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| Volume 9, Issue 3 |
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In This Issue:
 The 13 most annoying people to work with
Low-cost ways to motivate employees
 Set smaller goals, get bigger results
 Time management: Making every hour count
Lowball salary offers
 Prepare for a world without employer healthcare
No more mr nice guy [at work]?
 3 ways to run more effective meetings
Solve any workplace conflict in 3 simple steps
Rejection letters under scrutiny: 7 do's & don'ts
 Special report: Background checking—caution amid the credit crunch
 Job-discrimination cases tend to fare poorly in federal court
Layoffs are just one threat
Furloughs hit the white-collar set
Stress so bad it hurts -- really
 What your doctor really thinks of you
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The 13 most annoying people to work with
Most of us have had colleagues over the years who turned annoying into an art form.
Well, now it's a classifiable art form. Career experts Christine Lambden and Casey Connor, authors of the new book, "Everyday Practices of Extraordinary Consultants," have compiled a list of "The 13 Most Annoying People to Work With." How many of these does your company still have on its payroll?...
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Low-cost ways to motivate employees
Aside from cutting expenses, delaying payment of bills, ramping up collections and altering their business models, employers can try low-cost ways to motivate their employees to increase revenue and profitability, according to Suzanne Bates,
author of Motivate Like a CEO: Communicate Your Strategic Vision and Inspire People to Act!
"Money is only one of many factors that motivate employees. When people enjoy their jobs, like their co-workers, and believe their pay is basically fair, they don't focus so much on their compensation," says Bates, president and CEO of Bates
Communications. Among the low-cost and no-cost ways to keep people motivated in challenging times, according to "Motivate Like a CEO," are:...
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Set smaller goals, get bigger results
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What do you dread at work? Maybe it's filling out expense reports. Making a cold call to a sales lead. Giving a long-delayed performance review to T.J. (aka "the Crier"). You dread it, you avoid it, you procrastinate. You check out Google News instead.
There's a way out of this cycle, and it comes from self-help books. (We read them so you don't have to.) Start by thinking about housecleaning, the most unpleasant part of our everyday existence, other than forwarded kitten emails. Here's a surefire way to fight chore inertia. It's called the 5-Minute Room Rescue, and it was proposed by the
FlyLady, a "home executive" turned organization guru. You set a kitchen timer to five minutes. Then you rush to the dirtiest room in your house -- the one you'd never let a guest see -- and, as the timer ticks down, you start clearing a path. When the timer
finally buzzes, you can stop with a clear conscience. Doesn't sound so bad, does it? The trick, of course, is that...
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Time management: Making every hour count
Time management gurus hawking day planners aren't the only ones with ideas on how to manage your hours better.
Readers offered their own workplace-tested secrets for success on our Time Management blog, in a BusinessWeek reader poll, and on the social network LinkedIn. Here are 10 tips for taking control of the clock from readers who are already doing just that...
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Lowball salary offers
You can prevent—and sometimes turn around—offers of stingy pay, says Liz Ryan. But first let's have a little fun defining and categorizing them.
I get lots of mail from job-seekers who want to know the perfect juncture in a job-search process for the Salary Discussion. I'm glad to get these inquiries, because nailing down a salary range is not a trivial matter in a back-and-forth job-search conversation. However, all of these folks looking to pinpoint the Ideal
Time for the Salary Conversation are in great shape—they're people I don't worry about. It's the ones who decide never to have the conversation at all who scare me...
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Prepare for a world without employer healthcare
As the crumbling economy piles pressure on the bottom line, more and more US employers are taking a long and hard look at whether providing health insurance for their staff is something they can ill afford.
According to research by consultancy Hewitt Associates, nearly a fifth say they are considering stopping offering health benefits over the next three to five years. This is a five-fold increase on the four per cent who said they would be withdrawing in a similar poll conducted last year. Two factors appear to be coming into play
here. First, with little sign that we have yet hit the bottom of this recession, costs are being squeezed and squeezed again, meaning firms have little choice but to look at this ongoing (and rising) expense. But the healthcare reforms outlined by President Obama, even though his vision of affordable healthcare for all is still at
a very early stage, are also encouraging employers to question whether there will be the same need in the future to offer a healthcare safety net to their workers. The Hewitt poll of more than 340 employers found...
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No more mr nice guy [at work]?
During the heady days of the war for talent (remember that?), effective team management was often all about managers tip-toeing around their workers and doing all they could to keep them sweet.
Now, with workers are increasingly prepared to give up their home life, benefits and even their prospects of promotion if it means they just get to keep their jobs, the boot is very much on the other foot. But even though one in ten of us claim we would even grit our teeth and tolerate otherwise unacceptable behaviour from our managers,
does this sort of desperate climate do more harm than good in the long term? Research from consultancy Ceridian has found that half of workers say they would...
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3 ways to run more effective meetings
A talkative co-worker is rambling on again during a meeting that’s already run long. Eventually, with no decisions made, the meeting leader calls it quits, and everyone goes back to work.
“What a waste of time” is all you can think. The time-waster meeting is a common fixture in offices across America. The reason, says Reid Hastie, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, is that we’re not thinking about and valuing our time the right way. Hastie tells The New
York Times we often equate time with money. But we can always get more money, save it or move it around. Not so with time. You can’t earn an extra hour of it. We often feel...
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Solve any workplace conflict in 3 simple steps
Up to 30% of a typical manager’s time is spent dealing with conflicts.
And in every person, the natural reaction to conflict is based on biology: When confronted with danger, our innate biological response is to either attack or run away—the famous “fight or flight”...
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Rejection letters under scrutiny: 7 do's & don'ts
Mounting layoffs are creating a glut of qualified and aggressive job hunters who are desperate for work.
As their frustration grows, more applicants are reading deeper into their rejection letters—sometimes spotting job promises or hints of discrimination that you never intended. While a...
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Special report: Background checking-caution amid the credit crunch
As the recession deepens, employers that routinely include credit and criminal record checks in their screening process should tread carefully to avoid legal trouble.
With the economic crisis bearing down, the sheer magnitude of consumer credit defaults and the already evident rise in crime in some U.S. cities may give pause to many employers that commonly reject job candidates with negative credit and criminal records. If employers had screened out applicants based on credit
history hits in 2007, they would have eliminated more than 40 percent of all applicants; if they had rejected those with criminal hits, they would have eliminated nearly 10 percent, according to the latest background screening hit report by Kroll. The current economic crisis is highly likely to drive up hit rates
for years to come. Although credit and criminal checks will remain relevant for some positions, widespread screening for broad job categories may not produce valid predictors of employee behavior or protection from negligent-hiring lawsuits. In addition, screening carries its own risks. Higher numbers of rejected candidates
and soaring unemployment rates quickly translate into a rise in discrimination lawsuits...
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Job-discrimination cases tend to fare poorly in federal court
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Workers recently gained new ammunition to file job-discrimination cases in federal court, but they still face long odds against emerging victorious.
A battery of recent studies shows that employees who sue over discrimination lose at a higher rate in federal court than other types of plaintiffs. They also get less time in court, with judges quicker to throw out their cases. Many employee advocates hope the Obama administration will herald a better climate for discrimination
claims. President Barack Obama last month signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which makes it easier for workers to sue over pay discrimination on the basis of gender, race, age or disability by extending the legal deadline to file suit. Experts think the act will lead to a surge in employment cases in federal court.
Just because more workers have standing to sue doesn't mean that they will receive a better reception in court, if previous patterns hold steady...
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Layoffs are just one threat
Employers may be scaling back on layoffs, according to a new survey of large companies, but that doesn't mean an end to the pain for workers, as employers say they plan to introduce plenty of other cost-cutting measures.
Just 13% of companies polled earlier this month said they expect to trim their work forces within the next 12 months, down from 23% in a December survey. The latest findings, released Wednesday by consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide Inc., include responses from 245 large U.S. companies representing more than 4.1 million workers
in a range of industries. But employers say they intend to save money with multiple initiatives, including...
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Furloughs hit the white-collar set
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Temporary layoffs, once confined to blue-collar workers, are hitting white-collar culture as employers dig deep to cut costs.
More companies are instituting these short-term hiatuses, called furloughs, as a humane alternative to permanent job cuts. But the spread of furloughs to new sectors and a new class of workers has created a host of issues. "The places that are now
exploring this or discussing this are not industries where it's traditional," says Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, dean of the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. "I think a lot of [human-resources]
offices are sort of having to figure this out. There isn't a rule book that they were given." Furloughs have long been a way of life for workers in up-and-down industries such as construction and auto assembly. For instance, auto workers can
have weekslong periods of time off due to slowing orders or retooling of factories. Now furloughs are happening in...
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Stress so bad it hurts -- really
"I think your real problem is stress," the doctor said when I complained that the muscle injections he was giving me hadn't relieved my neck and shoulder pain.
"You can't blame me for everything that's hard in your life," he said. My bursting into tears only seemed to confirm his diagnosis. It's not like I hadn't heard this before. During earlier bouts of low-back pain, irritable-bowel syndrome and temporomandibular joint disorder, plenty of doctors have used the stress word with
me. And each time, I've become indignant. It sounded like "it's all in your head" or "you're malingering." That's an outdated view, says Christopher L. Edwards, director of the Behavioral Chronic Pain Management program at Duke University Medical Center. Decades ago, when doctors said a condition was psychosomatic, it was the equivalent
of saying it wasn't real, since there was little evidence that the body and the brain were connected. "Now, we recognize that what happens in the brain affects the body and what happens in the body affects the brain," he says. That knowledge gives us the tools to try to manage the situation, he adds. Dr. Edwards says his
pain-management program in Durham, N.C., is seeing a rise in patients amid the current economic crisis:...
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What your doctor really thinks of you
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If a patient's behavior frustrates a physician, poor care can result.
Some patients are notorious for "bad" behavior. They arrive late to appointments. They insist on diagnosing themselves using information found on the Internet. They demand a prescription drug they saw in a TV ad, despite their physician's advice to the contrary. Doctors are required to treat high-maintenance patients the same as
well-liked ones, of course. But a recent study revealed that doctors who experience a high number of difficult encounters also reported more adverse outcomes, while another study showed that patients with weak ties to their primary physician were less likely to receive care consistent with established guidelines. Both studies, by
the Archives of Internal Medicine and the Annals of Internal Medicine, respectively, are an important reminder to patients that cultivating a strong relationship with a physician is imperative to maintaining good health...
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