Surviving the Workday

How to Defang Scary Technology in the NY Times has some interesting tips for teaching and learning about technology in the workplace.  

Tip #1  Learn at the conceptual level (rather than the keystroke level).

I often find that some tech people simply won’t tell me what I’m doing at a conceptual level and will pass out keystroke instructions, which are immediately helpful in my short-term goal, but don’t deepen my understanding any way. Apparently they should not be doing this (though I completely understand why they do—because we, the learners, ask for it):

Fearful learners “want to have a piece of paper that tells them what buttons to push in what order,” she said. This leaves them unprepared for errors and impasses, which are inevitable.

So try to understand what you are doing conceptually before focusing on what to press or click.  

Tip #2  Create Analogies  To Anne P’s credit, she always creates analogies to explain technology to me (often they involve food of some sort….), and that’s apparently ideal (the analogies, not the food):

A good teacher creates analogies that make it easier for nontechnical thinkers to understand how a system works — for example, by comparing a hard drive to a filing cabinet, and directories to the drawers of the cabinet, she said.

So try to think of analogies that make sense to you as you learn or ask for analogies, if at all possible.

Resource

How to Defang Scary Technology

Bob Sutton of No Asshole Rule fame has written some tips for surviving workplace assholes. These are great and very practical. I think the best tip is to escape if you possibly can, because there is no shame in walking away from an asshole in the workplace. He also gives tips for polite confrontation with an asshole, which can be very effective.

One of the reasons I find Sutton’s No Asshole Rule so compelling (and I’ve written about it a lot) is that he acknowledges a huge workplace problem: some people are assholes. I can adopt a more pastoral orientation to try and understand, sympathize, empathize with the asshole and lots of career advice tiptoes around the asshole problem. Certainly if you’ve been in an organization with an asshole who has taken over, you’ll agree that empathy is not necessarily the best (or only) strategy. Sutton knows this.

I thought that Glencoe’s Career Tips were fairly traditional, but I liked the last point a lot:

Respect Yourself
Remember that the ultimate goal of your job is to satisfy your needs—for money, lifestyle, recognition, accomplishment, and advancement. Keep your career goals in mind and keep working toward them. Be the best employee you can, and some day, you’ll have that career you always dreamed of. Don’t stick with a job if it’s not right for you. If you’re not challenged, find a job that challenges you, and keep working for your career goal.

Amen to that.

Jim has been reading out loud from the Top 10 Holiday Party Offenses. It’s pretty funny. Possibly because I’ve never seen anyone krump at work. If you’re planning to attend an office party this month  (or simply want to be amused), you might want to read through.

It’s important for employers and job interview candidates to know what sorts of questions are illegal to ask during an interview. Illegal Hiring Questions gives a brief overview of the basic sorts of illegal questions including:

1) How old are you?

2) Date of graduation from high school? (Could be seen as both age discrimination and discrimination against minorities.)

3) Marital status? (Could be seen as discriminative against women.)

4) Age of children? (Also could be seen as discriminative against women.)

5) Do you have any physical limitations?

6) Have you ever been arrested? (Could be seen as discriminative against minorities.)

You might also want to read What Not To Ask and Other Tips for Conducting a Successful Interview.

I like the word “rubbish.” I should use it more often.

Workplace Tips: Reduce your Rubbish at Work has ideas for decreasing waste around the office. It’s a New Zealand resource and has some traditional (e.g., use backsides of paper) and untraditional ideas (e.g., an office worm farm for food scraps).

Ten Tips for Workplace Success has stellar tips for employers and employees.

For employers, give more informal feedback, avoid showdowns, be kind, keep your performance evaluation dates, and watch the bedside manner.

For employees, seek feedback and clarification, look down the road for change ahead, keep the boss happy if possible, keep evaluations in perspective, and trust your instincts.

Solid advice all around. And it’s interesting how much of the advice (40%) centers around informal and formal evaluations. That’s stuff we all can work on doing better.

Meditation is easy has tips for loving your coworkers:

 While dealing with your coworker, have a feeling of compassion towards them and see them in broad perspective as human beings who just happens to be your coworker. Try to help them in solving their problems…Have a feeling of compassion for all. You will be amazed to see the kind of positive feedback  you get from this.

Having a good lunch can make or break a work day. And I can’t be the only one who wants lunches like at the Vegan Lunch Box, Vegetarian Lunch Box, and Bento Lunch Box.

Check out the tips in the Working Mom’s Guide to Surviving Holidays at Work It. While adjusting your expectations, multi-tasking while waiting for meetings to start, and shopping on-line are helpful for most of us, I think the best tip is to avoid making too many comparisons of your holiday celebrations to those of others.

Don’t get caught up in the office comparisons. Women love to talk about who’s got the most done for Christmas. Meanwhile, you stand there loading up on coffee and hoping no one drives by your house to see the Halloween pumpkins still on the porch! This year, be the first one to admit that you haven’t put up the tree yet. Then watch how many other women relax and admit their realities, too.

In my own cautious way, I actually only advise honesty and sharing among people you trust. Sharing with a best friend at work is a great thing. Sharing with someone you don’t trust is generally not wise. However, if you can find a moment with people you trust to admit that you got the pumpkins on the porch, you’ll have created a genuine moment of connection. And that’s a wonderful thing.

It’s getting closer to the end of the year, which is my time for evaluating how I calendar and keep track of clients, projects, and money.

I’m curious how people keep track of their business contacts or clients. Do you do it exclusively electronically? Rely on your Outlook or Palm? Use good old fashioned rolodex technology?

 I use a Word document to list key business contacts, and I update and print it monthly. Very low-tech.

And you? I’m looking for ideas.

I’m not sure I really believe that a lot of people have sex at office “holiday” parties as data in Office Party Dangers suggest. That may be because my work experience is mostly with nuns, straight women, and gay men, none of whom had any sexual interest in me (and vice versa). Which is fine. However, apparently there is another world outside my own where people have prodigious amounts of sex at office parties.

Tips for Management for Planning “Holiday” Parties (excerpted from Office Party Dangers, which explains the use of scare quotes)

- Develop company policies on expected behaviour at workplace social functions, especially where alcohol is available; ensure the policies are drafted by “stakeholders” or all departments to encourage “buy in” by employees;

- Revisit those social-behaviour policies just before holiday festivities to remind personnel they are all respectable, responsible individuals, and that the guidelines are to be helpful;

- Invite spouses and significant others — which acts as a deterrent to sexual fraternizing, particularly if the party will include dancing;

- Limit access to alcohol by issuing drink tickets or putting the focus on a multi-course meal so that everyone has fun but doesn’t over-imbibe;

- And finally, ditch the mistletoe, as it only serves to encourage intimate contact and the very type of behaviour that could spell trouble and sour the office atmosphere faster than the Grinch can steal Christmas.

Read Office Party Dangers to see that other people are having more sex at work than you are.

In keeping with Anne’s post on three words to describe you (a popular interview question), I’ve been reading about the issue of formalized assessment in hiring. Personnel Testing in the Workplace reviews some of the basics, which include the prevalence of testing in the past 20 years for hiring (because of the high cost of replacing workers if they are a “bad fit”), sorts of tests, and then gives these tips for assessments:

 To ensure the appropriate and successful use of testing in personnel selection, consider these five key factors:

1.  Ensure that any test chosen for use has evidence-based support.
2.  Test only for personal factors that are directly applicable to the job and organizational demands.
3.  Advise all candidates upfront that testing is part of the selection process and obtain written acknowledgement of the candidates’ willingness to participate.
4.  Take a multi-faceted approach. Use test results as one factor in the selection process only. Do not make personnel selections based entirely on test results.
5.  Use test results as a basis for further candidate questions in a subsequent interview. Because test questions can sometimes be misconstrued, additional questioning will give you the opportunity to further validate the test results.

Most of my own concerns about testing have to do with design and limits of the test (1 and 2). As I said previously, it’s totally fair for someone to want me to take a basic copyediting test or a writing test in my content area, but often tests that are actually free samples, poorly constructed, and not a very good assessment tool.

Any experience with assessment in hiring?

Via Workplace News

This is in no way a real sex tip on Surviving the Workday.

However. You may know I have sort of an interest in environmental ethics, so I often mention environmental issues that are tangential to spirituality and the workplace. Like if a company put a lot of harmful chemicals in a product that many people use.

So.  

Most people don’t know:

• that most lubricants have all sorts of gross chemicals in them, like parabens, the family of chemicals linked to reproductive problems in men and women because they mimic estrogen and function as endocrine disruptors;
• that most lubricants also alter the pH of the vagina, which is a bad thing; and
• that lubricants basically kill sperm. Now if that’s a goal, that might be a good thing; but if you want your sperm live, it’s a really bad thing.

I’m just mentioning it because I wish someone had told me a few years ago. Lubes. Mostly bad news at least in the heterosexual reproductive arena.

Via The Ecologist

And, on a somewhat related noted, Green to Grow now produces bisphenol-free and pthalate free bottles, which you might be interested in if you have a baby.

From Use Cleverness with Caution in the Interview, read the excerpted paragraphs below, focusing on the second paragraph beginning with “Here is where you can recant your story”:

Joe Turner, who wrote “Job Secrets Unlocked!” and runs jobchangesecrets.com, suggests that you prepare your best “story” to answer the question by showing how you will go the “extra mile.”

“Here is where you recant that story of exactly how you worked 60-hour weeks, acquired new skills, or whatever it took to distinguish yourself and meet the challenge head-on to successfully make the sale, save the project, rescue a client, or whatever it was,” he says.

This word you use, I do not think it means what you think it means.

I have read a number of posts in the blogosphere that hint at the seasonal changes in our lives that happen in the late fall. For those of us north of the equator, it’s colder this time of year, there is less light, and our moods often seem depressed. I know that several years ago, when I left on my commute at 5:20 a.m. and returned hom3 around 6:30 p.m., I could scarcely function this time of year, and it wasn’t just the commute (though that was part of it). At least part of the problem at this time of year was that I spent most of the day inside and not in natural light.

So if you are having seasonal issues with your mood, as a remedy*, I suggest trying to spend at least 20 minutes (an hour is much better) outside each day, hopefully in the sun. For those of us with office jobs, that might mean:

Being in the light is a mood elevator, and you will gradually start to feel better. Being outside gives you an opportunity to find a source of wildness in your workday (and there is plenty of wildness in cities), a sense that there is life and death apart from what goes on between cube walls under fluorescent lights.

While we experience our indoor-ness most acutely this time of year, it’s not just an issue for adults in the workplace.

(more…)

Finding community seems to be one of those issues that comes up again and again in the workplace, particularly for people who work at home. Where is the community? Is it with coworkers online? with others in online communities? With their immediate families at home?

Shannon at Apartment Therapy describes how she found community in her day by going door to door in her neighborhood to gather signatures.

But walking around over the past few days, no, not just walking around but walking up onto people’s porches and in to conversation with them, my relationship with my neighborhood has changed. I feel more free to smile and say hello to people I see on the street, the way we did growing up down South, not just while petitioning but just out doing my regular activities. I feel more curious about my neighbor’s lives, not just their paint jobs and property values.

I’ve said “I am your neighbor” so many times that I’m starting to believe it.

I’ve gone door to door for water issues in our neighborhood, and it totally changed my outlook too. Not only did perfect strangers invite me into their homes and lives, but my notion of what it means to survive and struggle was broadened hearing about the lives of others.

Since I learned of World Shutdown Day, I like the idea of limiting my technology use so that I have time to recharge and do things other than reply to an endless stream of emails. Stephen Elliot even spent a month offline. Now for a writer, that’s pretty impressive. I’m not particularly good at it, but I like the notion.

GhostGirl found a new trend in limiting technology (new to me, anyway): Email Free Fridays catch on in the U.S.  During Fridays at certain business places, email is limited while person-to-person communication and phone calls are encouraged. You are allowed to send attachments, and external emails, but not internal emails. It’s not a bad idea, though I could see having a half dozen drafts started in email.

GhostGirl notes that they can pry her email from her cold dead hands. Other thoughts?

Ghostgirl sent me a link to hikaru dorodango or spheres made from mud. I’m not sure why I find looking at them so soothing. If you’re in New Mexico, you can see the artist’s work on Canyon Road in Santa Fe (of course!) and he also wrote instructions for creating a sphere of your own.

 If you’d like to paste a soothing link to your favorite art in comments, please feel free.

Biking to work is a tip that comes up often in green circles. And in theory, I think it’s a great idea. I don’t particularly like cars or the fumes they produce or their use as status symbols (at least in Southern California), and I like the idea of making the commute real exercise. So in theory? Good tip.

In practice, I will never ever ever bike to work. Not only do I live rurally and off a scary highway (and work at home), but I’m not a great bicyclist and I know it. My brother is a great bicyclist and has been injured multiple times, not only by cars, but by other people on bikes. And we went to the funeral for his brother-in-law, who was killed while on a bike by a drunk driver. I just read Collecting the Door Prize, which details the bike accident of a freelance writer and subsequent major problems, which just quadruples my resistance to biking.

Biking may be part of the solution, but you’re going to need a whole lot of education to improve car-bike safety, and a whole lot of bike paths.

In For First-Time Job Hunters, Pay Shouldn’t Be Top Priority, Lisa Patten, director in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ human resources group, advises recent graduates to look beyond the question, “How much does it pay?” when evaluating a potential position. These suggestions arose in the article:

1. Make a connection between your passion and your profession.

2. Focus on the “right” type of company for you.

3. Evaluate the location and cost of living.

4. Know your own worth (financially speaking).

5. Understand all the benefits, including medical, dental, and retirement.

I might add that there is substantial research that indicates that mentorship is important to job satisfaction and longevity, so recent graduates should look for those opportunities as well. And, lest you neglect the salary entirely, it also helps for recent graduates to get help with the number crunching in terms of making a budget to know whether a job will pay a living wage for you.