First things first. We were pleased to see Louisville and Xavier advance. If Kansas, Memphis, Stanford and Davidson can get it done tonight then our brackets will look quite healthy. We cool? Lately, when we’re not bringing American productivity to its knees by talking about basketball, we’re thinking about how people are freaking about how [...]
Archive for March, 2008
Hawaii Chair Solves Everything
We’ve been talking about people having the right to control their schedule, that they need the freedom to choose how to best use their time in order to do their jobs, spend time with friends and family, and generally take care of themselves. Then we saw this: You know, maybe we were wrong. People don’t [...]
Schedule Control or Robots?
We’ve written about the challenges and limitations of the Family Medical Leave Act before, but a statistic from this piece really got us scared. Apparently, 44 million Americans provide unpaid assistance to an adult. We can only imagine that this number is going to skyrocket as Baby Boomers enter retirement and semi-retirement in the coming [...]
The NCAA-tourney effect
We were all set to blow the lid off the bogus claim that March Madness has a negative effect on the economy. But when we woke up this morning we found that the lid was nowhere to be found. Jack Shafer, the media critic at Slate, had already done all the lid-blowing you could possibly [...]
3 Cheers to 37signals
We’d like to offer three cheers to 37signals, a web-based applications company that is thinking about work in the right ways. Here’s our take: First, the shorter work week acknowledges the realities of the 24/7, global economy. It’s not about how many hours you put in, but how productive and engaged you are when you’re [...]
The ROWE Launch Kit
Five years ago, when we first started implementing a Results-Only Work Environment at Best Buy, we dreamed of one day bringing ROWE to the rest of the world. We are proud to announce that today, that dream is starting to become a reality. The ROWE Launch Kit: Office Edition is now available for pre-order at [...]
Rethinking Telecommuting
Sue Shellenbarger’s Work & Family blog has a chilling story about how telecommuters are being “called back” to the office in droves. The reasons are “a push to consolidate operations, and the notion that teamwork improves when people work face-to-face.” The notion. The . . . notion. The . . . one more time . [...]
Maternity Leave Takes A Hit
In our last post we talked about some of the absurdities of the sick day. Today we’re on to maternity leave. This story from the San Francisco Chronicle is a chilling example of how the progress gained by a previous generation can be lost. The first half of the first quote (from Diane Freeman, a [...]
The Ethics of Sick
We liked this piece on the ethics of going in to work sick. We like how sober and reasonable it is. We think that everyone should print it out and give a copy to their boss so he or she can take it to HR and the entire organization can rethink its sick-leave policy. We’re [...]
Family Day Tussle
Check out these reader responses to a question asked by the Toronto Star about whether or not the government should determine whether or not stores should be open on statutory (or legal) holidays. There is an interesting tension here between people who want the government to step in and keep stores closed (for the greater [...]
Managing the Virtual Workforce Part 2:
Exercise Your Technology Savvy
Presented by Jody Thompson
February 23 at 1pm (EST)
