Surviving the Workday

I’ve never had much luck with submitting resumes to be electronically scanned, but this list from Nearly Half Employers Have Caught Employees Lies on Resume is pretty helpful. These are the key words and phrases that are searched for most often that you should insert appropriately in your resume.

    — problem-solving and decision-making skills (50 percent)
    — oral and written communications (44 percent)
    — customer service or retention (34 percent)
    — performance and productivity improvement (32 percent)
    — leadership (30 percent)
    — technology (27 percent)
    — team-building (26 percent)
    — project management (20 percent)
    — bilingual (14 percent)

 As the article suggests, don’t lie. Not only is it wrong, you can get caught fairly easily, according to my headhunter friend. And especially don’t pretend to be a member of the Kennedy family.  Or an astronaut.

This passage from Bob Herbert’s column in the New York Times has been lodged in my brain:

A recent survey found that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that the social contract of the 20th century — in which the government, employers and the society as a whole pulled together to see that those who worked hard and played by the rules were afforded the basic necessities of daily life and a shot at the American dream — “appears to be unraveling.”

That’s pretty much how I feel. Actually, I think it’s unraveled, and people are just starting to notice.

I’ve been receiving a disturbing (well, disturbing from my perspective) number of hits from people searching for resources about being pregnant and laid-off. I am going to list the important resources that I know about in one place:

• Facts about Pregnancy Discrimination
• How to File a Charge of Pregnancy Discrimination
• Pregnant Workers Report Growing Discrimination and Pregnancy Discrimination Suits on the Rise

In short, in the United States, you can definitely be legally laid-off when you are pregnant. But you can’t be laid-off because you’re pregnant. It’s a critical distinction.

Most places I can think of (parks, churches, businesses) are workplaces for someone. And I’ve been researching workplace violence in terms of the recent church shooting in Knoxville, and came across this table of types of workplace violence from Workplace Prevention Prevention Strategies.

It seems like from what I’ve read the Knoxville shooting is a combination of Criminal intent (domestic terrorism) as well as a Personal relationship (with his ex-wife’s church). For some reason, when I think of workplace violence, I tend to think of worker-on-worker violence, but you can see that this is really only 7% of workplace homicides while 85% involve a perpetrator with no relationship to the business. Scary to think how random that is.

My poet-friend and physical anthropologist, Sharon Hurlbut offers ten things she learned at the Tin House writing conference last week in Portland, Oregon. She also notes that writers don’t drink as much as archaeologists. I’d have to agree from the wee amount of archaeology field work I did. This is not to say that writers don’t drink. This is only to say that archaeologists are in a whole different league.

And here are my own notes on the writing conference at Tin House from 2006.

Dr. Jillian Weiss is offering a workshop on Transgender Workplace Diversity Issues on Friday, November 14, 2008, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in NYC with the precise location to be announcd. Her workshop is geared toward the needs of HR folks, attorneys, and transgender individuals.

The schedule will include:

• Transgender basics
• Legal compliance issues
• How to address policy issues:
  • bathroom and locker room facilities
  • insurance and benefits
  • name/gender changes on government and corporate records
• How to train co-workers and managers
• How to communicate changes to customers and clients
• Recruiting issues
• Roleplaying scenarios - learn to do by doing

 More information here.

The Crestone Energy Fair in Crestone, Colorado, is really a great bang for your buck weekend, providing you can get to Crestone (not the easiest feat). It’s held on Labor Day weekend (schedule here), and is free (though the all day home-tours of sustainable homes cost $15). And most importantly, it is all about people conserving energy on their own by repairing and modifying their homes for energy conservation. Jim got some great ideas for gardening and heating a greenhouse, as well as some more technical engineering stuff with heating hot water.

It’s really not a corporate-driven event as you can see from the straw-bale building workshop I attended (see photo lacking evidence of suits and logos). There’s music and friendly people and lots of dogs (we brought our dog to attend last summer). I wish I could go back this summer!

Here are my posts on the fair from last summer:

Greetings from Crestone

The Sustainable Home Tour

How Much Space Do You Use?

Lifestyle Choices as a Hedge Against Inflation presents some interesting ideas for keeping your costs down (I saw fit to make comments in parentheses):

• Start a garden (It’s harder than it sounds. We do have a garden, and some fruit trees, but that’s substantially different than being able to feed yourself daily. I suppose we do in the summer though).
• Cook from basic ingredients (Yes, cooking is good.)
• Drink your tap water (Yes, tap water is good, but I know there’s a 50% chance someone will write in and tell me how bad chlorine is or how they live somewhere the water is terrible and they just can’t drink it. I know).
• Drill your own well (For the love of God, please don’t. Just don’t. I’m saying this as someone who used to be on the local water board in a community split between private wells and community wells. It’s an expensive way to get out of paying your water bill, there are regulations on private well drilling, it doesn’t guarantee water (particularly clean phosphate-free, sulfate-free, arsenic-free water), and public-policy wise, it really not a good idea to have every house with its own well in terms of maintaining the long-term water supply of any community. Just don’t do this, particularly to cope with inflation. Yes, some homes already have a well. That’s fine. Carry on. But don’t drill a new well to lower your water bill.)
• Reduce your home energy use.
• Walk and bike more. (Presuming it’s safe)

More here.

Three guys with missile codes fell asleep in a room. Together, I assume. And at night? And why? There is so much more I want to know. This story has some critical parts missing. For security reasons, I’m sure.

I’ve attended a series of work-related meetings recently, and revived my favorite habit of interrupting others. Not others who are behaving themselves, mind you, just those who drone on and on and on and seem oblivious to the fact that we are not present as a group discussion to hear a lecture from one person.

I have to admit that I developed the habit of interrupting others at Harvard Divinity School, which doesn’t speak well for the place, necessarily, but I got tired of listening to the same few people talk in class as if their opinion was more important than anyone else. (None of them read my blog that I can be sure of). I was polite about the interrupting, and it was my hard-earned money paying for the classes, so I really didn’t feel obligated to listen to discussion monopolizers for 90 minutes at a time. Still, I felt guilty.

Another Meeting? on the Career Couch has some advice that made me feel a bit better:

Q. One or two blatherers always end up monopolizing the discussion at meetings, and running everything off the rails. How do you get them to stop?

A. Monopolizers need to be reined in because they rarely have the self-awareness to stop talking themselves, said Glenn Parker, a team-building consultant in Skillman, N.J., and co-author of “Meeting Excellence.”

It’s O.K. to interrupt a monopolizer, Mr. Parker said. But be polite about it, perhaps by validating what the person has said. You might say something like this: “I think you’re making a good point. Let’s see how the rest of the team feels about that.”

Then turn away from the talker, preferably to another part of the room, and ask someone else his or her opinion on the topic.

Similarly, he said, if a monopolizer or anyone else goes off on a tangent, you can say something like: “I may be wrong here, but I thought we were supposed to be dealing with customer complaints. If you all agree, let’s get back to the agenda.”

A mini-summary of a study suggests that viewing logos may trigger all sorts of thoughts:

“Every brand comes with a set of associations,” explains study co-author Gavan Fitzsimons, a professor of psychology and marketing at Duke University. “When we’re exposed to logos, those associations fire automatically, activating our motivational systems and leading us to behave in ways that are consistent with the brand image”

And Psychology Today tries to helpfully (perhaps?) point out ways we can use logos in our work lives:

What can brand logos do for you? A few (untested) suggestions: They could…

• Motivate you.

  Ugh, you’re slogging up to your fifth-floor walk-up after a long day. Just glance down at the North Face logo on your sleeve. To the summit!

• Start fights.

  Want to liven things up at the office? Don a WWF SmackDown! cap and get ready for people to rumble with you.

• Help you find stuff.

  Where did you put your car keys? Glance at the Google logo and the search is on!

I tend to avoid buying anything with logos. They just seem to trigger sensations of being highly annoyed.

I’ve learned that as a freelancer, if I don’t hear from a client, that generally means no: no, we don’t want to hire you, no, we don’t have what you need, no, please leave us alone. Of course, silence can also mean: I’m on vacation, I’m very busy, or, my personal favorite, You are bothering me. Sometimes it’s just hard to tell.

Steve at All Things Workplace explores how “no” varies among cultures:

• American Bob works for a German company. Whenever he makes a request for something he has learned that if the answer is “No,” he actually receives no answer. The issue is allowed to melt away over time.

• While working across the Middle East for a couple of years, I realized that the word “No” was never uttered in any meeting I attended.

• I watched a client’s sales presentation in Portugal. Suddenly the room filled with palpable tension. What happened? He responded with a simple, direct, “No” to a request from the client.

Does anyone have any experience with “no” in other cultures? I’m trying to remember hearing “no” when I taught at an Indian school in Santa Fe, but I have no memory of “no.” It may not have been done.

When I graduated from college, after four years in New England, I wanted to be in the southwestern United States (love the sun), and I knew that I wanted a small city with a growing economy (like being employed). It was 1994. Not exactly a recession, but sort of a recession-recovery period. I chose Santa Fe (see photo) based on a list in U.S. News and World Reports or something like that. Santa Fe had a lot of growth, it was a small city, had tons of cultural activities, and it was geographically ideal in terms of location and climate. It was also expensive as all hell, and the “growth” was entirely in the service industry (e.g., restaurants, hotels). Still, I don’t regret it. I met Jim in Santa Fe. I really like Santa Fe. And perhaps one day I’ll be wealthy enough to actually live there again, but somehow I doubt it.

This week several readers sent in information on their cities doing well on lists:

1. Milwaukee as a Best City for Young Professionals (image attribution Nicholas La Joie, Milwaukee, WI):

Milwaukee might not be a leading innovator, but it has the fifth-highest concentration of top companies in the country, by our count. And those jobs pay. Despite a below-average cost of living, salaries paid to professionals are comfortably above the national average, at $54,169. Sweetening the deal further, the city is in the top quartile for its population of never-married citizens between 20 and 35.

2. North Hempstead as a Best Place to Live

North Hempstead is a town that takes pride in its ports. Just south of the Long Island Sound and its many bays, the sprawling area of southeast New York is a seafarer’s paradise.

To balance out the bays, North Hempstead’s affluent community unwinds at the Harbor Links Golf Course, comprising nearly 7,000 yards of golf, or by taking a serene stroll through Clark Botanic Gardens.

Real estate is pricey here, but if you can afford it, you’ll appreciate the town’s world-class shopping at Americana Mall – Prada, Hermes and Tiffany & Co. are just a few of the tenants.

Perhaps the best part in these lists is reading the comments on each article in which people complain about why cities are on there or why their city isn’t.

Anyone want to send me an image for the post that’s in the public domain? And anyone want to share a city ranking?

A reader is curious to know if his small raise is a sign of the times (or a sign of his company).

Would anyone want to share the average raise in percent that he or she received this year? You can do it anonymously, of course, in comments.

 I’ll go first. I received no raise this year. I suppose I should give myself one, but that’s not really how it works when you’re self-employed.

Oh, I could be amused all day by the nonverbal communication of coworkers. A very cool slide show with narration including commentary on the akimbo position.

Fry’s always seems like a horrible place to work, but I thought that was because I don’t particularly like loud noises, crowds, and electronic equipment. An employee who details 100 reasons Why You Should Not Shop or Work at Fry’s gives more than enough food for thought.

How Positive Racial Stereotype Can Harm Your Career poses an interesting question: What is the flip side of the positive racial stereotype?

Three possible adverse effects to positive stereotypes:

1. You get pigeonholed.

2. You don’t get accurate feedback.

3. Your colleagues resent you.

More details here.

It seems as if most newly minted PhDs come to their first position without feeling prepared to teach undergraduates (no shock there). And there’s a bit of a gap between men and women: men feel better prepared than women (we don’t really know if men are better prepared, but they feel that way).

One of the really striking things that I remember from graduating from college and transitioning to teaching high school and taking graduate courses in education was how much I learned about pedagogy that seemed completely absent in the college-model from which I came. Not that some of us don’t benefit from having PhDs stand up in front of us and talk for 90 minutes, but….um…most of us don’t. At least not on a regular basis as the primary method for transmitting knowledge.

Oh, god, I’m having flashbacks from these terrible three-dimensional drawings in Mineralogy. See p. 2. Or don’t. It hurts me.

Our Midwest correspondent has found part of the secret to happiness in a short commute: Milwaukee area’s short commutes appeal to working moms. Now our Midwest correspondent is male, but I think the short commute appeals to many of us, including the moms, but also the dads, the child-free, the unmarried, and everyone who hopes to spend more time on vacation this year than on commuting (current U.S. Census data suggests the reverse trend).

New research from the University of Chicago suggests that one of the “driving” (ha, ha) factors in whether women work once they are married is the commute time. (I suppose “the need for money” would be another factor.) Still, it sounds like things can be pretty good in Milwaukee:

“Commuting certainly does take a big chunk out of your life,” said Joan Skimmons, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Fiserv Inc.

Skimmons enjoys a 25-minute drive from her Oconomowoc home to the Brookfield headquarters of Fiserv, the financial data management company. That’s a little more than the 21.9-minute average for Milwaukee, according to 2003 census data. But for 12 years, Skimmons worked in metro New York, where commuters have an average commute of 38.3 minutes, and 4.3% travel 90 minutes or more to get to work.

The time and cost and stress it takes to get from home to work and back factor into decisions of whether and where to work, Skimmons said. And even at Milwaukee’s moderate commutes, employers are looking to make work more convenient.

“With Fiserv, we’ve made it easier,” Skimmons said. “We’re looking for more women. We have flexible hours. Telecommuting makes it easier to work. So if you have children with schedules, you can still take care of them.”

I was supposed to fly twice in June, and ended up not going for a variety of reasons. And I have to say I’m tremendously happy not to be flying this summer, especially after reading this story: American Airlines Cancels Flight Because Their Customers Are Too Pissed Off to Fly. There’s a delayed flight, a late flight crew, and some angry booing passengers, all of which resulted in the crew’s decision not to fly with the passengers.

I was talking to my dad this weekend about how our little town of Goleta was famous (It’s on fire!), and he reminded me that it was also home to a postal shooting a few years ago. We started talking about workplace violence, and he shared a few stories from his own worklife, and we agreed that institutions seem to sweep workplace violence (and the threat of violence) under the carpet, as if it happens everywhere else (e.g., like at post offices only).

One of the particularly dangerous fields is that of healthcare. About half of all non-lethal workplace injuries take place in healthcare and social service settings.

Nurses and other personal care workers bear the brunt of such attacks, with 25 injuries annually resulting in days off from work for every 10,000 full-time workers — 12 times the rate of the overall private sector, according to the bureau. The most dangerous settings are psychiatric units and nursing homes, where patients are often confused, disoriented or suffering from mental ailments, as well as emergency rooms, where long waits for care can anger patients, and the people with them.

The level of violence may well be higher, since the government figures include only the most serious incidents. A booklet published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 2004 noted that violence in health facilities was “likely to be underreported, perhaps due in part to the persistent perception within the health care industry that assaults are part of the job.”

Nurses step up efforts to protect against attacks explores the growing numbers of workplace violence incidents involving nurses. Part of the problem? Chronic understaffing in hospitals. Other parts of the problem? Underreporting of incidents and hospitals who suggest that nurses suck it up and take the violence as part of the job. Oy.