Workplace Issues

Ah, something we’d all love to know how to do, right? PR pro Jessica Lawlor shares her six tips at Brazen Careerist.

Among them: Tell as many people as you can in person. Start with your immediate supervisor, and make sure you have a copy of your resignation letter in hand (it doesn’t need to be fancy, but you should have one). Make sure you have a “how to be me” document that lists all the projects you’re working on, passwords your replacement might need, contact people, etc.

And of course, after you leave, stay in touch! This is harder than it may seem because some people who seem like great friends are really just “work friends” who it turns out, you don’t have all that much in common with except work. But do, as Lawlor suggests, ask for a recommendation on Linkedin while they still remember you, and do try to send the people you liked a note every now and then to say hello.

Good luck!

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

In her new book Commander in Chic, Essence editor-at-large Mikki Taylor doles out fashion and beauty tips for the everyday woman based on examples from Michelle Obama.

“I love her clear cut assurance, the way she owns her style from within,” she explained in our Media Beat interview.

And one thing FLOTUS has done, according to Taylor, is inject a much needed sophistication into America’s dress code. Casual Fridays? No, thank you, she says.

“I think that we’re a little too relaxed. I think a relaxed nation creates other kinds of flexibilities that shouldn’t exist. Let’s treat each other with the respect and the honor that we are due, and so the subliminal things play into that. If we’re coming to work in sneakers, if we’re coming to work in ripped jeans and plaid shirts, who are we representing?”

Part 1:Mikki Taylor on Her 30 Years at Essence
Part 3: Mikki Taylor Reveals Why She Left Essence

Here’s a pair of columns from WaPo workplace advice columnist Karla Miller. The first features a letter from a woman who thinks her manager is out to get her (and other ambitious women), and the second comes from a manager whose young, ambitious female report is a nightmare.

The young letter-writer in the first instance says that her manager is “running off” other women based on “minutae” and “has now set her sights on me.”

Not a great situation to be in, but the interesting thing is, the LW didn’t mention having attempted to talk to her boss about the way she was feeling attacked.

In the second letter, a relatively new manager finds herself being second-guessed by a young, ambitious woman. “Her communication style is very up-front and borderline rude. I didn’t speak to supervisors that way when I was her age,” says the new supe.

What’s missing: the LW’s attempts at communicating with her report. In fact, she says she’s ” stopped responding to e-mails in which I feel I have to justify any decision to her.”

The advice in both cases is similar: talk. The young’in should say this to her boss: “I was surprised and disappointed at being taken off the Hudsucker project because my last review was so positive. What do you need to see from me to show you I’m ready for more challenging projects?”

And the manager should try (perhaps a more polite version of) the following: “I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but my decisions are based on years of experience. I welcome respectful dissent, but you should start from the assumption that I have a reason for doing things my way.”

But seriously. Start by talking before writing to a workplace advice columnist, that’s our advice.

Sharon Smiley was an administrative assistant at a Chicago real estate company.

After more than 10 years with the company, she was fired. Her offense? Working through lunch.

According to Open Forum and multiple other news outlets, Smiley was told that company policy required her to take a half-hour lunch break. Smiley was, at the time, off the clock, but was sitting at her desk working on a spreadsheet.

She was then instructed to go to HR to discuss the issue and was fired for “misconduct and insubordination with the HR manager.”

That was in 2010. Now, finally, a Cook County judge has ruled that Smiley’s conduct “didn’t amount to misconduct that would disqualify her for benefits,” and she will be entitled to keep the unemployment payments that she’s been receiving. (A ruling against her would have required her to repay all the money.)

“I knew you couldn’t eat lunch at your desk,” Smiley told ABC News. “I was under the impression that because I was punched out I could do what I want.” It was the first time in ten years she had worked through lunch.

In December, after spending nearly two years working temp jobs and working for tips at a restaurant, she got a new job as a receptionist at an advertising firm.

And now she’s won her case. The crazy part? No lawyer Smiley could find would take her on as a client, so she had to represent herself. After winning her appeal, she called one of the lawyers who turned her down and left a voicemail:

“I said, ‘This is Sharon Smiley, and I just wanted to call and let you know that I did win my case, and I did it on my own.’ “

More workers now than a decade ago say they’re feeling pressure to ignore company policies or even break the law, according to a new survey from the nonprofit Ethics Resource Center, as retaliation against whistleblowers reached record levels.

The percentage of employees who felt pressured to break rules rose to 13 percent in 2011, up from 8 percent in 2009. A whopping 93 percent of those pressured workers said they saw rules being violated while on the job.

Meanwhile, more than one in five employees (22 percent) who reported misconduct said they then experienced some form of retaliation, from getting the cold shoulder to being denied a raise or promotion.

“The co-existence of widespread retaliation and pressure with historically low misconduct and high reporting is unlike any previous pattern,” the report said.

Everyone likes offices that let in more natural light, with big open windows instead of cube farms, right? Yes and no, says WSJ columnist Sue Shellenbarger.

The benefits are undeniable. “Better communication and collaboration, lower real-estate and energy costs, more natural light and expansive outdoor views for all,” says Shellenbarger. One ad agency that moved its employees into an open floor plan last year say work gets done in a fraction of the time. Open offices are so popular that 68% of workplaces have “open plan” or “open seating” design, with desks separated by either low or no walls, according to a 2010 survey by a facilities management association.

But in a glass office, privacy goes out the, uh, window.

One consulting company boss met with a client in a stairwell to avoid having to discuss a touchy issue in a glass-walled conference room.

Others have installed switch-on opacity screens, which just signal to onlookers that “somebody is getting in trouble.”

And as Shellenbarger points out, you can’t cry in a glass office. And you definitely can’t go on Farmville if your coworker can see your screen.

To combat this privacy issue, some employers have added small private rooms for phone calls. Facebook even brought in old “superman-style” phone booths.

With 68% of offices using this style of floor plan, though, these issues are only bound to get more prominent as time goes on. Maybe that’s why so many people work from home.

In a chart that should not surprise anyone who has read this blog (or read anything in the media in the past six months, for that matter), a new chart from Bloomberg shows that minimum-wage workers are worse off now than they were in the 60s, even as the minimum wage has risen by more than 400 percent.

That’s because inflation has outpaced minimum wage increases so now it’s like minimum-wage workers are making 20 percent less than they were in 1967.

Thanks to increases over the past four years, that figure is better than it would have been: in 2007, before federally mandated wage increases took effect, minimum-wage workers were making 41 percent less, adjusted for inflation.

Of course, as Bloomberg points out, with so many people willing to take any job due to the poor economy, employers now have little incentive to increase wages.

Eight states — Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington — will increase their minimum wage by between 28 cents and 37 cents an hour effective Jan. 1. Workers in Washington State will then receive the highest minimum wage, of $9.04 per hour.

The US House of Representatives will approve today a two-month extension of the payroll tax that puts an extra $40 per paycheck in the average American’s pocket.

The New York Times reports that House Republicans, who “rejected an almost identical deal on Tuesday… collapsed under the political rubble that has accumulated over the week, much of it from their own party, worried that the blockade would do serious damage to their appeal to voters.”

House speaker John Boehner told reporters “that it might not have been ‘politically the smartest thing in the world’ for House Republicans to put themselves between a tax cut and the 160 million American workers who would benefit from it, and to allow President Obama and Congressional Democrats to seize the momentum on the issue,” the Times said.

The cuts are now only extended through Feb. 29, and also extend unemployment benefits through that date. Congress will now form a committee to work on extending these benefits through all of 2012.

Still crossing your coworkers off your holiday list? Worry no more. Fistful of Talent, the HR blog, has come up with eight things to give to your annoying coworkers in the spirit of the holidays, even if what they really deserve is a swift kick in the rear. (har har.)

For example, for the lazy employee who’s too lazy to get up and grab his copies from the machine, too lazy to walk to a different cube and instead just IMs people sitting two rows away, and so on, you could purchase a pedometer that actually delivers a small shock if you sit still too long.





The person who doesn’t understand email etiquette can be tossed a copy of this book:
And so on, and so on. There are gifts for the office gossip, the rude jerk, and even the Guy Who Is Always Late. Happy holidays!

Some may be skeptical of this program from IGN Entertainment (a subsidiary of News Corp that is responsible for IGN.com and other male-focused websites) but hear us out: the company has developed a system that lets employees give each other bonuses.

Called “Viral Pay,” here’s how it works: every employee is awarded “tokens of appreciation,” worth $1 each, twice a year. Then there are only three rules: the employees must give all the tokens away, they can’t give any to themselves, and they can’t give any to IGN’s president.

“The purpose is to reward super-performers with super-pay,” IGN’s HR vice president tells Fast Company.

Every token gifted is anonymous, so the creepiness factor of sending a buck to that person in accounting who saved your butt is much reduced. And while it may seem like this system is just begging for two people to agree to give each other all their tokens, in practice, that hasn’t seemed to have happened yet, FC reports. Instead, most employees divide their tokens up among multiple people.

Another likely pitfall of such a system is that the most popular, not necessarily the top performing, employees are likely to receive a lion’s share of the bonuses. While IGN can’t do anything about that, it did create a separate program where managers are given tokens from another pool and can award them to people who were overlooked by their peers but still deserving.

“Silva says the viral program is useful for confirming who the star performers are and identifying people who should be helped to grow,” FC says. “And it helps identify “unsung heroes”–people who might not being doing the kind of work that gets recognized at all-hands meetings but who are considered indispensible by their peers.”

Your thoughts?