Great piece from Slate‘s Farhad Manjoo about the tyranny of corporate computer control. If you’ve spent any time in corporate America, you know the IT drill: You’re blocked from Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc. You can’t use popular browsers like Firefox. You can’t share documents using Google docs, IM or other programs that foster collaboration. As [...]
Archive for the ‘Stress’ Category
People on the Street: Tim and Kara
This installment of “People on the Street” involves a husband and wife: Tim and Kara. We’ve learned from experience that when someone thinks their work sucks, it doesn’t just affect them – it affects people around them, too. With that in mind, in this post, you’ll hear Tim’s account of his entry into a new [...]
Why You Can't Wait
The other day we ran across some interesting numbers from a Watson Wyatt survey. It seems that a percentage of the companies surveyed are aware that certain aspects of their work cultures cause stress, and that employee stress is having a negative impact on the company’s bottom line. Unfortunately, in each category, the percentage of [...]
The Workplace Taking Care of You
Thanks very much to Harriet Traxler for the tip on this: Sound the alarm! Microsoft wants to hook you up to your computer to monitor your “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure.” And we thought the stress mouse was bad. You can [...]
The Stress Mouse
We ran across this recent blog post about a new technology that would help people recognize when they were stressed at the office. We thought this was funny, and perhaps a little chilling, that people would turn to their mouse to tell them they were about to blow a gasket. We have another tool you [...]
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 [...]
Modern Working Environment: Tools & Techniques for Virtual Managers
June 13, 12 p.m. CDT
