December 30th, 2008

How to be a better techie in 2009

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 3:55 pm

Categories: Business Technology, Cubicle Culture, IT Skills, Job Hunting, Work-Life Balance

Tags: Hiring, Information Technology, Professional Development, Recruitment & Selection, Strategy, Career, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Management, Deb Perelman

In 2009, this could be you.

… Cure cancer, run that three-minute mile, save the whales… remember when your New Years Resolutions were downright triumphant? These days, they sound a whole lot more sober: “I hope I’ll have a job in January,” said one reader. “Contract work with no benefits is all I see out there,” commented another. World peace, anyone?

Yet the Web is full of advice for IT professionals on how they can be become better, more hireable pros. Not all of it is realistic, though it sure beats “cross your fingers and hope your job is still there after vacation”. Here are some of my favorites, and the things I would bank on getting you the furthest in the new year.

1. Pay attention to where the hiring is.

We all get caught up in our work. We all bear down for months and even years at a time on one all-encompassing project or another — this is a good thing — but the danger is in looking up and seeing that the field around you has changed. Keeping your eye on the “prize” so to speak — where the hiring is still taking place, even in a downturn — is essential for continued career success.

So where is this mythical hiring surge? It depends on who you ask, of course. Some people, such as Read Write Web’s Jobwire, point to the growing use of community managers and new media specialists and that developers are still being hired at twice the pace of sales and marketing folks. Others put their money on SAP, .Net and help desk support. But all agree that even in a downturn, there will be small pockets of growth.

2. Keep your skills current.

Advising tech pros to keep their skills current may be advice as old as time, but it doesn’t change the fact that if you’re still boasting skills at the top of your IT resume that haven’t been a central focus of enterprise organizations in years, or worse, a decade, you’re going to have a harder time selling yourself for a promotion or to a new company.

It’s not something to put off, either. “Any IT Pro knows that keeping up with the latest technology is a career key. Make it easy on yourself by reading technology news and subscribing to various newsletters and technology magazines. If you keep up consistently, you can’t be overwhelmed by falling behind,” explained Kristin Clifford at CompTIA.

3. Be a documenting fiend.

Most IT departments are a place where the cowboys still roam — the “cowboy” being the guy that everyone in the department depends on because he or she knows how to run things. Productivity can hinge on them, and dangerously so.

But this is now an age of standardized processes — things like CMMI and ITIL are more popular than ever — and documentation is at the core of this. Being someone who is organized and keeps track of what they’ve done, even if your boss doesn’t require it, will mean that you can always reference your work so that your successes can be repeatable. If this is where IT is going, you want to be there first. Heck, you might even like it.

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December 1st, 2008

The most slacking-est time of the year

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 2:03 pm

Categories: Cubicle Culture

Tags: Workplace, Hour, Aisle, Recruitment & Selection, Marketing Research, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Marketing, Deb Perelman

Is this what your office looks like from November to January?

Statistically speaking, you’re not doing any work today — or so poll after poll out this time of year about “lost productivity hours” and “distracted workers” claims.

You probably won’t work for the rest of the week, either and you didn’t last week, when half your office was out for Thanksgiving and you likely didn’t do a lick of work after Tuesday afternoon. Next week, when the days until Santa are down to the mere teens, you’re probably not going to be focused on the daily grind either. And the week after that, you’ll likely already be on vacation and probably won’t be back until January, when you’ll start focusing on your MLK Birthday ski weekend.

Ah, it’s the most wonderful time of the year, indeed! But here is what the curmudgeons are saying:

• Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation, says 84.6 million U.S. consumers planned to shop via their home or workplace Internet connections today, also known as Cyber Monday.
• ComScore, a marketing research firm, says that online spending numbers on Green Monday, a term coined by eBay for the second Monday in a December, trumps both Black Friday and Cyber Monday, at $881 million versus $430 and $610 million respectively.
• CareerBuilder.com warns that workplace productivity will be impacted throughout the holiday season. Of those who plan to holiday shop online this season while at work, 43 percent of workers anticipate they would spend more than one hour, 23 percent said they would spend two hours or more and 13 percent said they’d spend spend three hours or more doing so.

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November 13th, 2008

'The devil you know' keeps worried workers in place

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 2:29 pm

Categories: Cubicle Culture, Economy, Job Hunting

Tags: Worker, Recruitment & Selection, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Deb Perelman, Job

The comfort of the familiar trumps the fear of uncertain economic conditions, say workers.

So, let’s say that you’re one of the lucky ones who slip out from under the economic downturn’s merciless grip, and you get to keep your job. Aside from keeping your head down and by all means, not audibly cheering your good fortune, what do you do?

While it is is of course a “gift” to “have a job at all” (as others will be sure to tell you), office life for those saved by the axe can be anything but a relief. There is a bigger work burden for each employee, who must then cover for a position or two that has been lost and morale takes a hit as the unsettled feeling about one’s job security doesn’t leave when the last pink slip is distributed.

There is more career conservativeness. Is this the time to job hunt, what with the job market flooded with established applicants with bad luck? Probably not, most workers rationalize, and choose to stay where they are.

If you’re one of these people, a new survey finds that you’re anything but alone. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. middle managers said that the economy was having a negative impact on their work environments, according to the survey released today by Accenture, a management consultancy. And despite the fact that more than half (53 percent) said that they were dissatisfied or only somewhat satisfied with their jobs, only 13 percent said they were actively looking for a new job. Nearly half (46 percent) felt that taking a new job in the current economic environment was risky.

There is good reason to be cautious, too, as it is hard to fully know the financial health of a company you may be considering jumping ship to. When layoffs come around, it is usually the newest employees who are given the boot, putting these professionals in exactly the place they were trying to avoid.

So what can be done? Accenture feels that employers whose ranks are filled with employees worried about their job security should do what they can to reassure them, and to help them cope, be it through opportunities for telecommuting, four-day work weeks or transportation subsidies. But if there is one thing for certain, it is that most employees are too unwilling to make waves right now to ask for these things themselves.

September 12th, 2008

It's all email's fault

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 7:34 am

Categories: Cubicle Culture, Workplace Technology

Tags: Worker, E-mail, Online Communications, Deb Perelman

Enter the term email into “Googlism”–a Web app which queries text in Google and displays the different ways the term is used among the results–and the very first response it submits back is that “Email is a bad thing.”

The email hate-a-thon doesn’t end there: Email is also deemed “dangerous,” “slower than,” “evil,” “not private,” “slow,” and “bad” by people clearly not prone to mince words.

When did email become such a punching bag? It certainly didn’t start this week, when we cringed over the HR executive who accidentally told the entire organization that the company was planning a major restructuring of its U.S. operations, including an undetermined number of layoffs. [Whoops!]

More likely, it began in a more idyllic time when happy workers would file into their cubes or offices, eager to get to the day’s tasks and found that they first had 120 emails to respond to, up to 95 percent of which were spam. The remaining five percent were likely silly forwards, newsletters nobody remembered signing up for and lists that refused to unsubscribe them and leaving a mere handful of emails that related to their tasks at hand. Meanwhile, 45 minutes had passed while this frustrated worker whittled their email inboxes down to this effective nub of five, and this, not surprisingly, was why they came to grumble about email’s existence.

Workers now have some statistical backing to their malcontent, as a study has found that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email. It estimates that people who check their email every five minutes waste 8 1/2 hours a week trying to figure out what they’d been doing just moments before. The study, put out last year by Dr. Thomas Jackson at Loughborough University, England was highlighted in the Sydney Morning Herald this week, found that workers were especially unable to resist the siren call of a new message, responding to new message alerts in an average of 44 seconds.

These findings were backed up further by a study by by tracking-software maker RescueTime cited in a New York Times article published June 14, which noted that a typical office worker checked e-mail more than 50 times a day, IMed 77 times and visited more than 40 Web sites each day. A research firm, Basex, estimates that more than $650 billion in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions about predominantly mundane matters.

So, to review, email can be a productivity killer, but it’s also not going anywhere, so it’s best to find ways to not let it throw your day off course. Here’s what I (try to) do:

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September 10th, 2008

Whoops! Apparently, we haven't mastered email yet.

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 1:49 pm

Categories: Cubicle Culture, Workplace Technology

Tags: E-mail, Online Communications, Deb Perelman

This would have gotten you in less trouble.

Email has been around in one format or another for nearly 50 years, yet by the looks of recent news headlines, we might have another 50 to go before we master it.

Although it hasn’t been officially announced, Carat, a New York media agency, is planning a major restructuring of its U.S. operations, including an undetermined number of layoffs. So how do we know about this? Is it because we have a finely-tuned ear to the workings of the New York media world? Of course not. By way of AdAge.com, we learned that the agency’s top New York-based HR executive emailed this information to the entire agency.

Accidentally.

The email, intended only for senior managers, was, “a rare, uncomfortable look into the preparations for employee layoffs” in which “management informed its rank and file of forthcoming layoffs and other changes in Microsoft PowerPoint and Word documents full of ‘message’ points on how people should be told of their fate and what should be said to their still-employed colleagues, clients and vendors,” explained AdAge.

I bet you already know who was called up to do whatever it could to yank the email out of circulation: the IT department. Of course.

Astoundingly, email flubs like this still occur on a near-daily basis in workplace as overeager or rushed workers press the send button before carefully checking their work. Realistically, they’re going to continue to occur until someone invents a program that beeps and blinks “Are you sure you mean to send that to the CEO?” before letting someone send. And probably even then.

So what happens if you’re the next one to embarrass yourself?

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August 28th, 2008

Things you've probably done this summer instead of work

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 9:39 am

Categories: Cubicle Culture, Job Hunting, Work-Life Balance

Tags: Hour, Worker, Odds, July, Deb Perelman

Found yourself a little distracted this summer? You weren’t alone.

The seasonal patterns we learn as kids–fall, winter and spring are for school, summer equals freedom–tend to stay internalized even as we grow up and join the work worlds (and are doubly reinforced if you have children) all adding up to one little fact that likely drives your boss batty: Everyone slacks off a little in the summer.

Though fewer people are around, making it harder to get work done even if you wished to be a go-getter, it is all the more likely that the nice weather has gotten you daydreaming at your desk about taking long beach weekends, you taking long beach weekends and your own vacations.

Before you get “back to school” next week, here are some of this summer’s greatest distractions:

• Watched the Olympics: NBC proclaimed this week that Olympic Games were the most-watched TV event in history, with an estimated 214 million viewing at least a portion of the Summer Olympics over the 17 days.Two billion people watched the opening ceremonies alone–or nearly a third of the earth’s population, and one in ten said outright they’d be doing so from their desks. Odds are, you were one of them.
• Worked longer hours, but didn’t get more done: According to the Bureau of Economic Research, in 1983 the lowest-paid workers were more likely to work long hours. 20 years later, the trend reversed itself and now the most highly paid workers are twice more likely to work long hours. But you don’t need statistics to tell you that you’re likely working more hours than ever before, and getting less from them. More hours at the office do not always mean more productivity, and in many cases it is the opposite, where worn-out employees are not performing at their peak. They’re also not as healthy, as it can be almost impossible for workers to maintain a healthy lifestyle when work and commuting might consume 60 or more hours a week. It’s no surprise that 45 percent of workers in a May Career Builder survey said they’d gained weight at their current jobs.
• Took a staycation: “Staycation” is the buzzword du jour this summer as rising airfares, fees for such “luxuries” as blankets and pillows, surging (but now leveling off) gasoline prices and more delays than ever on our nation’s runways has convinced many-an-already-exhausted worker that they needn’t leave the comforts of their lounge chairs, patio grills, and backyard sprinklers to take a vacation this summer. In fact, 51 percent of the respondents in one poll said they plan to take one or more staycations this summer, that is, once they had the term explained to them—including 24 percent who are changing their traditional summer vacations to include a staycation this year.

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August 25th, 2008

5 ways to unwire your holiday weekend

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 3:52 pm

Categories: Cubicle Culture, Wireless Workplace, Work-Life Balance

Tags: Vacation, Phone, E-mail, PDAs, Telecom & Utilities, Handhelds, Online Communications, Hardware, Deb Perelman

This doesn’t have to be your weekend.

There are people who don’t mind being lightly tethered to their work worlds while they’re on vacation, be it via email, cell phones or PDAs. They’ll tell you that they enjoy checking in and making sure there are no fires waiting for them when they get back and can even relax better knowing everything is running smoothly.

And, well, good for them.

But the vast majority of U.S. workers wonder if the notion of a disconnected vacation that is a decisive break, however brief, from their daily grinds has gone the way of the rotary phone.

It’s not always their fault. Much blame lies in the blurred line between work and downtime that comes with the proliferation of both wireless technology and perks such as flexible scheduling and working from home. Some toil in workaholic environments with coworkers and bosses who so frequently check in from the beach, they threaten to make them look bad if they do not. Others have actually been instructed to keep their Blackberrys on them, so they can keep tabs on a project or release. Yet a good lot of these employees had great intentions when they set out on vacation to do nothing but sleep, play, eat and drink for seven days but fell prey to free wireless and checking email out of a nervous habit or a blinking phone they couldn’t bring themselves to turn off.

The good news is, there’s hope for everyone. The Web is full of innumerable tips on how to avoid being chained to your laptop while you should be hiking. Here are some of the best ones:

1. Schedule your vacation at the right time: Though a well-scheduled vacation to some is to find one that spans the two most hectic workweeks of the year, an IT professional looking to increase the odds that they will not be bugged by the office will pick a period of time either before a project really ramps up, after a big release or in the brief downtime between two projects.

2. Reduce the need to be contacted: In the weeks leading up to your vacation, you should do everything in your power to make sure that your bosses, managers, coworkers and clients have no reason to need you while you’re gone. Let your coworkers know far in advance when you will be going away, so to limit the “Where’s Bob? We need him!” the first Monday you are out. Leave them with copies of important emails and phone numbers, and set an Out of the Office Auto-Reply that reminds people where to go with their concerns in your absence. Warn coworkers of anything that might come up while you are away.

Being a tad paranoid and trying to think of everything doesn’t mean you’ll never get called by a needy boss, but it certainly reduces the legitimacy of the interruption.

3. If you must call in, schedule it: For some people, checking in once, and only once, during a week’s vacation can be exactly what they need to help them relax better. If you’re one of these people, or your job requires you to call in, it’s worth it to actually put your phone call on a schedule viewable by managers and coworkers, so you can get the maximum out this sunbathing interruption.

This could be applied to email as well. John Halamka, a healthcare CIO, says that when he goes on vacation, he only checks his email before his family wakes up and after they go to sleep.

“When I return to the office, there is nothing waiting for me,” explains Halamka. “A great vacation is one that is easy to return from.”

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August 15th, 2008

It's just a TPS Report: How to step away from your Desk Rage

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 9:33 am

Categories: Cubicle Culture

Tags: NBC, Workplace, Worker, Recruitment & Selection, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Deb Perelman

Workers Gone Wild! Like Office Space, but less funny.

If, perhaps, you shared my weakness for the 2008 Olympics Women’s Gymnastics All-Around Competition and watched the event all the way until the very end last night and then continued to watch NBC long enough to catch the late late news, you might have caught a report on the “newest serious workplace threat”–drumroll–Desk Rage.

Type these words into Google and it will return over 60,000 results with headlines ranging from “Workers gone wild!” to “Workers: More and more out of control” and “Is there one in your office?” NBC’s on-the-ground reporting found a few gruff-looking guys weighing in with their own on-the-job war stories: “I’ve seen someone pick up the phone and beat someone over the head with it” said one, while another “once saw someone throw a chair at a window and break the window.”

First there was road rage, then there was air rage and now there is desk rage? Is desk rage truly the newest “workplace killer” or is this just a contrived story to fill out news hours in the dog days of summer when most of America is more deeply engrossed in Phelps Fanticism than whatever those news anchors are going on about in South Ossetia?

Not to make light of the real-life scary workplace headlines this week such as “Arkansas Supsect Quit Job on Day of Killing” but it seems that much of the advice on handling desk rage might at best be hard to apply and at its worst, entirely misses the mark. Dr. Kerry Sulkowicz of the Boswell Group told NBC news that “rage can be avoided when workers can talk about what’s wrong in the office.” In an illustrated slideshow, Forbes suggest that one go as far as to drive their troubled coworker to a therapist’s office to get them help. And Career Builder, via CNN.com, suggests that employees dealing with an enraged coworker apologize for anything they might have done to set him or her off. Hm, okay then.

The next time you’re at work and something has gone down that you have decided is the last straw consider instead The IT Grind’s Three No-Nonsense Steps to Stepping Away From Your Desk Rage (TM)

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August 7th, 2008

When IT culture changes with or without you

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 6:05 am

Categories: Business Technology, Cubicle Culture

Tags: culture, information technology, strategy, management, deb perelman

Are you suddenly a bad fit for your IT department?

Workplace culture is one of those terms you hear HR professionals, executive strategists and job boards throw around all the time, but what it means is generally less clear–and usually depends on who’s doing the talking. HR pros often speak about their workplace’s culture in terms of selling their attitude toward work to new candidates, execs in terms of employee productivity and the bottom line and job boards to goad you into a better one, perhaps one that is a better fit for you.

However, what all have in common is that conversations about workplace culture are more often about “transforming” or changing it than embracing the status quo.

IT is no different. In a new report, Forrester interviewed 15 CIOs and 41 IT decision makers about IT culture, and signs–from an unclear IT mission to a top heavy decision-making process or employees that are discouraged from extending their skills sets–that an overhaul is needed. Though CIOs and IT leaders are advised on how to go about making big changes to their IT culture, less is said about what changes could mean for the staffers within the department.

“It depends on the nature of the change,” explained principal analyst and report author, Marc Cecere. A culture change from decisions being made from a large to a small group of people might force an employee to quickly adjust the way they get things done. A change from a U.S.-centric IT organization to a global one might put pressure on a worker to adjust their schedule, and their way of communicating with customers to fit the culture.

However, the message is that the onus is on the IT professionals to adapt to the changes being made within their departments. Yet most employees have from time to time felt that the culture of their group was changing and perhaps leaving them behind. Is the only option to quietly plot one’s escape?

“First you’d want to make sure that things have really changed in a way that shuts you out. Sometimes you just perceive that things aren’t going your way. This is something that happens on the lower levels of the organization, where they only see a small part of the organization,” said Cecere.

“If the change is not in sync with your ethics, that’s one thing. But if it’s about the way decisions are made, who makes the decisions, global versus local, that is not in sync with what you think it should be, consider how much it matters, or consider that you might just be dealing with what you know versus what you can learn.”

July 30th, 2008

Signs you might not be IT management material

Posted by Deb Perelman @ 2:41 pm

Categories: Cubicle Culture, IT Skills, Leadership

Tags: IT Administration, Information Technology, Manager, Professional Development, Team Management, Recruitment & Selection, Strategy, Career, Management, Human Resources

In theory, everyone wants to climb the corporate ladder. With promotions come steps up that eventually land an employee in the coveted management echelon, with the opportunity to increase both their pay grade and influence.

Yet in practice–as anyone who has ever had a lousy boss or manager can tell you–not everyone is actually cut out to be a manager. Perhaps they’re happiest buried in thick lines of code or have little patience for the schmoozing or interest in the visibility that come with more pivotal roles. Perhaps they’re better suited for other things.

Though the fault is rarely with the individuals–all too often companies reward employees they don’t want to lose with inflated titles and promotions, whether they’re ready for prime time visibility or not–many could save themselves headaches further down their career path by understanding their own limitations and finding more suitable paths.

Here are eight telltale signs:

You hate bureaucracy

Fact is, managerial roles are rife with all the fixings of a bureaucracy–meetings and reports and reviews and pow-wows–and this will be what you spend the bulk of your time on.

“If you cringe when you go into a meeting with more than one person or you feel you would rather pluck out your eyeballs rather than go into a performance review of a subordinate, those are the very first signs that you should not become a manager,” said Jim Lanzalotto, vice president of strategy and marketing at Yoh, a Philadelphia-based provider of IT staffing services.

You need a lot of support

Not all employees are the independent type. They might need to know that someone is looking out for them or checking their work; they might work best on teams. Though there is no detriment in having this approach to work, it’s usually a bad fit in the management space.

“Managers get very little support, much less coaching from their boss,” says Alam Allard, an executive coach based in Lawrenceville, Ga. “You’re probably not cut out for management if you’re not ready to take on more stress, challenges and headaches…without getting much support from above. Most managers are promoted, then realize they have to do all the work they’ve been doing all along…and then take on the extra work of managing a team, often without much of a raise.”

You’re in it for the title

There is no question that a title that connotes that you are within the upper ranks of your company can be impressive on a business card or slipped into a casual introduction.

“In our world, we value external titles and visible things. If you meet someone who is a director or manager of something, you think ‘look at that guy. He’s really successful.’” said Lanzalotto.

But if this is the reason you want it, or–even worse–you’re unclear on your personal motives for accepting such a position, you could be in for a rough haul.

“You’re probably not ready for management if you’re not clear on your motivation for accepting the role: Is it for ego gratification, self-esteem boost, because you think it won’t be that challenging, so, heck, why not?…or does it fit in your clearly thought out career acceleration plan?” said Allard.

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