News and Views: July 14th 2007

Study suggests managers may not know when employees are overwhelmed

“Stress in most workplaces is nothing new. But a new survey done by ComPsych, a Chicago-based employee assistance company, suggests many bosses don’t notice when anxiety is running high among workers. While 60 percent of employees reported high levels of stress and extreme fatigue in a spring survey done by ComPsych, only 45 percent of managers perceived workers as highly stressed.” Read more >>

Success: All work and no play?

“Do most of us have the notion of work-life balance wrong? Is it possible to get ahead in our careers without literally working around the clock? The answers are never clear cut. But I’m asking these impossible questions because of an item I recently read on the Wall Street Journal blog called The Juggle that deals with the issues of life and work. The blog cited New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s commencement speech to graduates of City University of New York’s College of Staten Island.” Read more >>

“Always on” connectivity and management

“Here are a few questions I think we need to explore.

1. As a manager how do you control both, personal and professional so one doesn’t take over the other?
2. How do we manage the “social/knowledge/collaboration tool junkies” James Governor talks about?
3. How do we measure productivity of the “social/knowledge/collaboration tool junkies”?
4. Do we need to change the definition of productivity?
5. How do you recruit a “social/knowledge/collaboration tool junkie”, what would the job description look like?
6. How do we explain to the Busy people that the Burst people are actually getting their work done?
7. If Bursty people can, or are perceived to, get their jobs done so quickly, should we expect more productivity out of them during 9 to 5?” Read more >>

What Gen Y Really Wants

“With 85 million baby boomers and 50 million Gen Xers, there is already a yawning generation gap among American workers--particularly in their ideas of work-life balance. For baby boomers, it’s the juggling act between job and family. For Gen X, it means moving in and out of the workforce to accommodate kids and outside interests. Now along come the 76 million members of Generation Y. For these new 20-something workers, the line between work and home doesn’t really exist. They just want to spend their time in meaningful and useful ways, no matter where they are.” Read more >>

Offering a good work-life balance—for example, by rewarding employees with an occasional lie-in—can cut staff turnover and boost profits

“. . . author, Mike Emmott, employee-relations adviser at the CIPD, said the five [businesses studied] had key things in common. The managers were all ‘people’ people; they were good at communication and fostered a caring ethos in their businesses. This meant they had low absenteeism, very high retention of expertise and experience, and workers who looked after each other. Emmott was particularly struck by how policies promoting work-life balance were ‘so intimately linked with business ideas about profitability. It’s about resolving business issues, not just about being lovey-dovey’.” Read more >>

Americans learning to disconnect more on vacation?

“Orbitz’ Take 5 to Travel survey seems to show a trend towards more balance between the workplace and the American worker’s desire to use a vacation to actually take time out to relax and rejuvenate.” Read more >>

Work-life contradiction . . . or balance?

“Freud’s seemingly contradictory observations, made nearly 80 years ago, sum up the dilemma around work-life balance and show why the problem has never changed, and is unlikely to.On one hand, Freud seemed to say work was life and vice versa. On the other, he cautioned that people get trapped in its importance, missing the intersection of work, family and society and leaving us with the same age-old questions. How much money do you need? How much time do you want to spend with your family? How much time for yourself? How much stuff is enough?” Read more >>

Workaholic groups aren’t working

“Health professionals, academics and psychologists agree. They claim the changing work-place, technology and globalization have produced a worldwide epidemic of ‘workaholism’. [. . . ] But as the Workaholics Anonymous member said, perhaps many of these people are in denial about the consequences of their ‘addiction’.” Read more >> [via ]

A long list of ways to dodge long hours

“It’s hard to leave the office at a reasonable time of day when your workplace culture centers on long hours. But the cost of not leaving work is high: a half-built life and career burnout. Of course, if you never work long hours, you will never appear committed enough to get to the top ranks. So your job is to work enough hours to look committed but not so many hours that you risk your personal life and your ability to succeed over the long haul.” Read more >>

Fear drives us to work

“Whenever your work is driven by fear, you’re not really happy. No matter what you try to mask it with. It doesn’t sound like he’s enjoying his successes, because he doesn’t have enough time. If he [an entrepreneur] doesn’t have enough time for dinner, I doubt he has a wife, family, let alone much human interaction outside of work.” Read more >>

Do you need to be a competitive jerk to succeed?

“I’ve found competition actually de-motivates me. I find I can run a race faster if I’m not trying to beat the other runners. Games where you face off against another opponent can be fun, but I’ve always preferred close matches to simply winning at all costs.” Read more >>

The two F-words you should love

“We all experience failure and the subsequent frustration. But how you handle those tormentors makes all the difference in your final outcomes. Oftentimes the peak of frustration comes right before a major breakthrough. That’s if you don’t quit.” Read more >>

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