Work Daze

If you ever wonder why your career is in a downward spiral, and no one respects you, and the boss never gives you really diddly raises, and your only perk is being allowed to slowly rot in your cubical 12 hours a day, and your chance of getting a promotion is less than slim and little better than none, I have news for you. I know why.

You aren’t apologizing enough.

That’s right! The more you apologize the more likely you are to be successful – according to a new poll by Zogby International (and with a name like Zogby, you know they have to be good.) The poll was commissioned by an outlet outfit that sells pearls, AKA, the Pearl Outlet, but I’m not suggesting that you pair up your apologies with a nice string of cultured pearls. I’m more a nice string of cultured string type of guy, and believe me, you’d look lovely in twine.

Still, the results of the poll are rather startling. According to a press release released on the findings, people were asked if they would apologize in three different situations: when they felt they were to blame; partly to blame; or blameless. “In all three,” according to the release, “a person’s willingness to apologize was an almost perfect predictor of their place on the pay ladder.” So, 92% of 100K+ earners would apologize when they felt they were completely to blame while apologies came easily to only 72% of the 35-50K folks, and a measly 52% of those earning under a measly 25K or less.

As for the rich and the blameless, the same correlation occurred. 22% of the highest earners would say they’re sorry anyway, while only 13% of the underpaid underclass would cop a plea. That may be taking the apology gambit too far. If you’re going to apologize for something you didn’t do, you might as well do it.

Which is the explanation for the apology phenomena proposed by Terry Shepherd, the president of Pearl Outlet. “Maybe high-earners apologize more because, as someone once said, it’s easier to apologize afterwards than to ask permission beforehand.”

I believe it was John Dillinger who said that, Mr. Shepherd, but the theory has merit. The more chances you take, the more likely you are to be promoted. Or fired. Either way, you’ll be in an excellent position to apologize.

Another theory comes from Marty Nemko, a career counselor, who suggests that high-earners are more secure in their positions, and therefore, believe an apology or three won’t hurt their careers. The trick, of course, is to apologize up. Tell your direct reports that you made a bonehead blunder and there could be a rebellion in the ranks. Tell your boss that you made a mistake and you can spin the boo-boo in a way that takes away the pain.

“You know those thirty thousand Sanjia bobble heads I ordered. Well, Wilson told me to do it. But I do owe you an apology – I apologize for not firing Wilson.”

While the results of the survey are connected to job performance, the actual to-apologize-or-not-to-apologize poll question was asked in relation to one’s “significant other.” I’d hate to think you have an other more significant than your manager, but there are equally interesting implications on the domestic side of the equation.

The study also found that married Americans are twice as likely as the single or divorced to apologize to their significant others after an argument. I’m not sure we needed an international polling company to discover those results. If you’re married, you know married people are always apologizing after arguments. In fact, many times the entire cause of the argument is who should be doing the apologizing. I suppose we need another poll to figure out why this rush to apologize occurs, but I’d guess it has something to do with alimony, child support, and winning control of the remote control.

In conclusion, I do think we owe a debt of thanks to the Pearl Outlet and the Zogby organization for helping us see that the road to success in business and marriage is paved with “I’m sorrys.” And I’m sorry I didn’t get this valuable information to you sooner. Personally, I’m going to apologize to everyone I meet today at work. I’m sure each co-worker knows something I did that I need to apologize for. And I am going to buy that string of cultured pearls for my boss. On him, they’ll look gorgeous.

If you think your employer is demanding more in terms of effort, commitment, and THBC [Total Hours your Butt is in your Chair), get ready for a surprise. Not content with the 8-hour day, or the 12-hour day, management is turning its attention deficit disorderly conduct to a brand new paradigm – the 24-hour day.

Change is to be expected, of course, and even newbies to the workforce will have experienced workday creep. This is the industry term for the minimum hours expected by the creeps that manage us. In a few short decades it has transformed the 9-to-5 of the famous Dolly Parton song to the new age 9 to 9 demanded by today’s managers in the name of increased competition in a global business environment.

But now management has its bloodshot eye on stretching the workday even further. To do so, companies will take advantage of time zone technology that allows workers in different lands to work on the same project. In other words, to make the workday stretch around the clock, the work has to stretch around the globe.

Sound unrealistic? According to a recent article by Amar Gupta, a professor at the University of Arizona, in The New York Times, the idea of a 24-hour work force is entirely workable. Once limited only to call centers, Professor Gupta sees a round-the-clock round-the-world workforce scheme implemented in a wide variety of “knowledge factories.”

“Thanks to more robust information technology and a growing acceptance of offshoring,” Gupta writes, “ the concept is feasible for a much broader range of work.”

Unless the global business guru from Arizona is spending too much time in the sun, there is a definite possibility that your job will someday become chopped and channeled into three parts, part of which you will continue to do in your inimitable fashion, while the other two parts are farmed out to your counterparts in – say –Iceland and India.

That means when you finish perfecting your day’s work and head off to Kit Kat Lounge for some well-needed entertainment and barley-based rejuvenation, your project will be seamlessly transmitted to Olaf in Iceland who is just starting his day with a nice hot cup of Kúmenkaffi. You’ll be in your jammies and snoring happily when Olaf finishes his eight hours of tinkering with your work and leaves for home and the big pot of Makkarónumjólk his wife has waiting. Olaf is done for the day, but, in India, Indrajit is just getting started. After a hearty breakfast of Moong Dal Vada, Indrajit will add his eight hours to the project that will be waiting on the computer screen on your desk when you roll in with a coffee and a bear claw the next morning.

The fact that the project you see in the morning will be completely different than the project you left last night is not a problem. According to the proponents of the expanding workplace, it is progress. According to those of us who have difficultly working with people who speak the same language and eat the same burgers, you’ve got a whole world of trouble in your hands.

Professor Gupta is more optimistic. He posits that each worker on the team will be inspired and motivated by the work done by the previous worker in the previous country. I’m not so sure, but I guess it’s you’d be happy if only a third of your job is being outsourced.

Gupta sees the 24-hour day spreading to a wide variety of “more sophisticated and less structured work, endeavors in medicine, logistics, product design, finance, accounting and law.” So if your next traffic ticket calls for a fine of 500 Dinars, or your doctor prescribes a course of acupuncture and Chinese herbs, it would not be unreasonable to suspect that you have been globalized.

On the positive side, a diverse, international workforce could help companies create products and solutions with greater appeal to a global audience. And it would be nice to have someone who knows your job and your frustrations with whom you can complain – assuming you learn how to speak Hindi.

There is one fly in the ointment. The whole 24-hour kit and caboodle depends on the IT department, and those guys can’t even get your computer to talk to your printer. If you come in one morning and find out you have an additional 16 hours of work to do, you know who to blame.

Good news, neighbor. If your constant complaining and worthless work habits and garrulous gossiping and alienated attitude have so far failed to drive your managers from their mahogany-lined aeries, hope is here. Those of us who pride ourselves on being a difficult mother to work with have started receiving assistance from Father Time.

It’s true! According to a William C. Byham, Ph.D., the author of “70: The New 50,” calculates that approximately half of all managers and key professionals in many companies will be eligible to retire by 2010, with about seventy percent turning in their key to the executive washroom by 2015.

While this is welcome news for the troops in the trenches, the mass retirement of the managerial class may represent something of a headache for the companies they – theoretically – manage. This is why Dr. Byham has subtitled his latest tome, “Retirement Management: Retaining the Energy and Expertise of Experienced Employees.”

Having discovered and service-marked the concept of “Retirement Management,” author Byham may be more interested in preserving the managerial class than thee and me. “If these and other members of the boomer generation choose to leave the workforce en masse over the next few years,” he or his press agent fume, “organizations will be facing a severe loss of key leadership knowledge, skills and contacts.”

If you think losing key leaders is a problem, consider the disaster potential in keeping the same bozos in place for another decade or so. Yet this is exactly what Retirement Management is all about – cementing the addled and infirm into their Aeron Chairs until a HR swat team can come around to bag and tag ‘em.

The reason Byham wants to keep the current leadership in place is not because they are so good, but because their successors are so bad. “Companies will not be able to rely on the next generation to pick up the slack,” he writes. “The Generation-X cohort following the baby boomers is one-quarter smaller and not nearly as experienced.”

Perhaps, but the Generation-X crowd certainly could not do any worse than our current crop of clowns, and maybe their lack of experience will result in some wild new ideas, like actually manufacturing products in this country, instead of outsourcing everything to some offshore hell-hole, or treating workers with respect and dignity.

Of course, many managers do not want to go gentle into that good night of retirement. They simply do not have the courage, or the cash.

“Forty-three percent of baby boomers don’t have sufficient savings or pension income to retire at anything approaching the lifestyle they would like,” writes the good doctor. He forgets that if the impoverished managers we so much want to keep had been better at their jobs, they might have had the cash they need to turn meeting time into Miller time.

Imagine! The baby boomer management class squeezed our paychecks and scuttled our pension plans while keeping themselves knee deep in bonuses and perks. If these management superstars are so dumb they can’t even salt away sufficient cash emollients to allow them to retire, who wants them running our businesses?

On the positive side, at least for the older manager, Dr. Byham suggests that the seventy-year old – representing the “new 50” – will benefit from better health and less physically demanding work. Very true. It’s much less stressful to send a pink slip than receive one, and with today’s astonishing developments in health care, it is possible to stay fit and well, well into your seventies. Assuming, of course, you have health care.

Still, older managers will experience the “usual problems associated with aging,” Byham writes. These include “reduced strength and endurance, slower reflexes, and a decline of sensory functions.” While this may explain the many bad decisions that roll down from Mahogany Row, it doesn’t explain why we want to keep these old fogies in place, at least, not until medical science goes behind the hip replacement to perfect that much-needed brain replacement.

And remember – just because you’re old and in the way doesn’t mean you get a free ride. An integral part of Retirement Management suggests, “older underachievers will have to be remotivated or culled from the organization.”

Personally, I hope they just let me retire to my refrigerator box under the freeway. I don’t know how you can be “remotivated” when you never were motivated in the first place, but I can tell you this – it sure beats being “culled.”

Summer’s over and it’s time to take a look at your career. Or so says Richard Bayer, Ph.D., economist, ethicist, and the Chief Operating Officer of The Five O’Clock Club, a national coaching organization.

Personally, I’d prefer to take a look at my tan, which is already starting to fade, along with my attitude, my enthusiasm, and my savings account, but the good doctor may have a point. Returning to work after a summer of fun could be a great time to turn your dissatisfaction into action.

But how do you know this is the right time for you to change jobs? That’s where Dr. Bayer comes in. His recent press release, “Eight Signs That Say It’s Time to Change Jobs” is based on his experience providing coaching and counseling to members of the Five O’Clock Club, a full-employment cult whose “members are special,” according the club’s website. [“We attract upbeat, ambitious, dynamic, intelligent people,” the writer of the site goes on to say. Why such highly evolved individuals can’t hold a job is not explained, but I imagine it may have something to do with problems usually associated with a galloping ego.]

You only need three or four of these warning signs to exhume your resume, so be ever alert to workplace slights. Who knows? By the time next Labor Day rolls around, you could have a wonderful new job you’re ready to dump.

1. “You don’t fit in. Your values don’t match.” For example, other employees work and all you do is goof-off. Any company that cares more about making a profit over getting top score in Dungeon Wars III is clearly a values mismatch.

2. “Your boss doesn’t like you.” Does your manager see you as a human sponge, a useless biomass sucking the profits from the company and draining the froth from her bonus? If so, you’ve accomplished your goals. Time to move on!

3. “Your peers don’t like you.” Gee, is there no one is the company who craves your company? That means no one is paying attention to what you do – and don’t do. Given those working conditions, I’d never move.

4. “You don’t get assignments that demonstrate the full range of your abilities.” Now you’re being over-sensitive. Someone has to detail the boss’s Hummer.

5. “You always get called upon to do the ‘grunt work.’” One man’s grunt is another man’s glory. Next time they send you out for coffee, hop a jumbo jet to Rome. There’s an excellent Starbuck’s next to the Pantheon. You’ll get excellent coffee, and also get points for thinking outside the box – and outside the continent.

6. “You are excluded from meetings your peers are invited to.” Let me understand this – you want to go to MORE meetings? Any job that keeps you from the black pit that is a conference room is a keeper!

7. “Everyone on your level has an office; you have a cubicle in the hallway.” I think Dr. Bayer is using hyperbole here. Everyone “on your level” is working on the loading dock, or operating out of the janitor’s closet. Listen, a cubicle in the hallway is a primo location – close to the break room and even closer to the exits. Besides, a private office is a sad and lonely place, which is why such bad decisions emanate from them.

8. “You dread going to work and feel like you are developing an ulcer.” No sale! Simply because you dread going to work – “You have a hard time concentrating and count the hours from the time you arrive at the office until the second you leave” – does not mean you are sick. Au contraire, wanting to get out of work is a sign of robust mental health.

[As for ulcers, I wouldn’t be too quick to put them down. People with ulcers are usually well respected in a workplace where they are viewed as worriers who “really care.” Even if you were not lucky enough to develop an ulcer, I’d keep a jeroboam of vintage Pepto on your desk at all times. It gives you a great reason to miss meetings, and miss deadlines, too.]

I hope I have not been too negative about Dr. Bayer and his little club of losers. If you truly hate your job, and are always miserable, and project nothing but negative energy, you should definitely consider making a change. Or you can really teach everyone at work a lesson – stay right where you are.