Apparently this happens every year. In Germany, during the holiday season, there is a debate about whether or not to allow shopping on Sundays. Merchants want to stay open on Sundays, but tradition dictates that stores stay closed. We saw (and heard) several versions of this story and typically it was covered as a business [...]
Archive for December, 2007
Dilbert Must Be Stopped!
Here’s some holiday cheer for you: a casino worker who was fired for posting a Dilbert comic strip that likened managers to a bunch of “drunken lemurs.” The best (as in worst) part: they challenged his unemployment insurance. Fortunately, the state ruled in the worker’s favor in terms of the insurance, although in our opinion [...]
New Year's Resolutions
Here’s a peppy press release from DayTimers, Inc., who commissioned a survey about New Year’s resolutions that target work-life balance. Not surprisingly, everyone pretty much sucks at keeping them: Top resolutions that people made and failed at in 2007 were related to health, finance and work/life balance. They included: 1. Increase exercise — 51% failed [...]
BlackBerry Balance
Interesting story out of Australia about concerns that giving senior government workers a BlackBerry would upset their work-life balance: “Staff expressed fears about BlackBerries contributing to a longer working day and felt it was going a step too far because mobile phones are adequate for out-of-office contact. Not everyone agreed, however, with some senior executives [...]
Working Ourselves to Death
There is a very sad story that’s been going around about a Toyota worker who died–on the job, at 4 am–of overwork. As this version notes, he had put in 106 hours of overtime the month he died. The Japanese word for what happened to Mr. Uchino is karoshi. Karoshi first surfaced as a phenomenon [...]
Working from home
We’re not sure what’s funnier, the actual advice presented in this blog p0st or the frequency with which we see the same . . . ideas . . . packaged . . . in . . . slightly . . . different . . . ways. Our favorite is the idea that it’s easier to [...]
Telecommuting, Jealousy and You
We were catching up on our work-life balance editorials the other day when the following jumped out at us: “In a survey of 46 studies looking at 12,883 employees, the authors found that telecommuting improved job satisfaction, performance, turnover and stress, and did not harm career prospects. Telecommuting, more than half of the time, did [...]
Amazing New Product
We were at an undisclosed office supply company the other day when this nifty little number caught our eye. Cool, we thought. Now whenever we have an Important Message someone can write down the contact information and a note detailing what the call was about. How handy! But wait a minute . . . what [...]
Managing the Virtual Workforce Part 2:
Exercise Your Technology Savvy
Presented by Jody Thompson
February 23 at 1pm (EST)
