Friday, April 26

WORK

Job Interviews From Home: Pants Or No Pants?
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TOP FOUR, WORK

Job Interviews From Home: Pants Or No Pants?

If you have the good fortune of scoring a virtual job interview in the middle of a pandemic, the initial euphoria of potential employment may soon be replaced with anxiety over what to wear – as well as putting your home life on display for a potential employer. And with good reason. Social scientists have found that traditional interviews – without set questions or scoring metrics – are poor predictors of job performance. When this happens, interviewers make subjective judgments based on irrelevant information, like physical appearance and nonverbal cues. Illegal stereotypes based on gender and race may also be at play. And unfortunately, employment litigation has not succeeded in tamping down these practices. Although many companies were successfully sued in the early 2000s for making...
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Essential Strategies For Salary Negotiation
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TOP FOUR, WORK

Essential Strategies For Salary Negotiation

In the workplace today, salary negotiation is often considered an art. It is something that is not just done mindlessly, there has to be careful thinking and planning that takes place before you can ask your employer for a pay raise. It also comes in handy during job interviews, when your future employer will talk about the offer they can provide. But if you learn about the effective strategies, then you can easily get the pay that you've always wanted. If you are being interviewed for a job, after the first few interviews you will already be asked about the package. This is an important opportunity that allows you to be assertive about what you want, so you don't feel that you got the short end of the stick. It's important to speak up but think well about what you say. Before you acc...
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Given The Challenges Of Supervising Remote Workers – How To Make Performance Reviews Less Terrible
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TOP FOUR, WORK

Given The Challenges Of Supervising Remote Workers – How To Make Performance Reviews Less Terrible

Few office workers seem to like performance reviews, those annual examinations of how well workers are doing their jobs. And many seem to outright hate – or fear – them. A 2015 survey of Fortune 1000 companies found that nearly two-thirds of employees were dissatisfied with performance reviews, didn’t think they were relevant to their jobs – or both. In a separate survey conducted in 2016, a quarter of men and nearly a fifth of women reported crying as a result of a bad review. The figures were even higher for younger workers. And that was during the much simpler pre-pandemic times, when pretty much all professional workers were in the office daily and could be assessed similarly. Things are trickier today, as some employees work entirely from home, others come to the office and still ot...
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The Ruthless Pursuit Of Online ‘Likes’ Gives You Nothing
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WORK

The Ruthless Pursuit Of Online ‘Likes’ Gives You Nothing

Imagine a popular social media channel that did not display the number of “likes,” mentions, impressions, followers, engagements or any other metric to show how many times one’s content has been viewed, by whom and when. A flourishing “how-to” industry has arisen dedicated to increasing “counts” on social media, while also claiming this is the silver bullet to becoming more popular, rich and famous. You can purchase the services of click-farms to artificially increase your like-counters. This potentially increases your content’s chances of being cross-syndicated, appearing higher up in newsfeeds and possibly meaning the ability to convert “online social wealth” into material wealth. In other cases, approbation markers such as likes can be used to generate popularity or condemnation of a...
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Flight Attendants’ Jobs Have Never Been More Dangerous – Violence On Planes Is At An All-Time High
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Journalism, WORK

Flight Attendants’ Jobs Have Never Been More Dangerous – Violence On Planes Is At An All-Time High

The fight broke out over bags. After the plane touched down in Miami, one passenger was not getting his luggage down from the overhead bin fast enough, at least not in the eyes of the man behind him. That man, who is White, started shouting racial slurs at the other passenger, a Black man. In the front of the plane, flight attendant Cher Taylor heard the commotion just before the angry man punched the one pulling down his bags until he fell on his back into a row of seats. Taylor started running. “I’ll beat you good, I’ll kill you,” the man was shouting, punctuating the end of each sentence with a racial slur. Taylor, a Black woman, tried to step between them, unsure of how to intervene. When the White man finally stepped back, leaving the other man on the ground, he and his family wa...
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Gen Z Is All About The Gig Economy
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Journalism, WORK

Gen Z Is All About The Gig Economy

Millennials (Gen Y) have already established a secure spot and are leading the show, they will now need to equip themselves to head the novice. With this shift in the generation, HR will need to begin its groundwork to embrace the new wave of staffing from the true digital natives (Gen Z). Gen Z is always in constant touch with the digital world and it is quite impossible to isolate them. This new alliance with fresh talent doesn't come all that easy. Recruiters have to look at the on-boarding of this Generation as a possible organizational disruption and restructure business operations and administration to best engage the post-millennials. The contemporary job market sees recruitment teams and managers hiring more contingent workers. The traits Gen Z carries manifests the fact that ...
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The Post-Covid Office
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WORK

The Post-Covid Office

The knowledge economy office workplace got a sudden shake-up over the past year plus. At its peak, not that long ago, the pre-vaccinated office-based workforce was functioning more from home than from the traditional office, approximately ten times more so than pre-pandemic rates. According to the University of Chicago, as recently as March 2021 45% of work services were still being performed in home environments. This begs the question, is office work going to snap back to the way it was with workers committing to long hours away from family spent in bustling office buildings arrived to via thick commuting traffic? And if so, why? Whether or not the Covid pandemic has unwittingly ushered in a paradigm shift in how work is dispensed over the long term is yet to be determined. It will c...
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The At Work Wife – Do You Have One
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WORK

The At Work Wife – Do You Have One

Polygamy is rampant in the business world and workplace. (Polygamy without the sex, usually) The 'At Work Wives Club 'has many members or 'wives' in many business entities. A definition of an 'at work' wife is someone (man or woman) who is dutifully and voluntarily bound to their boss, a so-called powerful executive (male and female executives, yet predominantly male) only in the workplace. The relationship bears a perfunctory resemblance to marriage. The 'at work' wife, generally exhibits unconditional loyalty, works over and above what is required, and does whatever the 'at work husband' needs or requires, normally without sex involved. This employee is noted by the other employees as more than just a 'good' employee as the policy denotes. This employee or 'at work wife' is territor...
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Build Back Better Could Help End Subminimum Wages For People With Disabilities
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WORK

Build Back Better Could Help End Subminimum Wages For People With Disabilities

Many people with disabilities are paid just pennies. Build Back Better could help end that. For almost a century, it has been completely legal for companies to pay workers with disabilities mere cents on the hour. Employees have reported receiving pennies in their paychecks, with no limit on how little they can be paid. This practice of paying “subminimum wage,” which the U.S. Department of Labor allows under the auspices of maintaining employment opportunities for people with disabilities, has also led to some workers being sequestered in workshops away from the regular workforce, where they have little opportunity to advance into other jobs. About 1,500 of those workshops remain nationwide, employing more than an estimated 100,000 people with disabilities at companies including Goodwil...
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A Trend That Began Before The Pandemic The ‘Great Resignation’ – And Bosses Need To Get Used To It
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BUSINESS, WORK

A Trend That Began Before The Pandemic The ‘Great Resignation’ – And Bosses Need To Get Used To It

Ian O. Williamson, University of California, Irvine Finding good employees has always been a challenge - but these days it’s harder than ever. And it is unlikely to improve anytime soon. The so-called quit rate – the share of workers who voluntarily leave their jobs – hit a new record of 3% in September 2021, according to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. The rate was highest in the leisure and hospitality sector, where 6.4% of workers quit their jobs in September. In all, 20.2 million workers left their employers from May through September. Companies are feeling the effects. In August 2021, a survey found that 73% of 380 employers in North America were having difficulty attracting employees – three times the share that said so the previous year. And 70%...
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