness or injury, see a doctor or care for a family member who is ill.

Mendez, an activist with the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is part of a broad coalition that includes labor unions, health advocates and women’s groups backing a bill that would give all employees in the state at least five paid sick days a year.

The bill is expected to be vetoed by the governor, who consistently sides with the California Chamber of Commerce, and business lobbyists.

A blanket ban is rarely effective, but apparently it’s especially non-effective in the workplace regarding personal communications:

Checking your personal emails in the office and even researching your next holiday on company time can actually make employees happier and more productive at work, according to a new study.

R. Kelly Garrett, a professor of communications at Ohio State University in the US, has found that everyone - from senior managers right down to entry-level staff - regularly indulge in so-called “cyberslacking” during office hours, and believes that attempts to clamp-down on what is perceived as time-wasting are unnecessary.

“It’s appropriate to just avoid the knee-jerk response that all personal internet use is detrimental,” Prof Garrett told the Associated Press.

So I use Firefox, and I’ve developed a system of tagging my links that I’m still kind of working out the kinks on. What’s the only tag that has remained constant this whole time?

(more…)

14% of companies in the United States offered back up care in 2006, but 74% of Human Resources Departments report being interested in offering it.

What is back up care? It’s child care or elder care for an employer’s dependents in case of emergencies (e.g., a baby sitter that doesn’t show up, a sick kid that needs to go home from school immediately, an elder care aide who cancels).

“When we’re concerned about our loved ones, we’re not focusing on our jobs. And I think most people understand that we’re all like that,” said Marilyn Lagerman, chief human resources officer for Milwaukee-based Foley & Lardner, also a Work Options Group client, which has more than 2,500 employees in 22 law offices worldwide. “So we really respect people’s commitments and concern for their families and their loved ones, and we think backup care is a way that we can demonstrate this to the firm - that we care about them not only as employees but we care about them as individuals.”

Read Back Up Care is a Perk that Helps Workers, Employers for more details on the success of these sorts of back up care programs.

Hello everybody! Happy First Day of Summer to you all. Though, for us east coasters, summer started last week with that terrible heat wave. I have to say, I do miss the California summers. This is because I did not live in the desert as Ms T does.

Anyway, on with the show.

(more…)

$700,000 verdict gives chaperones pause. Indeed.

In my early twenties, I worked for a TRIO program, which took low-income, first-generation students (to consider college) on college trips.  I took many overnight visits with students around New Mexico and Colorado, arranging everything from bus transportation to chaperones to specialized college tours. In retrospect, it was a really tough job.

Part of the reason it was so tough was that I was essentially responsible for lots of other people’s children while on the trip, and liable for their safety. Now I thought about that, but not deeply enough. I didn’t have a homeowner’s insurance policy with personal liability insurance, and I don’t know if my employer did. My only insurance was that I stayed up for all night, sitting outside the kids’ dorm rooms reading the paper, mostly to make sure that they weren’t planning midnight excursions or drinking in their rooms. I would never take that sort of risk now, which doesn’t mean that it wasn’t an important job. Just that I would want some protection.

Many small non-profit groups do not have liability insurance and are great risk of being sued if something goes wrong, particularly on a school trip. In the case I opened with, a chaperone was sued for the death of one of the cheerleaders she accompanied to Hawaii to the tune of $700,000. The cheerleader was 18, and had been drinking within hours of arriving in Hawaii. This doesn’t particularly blame the cheerleader or the chaperone, but if you chaperone, consider asking about liability insurance from your organization or your homeowner’s policy in order to protect yourself.

I think she’s hilarious.

I read an article a long time ago in Mother Jones about the mentality of a whistle blower. It wasn’t terribly positive, and I’m not sure exactly why. Take this case, for example, which wouldn’t be anywhere without a whistle blower: a pharmacist for Walgreens just blew open a huge scheme to bilk taxpayers of millions of dollars by switching Medicaid patients to the most expensive version of a pill:

To save taxpayer dollars, Medicaid limits how much it pays for popular forms of drugs.

But it doesn’t bother to set price-ceilings on rarely-used versions.

Take generic Zantac, or ranitidine, for example. The antacid is a huge seller in tablet form. Medicaid limits payment to 34 cents apiece.

The same drug as capsules has no price-ceiling because it was so rarely-prescribed. Medicaid pays $1.25 each.

Walgreens figured it could pocket millions by switching patients from tablets to capsules.

Cheers, whistleblower! I raise my cup of tea to you this morning. Walgreens agreed to repay the government 35 million dollars. I wish I had a job to offer the whistle blower.

Are You Your Own Bully? explores the idea that we may bully ourselves throughout the workday with negative self-talk and imagery:

The things that we tell to ourselves can be much meaner and far more hurtful than anything anyone else would ever tell us.

I’m talking about self-talk – specifically, negative self-talk.

Self-talk refers to the thoughts and attitudes that you have about yourself. It is expressed primarily in thought form. Negative self-talk can be a form of bullying yourself. Like external bullying, it’s unfair and it’s usually not true.

Paying attention to self-talk is important because what you tell yourself makes a difference in your professional success. Too much negative self-talk can sabotage your career before it even gets a real start. The damage we do to ourselves is as real as the damage that any external bully could do.

This week on the east coast started out hot, damn hot, but it has finally settled down a bit. Meanwhile, we all have dry throats from the air conditioners, I have run out of sleeveless shirts appropriate for work, and the biggest office scandal of the week is all the women who saw fit to show up braless in tank tops, short skirts, and hooker heels. So the first category of the day is sort of appropriate:

(more…)

• I work in market research in real life. Or, let’s be clear, I work in the Operations department for a market research firm. I work with data. I can spot a data trend a mile away. I don’t need to be clubbed over the head to notice that there were two big trends in my collection of links this week:

(more…)

Good afternoon readers! I love short weeks after a holiday. Almost as much as I love the holiday. But today’s column came upon me almost too fast.

Nonetheless, today I have a vast and hopefully interesting selection of weird news for your viewing pleasure.

(more…)

Seeking out the bad news as a manager rather than waiting for it to come to you seems like a good skill (providing you don’t always seek entirely negative news all the time). It also avoids one of the common traps of upper management: believing you have an “open door” policy when people truly have to get past double lines of reinforced management in order to tell you anything, which may be met by hostility, or worse, on your part as manager.

A summary from the article of this particular facet of management:

Simple human nature is part of the problem: No one likes to hear bad news, no matter how useful it may be. Managers who appear to blame the messengers bringing word of, say, poor sales or a competitor’s inroads, can easily discourage future reports.

Niko Canner, the managing partner of Katzenbach Partners, a consulting firm based in New York, said that when an employee comes to him with news of actual or potential problems, “I try to deal with bad news in a way that I get more of it rather than less.”

That entails thanking his informant, then discussing ways to resolve the problem and — as a final step — setting aside time in the future to discuss how the problem started. That way, the people delivering bad news realize that they will not be punished for their candor.

That seems like great advice to me.

A new survey reveals that quite a few corporations are reading emails of workers, supposedly on the look-out for inadvertent releases of information:

E-mail security is an important issue for most companies because leaks have many competitive and regulatory implications. The Internet makes it possible for leaked information to travel quickly and be replicated endlessly. Sensitive trade secrets or internal strategy information is highly vulnerable to third-party interception and abuse. Companies also have to contend with the risk of falling afoul of complex privacy laws intended to protect confidential information about customers and employees.

It’s hard to wrap my head around this, but when I’ve worked with sensitive information, usually only my boss knew what I knew was sensitive and confidential. So would a general screener know it was confidential? I don’t think so. Sigh. I guess this could mean anyone is reading. It’s just a matter of luck (or supervision) at any given time.

This is the Academia edition.

And how better to travel around college than with a bike. Preferably a cheap bike that you can replace if it gets stolen. You might want to read How to Start Bicycling to Work for practical tips, including how to buy a bike (they disagree with me on the cheap bike point). In any case, it is bike month, after all.

How Green Is the College? is about Oberlin’s efforts with the sustainable house. You’ll have to read the article to figure out how they live with an unplugged fridge.

What happens to adults who have just aged out of foster care while in college? They usually get screwed. No one can co-sign their loans or provide money for books and food. No wonder 90% of children in foster care don’t even attempt college. Western Michigan University provides a Lifeline for Students Left Behind as they age out of foster care.

I received a weird group e-mailing from Wesleyan this week about hearing Barack Obama at commencement. It was odd in that it assumed a certain about of knowledge about what is going on currently at Wesleyan (Bad graduate! Bad graduate not living vicariously!). Evidently Obama was speaking to Wesleyan graduates (I had no idea) at commenement, and apparently in place of Ted Kennedy (I also had no idea). And, now apparently he spoke. The email suggested there were no tickets left, but I could sit on Foss Hill with a blanket if I wanted to. That’s about as likely as me drinking the punch at a party at Eclectic House right now.

I mention this mostly because of a discussion in comments on commencement speakers, how they’re chosen, what they say, and an institution with recent sexual miscoduct allegations choosing Clarence Thomas. This is probably the most sympathetic audience to Barack Obama in the United States. Nothing wrong with that. But it is the university voted something like, “World’s Most Annoying Liberal Arts College”…. 

Today we have the Early Edition of WWN, because my boss loves us and let us leave early–I guess he had a party to go to. Speaking of party, we’re going with a musical theme today.

(more…)

I don’t have the heart to try and find art for this post, but there is more evidence that being overweight, particularly being obese, can hinder your career:

“This is not just something on the margins,” says Mark Roehling, Michigan State University associate professor of human resources management and author of an upcoming meta-analysis of 30 studies examining weight-based discrimination in controlled employment settings. “At the obesity level and higher, we have every reason to believe [discrimination] is having a very significant impact on people.”

Weight-based discrimination consistently affects every aspect of employment, from hiring to firing, promotions, pay allocation, career counseling and discipline, according to Roehling’s work.

You’ll have to endure a little advertising at Forbes for the whole article, but it appears the bias is most strongest in hiring, and the bias is strongest against overweight white women.

Flexibility, here defined as flextime or the ability to negotiate arrival and departure times periodically, can be predicted in a number of ways according to a new 2008 National Study of Employers (available in complete form here):

Those most likely to be flexible are employers that:
• are nonprofits;
• are in the finance and in professional services sectors;
• operate in more than one location;
• have fewer union members;
• have fewer hourly employees;
• have more women and more minorities in top positions or who report directly to those in top
positions; and
• have more part-timers.
Interestingly, more flexible employers report less difficulty hiring hardworking self-starters and less
difficulty dealing with the retirement of highly valued employees. It is impossible to separate the
cause and effect here. Does seeing one’s employees in a positive light (as hardworking, self-starters)
and managing human resource issues well (such as the retirement of key staff) lead to or result from
providing greater flexibility?

That certainly fits with my experience. The most flexible places I worked were all nonprofits with multiple locations, no union members, few hourly employees, and many womn in top positions (and minorities, depending on which nonprofit I consider). Other thoughts on flexibility prediction?

This was a big week in workplace weirdness. I found so many articles that my bookmarks overfloweth. But fear not, I have culled out the best of the week’s weirdness to entertain you as we move into the weekend. It’s all about people this time. Because I’m a people person.

(more…)

Yay! There are many work-related implications for same-sex marriage, including receiving benefits through your spouse, so what a relief that the California State Supreme Court has made this decision:

“There can be no doubt that extending the designation of marriage to same-sex couples, rather than denying it to all couples, is the equal protection remedy that is most consistent with our state’s general legislative policy and preference,” said the 120-page ruling.

It said that the state law’s language “limiting the designation of marriage to a ‘union between a man and a woman’ is unconstitutional, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available to both opposite-sex and same-sex couples.”

Analysis at the Workplace Prof Blog is helpful for understanding the implications.