Work Daze

Office walls do not a prison make. Or do they?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been sitting here all morning, waiting for
government intervention to save my sorry assets. Since our politicians have
extended a helping hand to the financial industry – after first putting that
helping hand into your pocket – I don’t think it’s too much to expect the
Fed to bail out the disaster that is your personal cash flow situation. I’m
not saying your balance sheet is out of balance, but let’s be realistic here
– if it wasn’t for the spare change you dig out of the reception room
couches, you’d never be able to afford the luncheon buffet at the Kit Kat
Klub.

As bad as your personal situation may be, at least, you have a job. This is
more than can be said by a passel of predators who, until very recently,
worked in the financial services industry. After years of buying and selling
worthless securities, and rarely making more than one or ten million dollars
a year for their efforts, these poor rich devils are suddenly thrown out of
work – unable to pay the mortgages on their penthouses or buy gas for their
Aston-Martins. [Or they will be until they are hired by the Treasury
Department to purchase the bad investments they once peddled.]

No disaster is without its redeeming aspects, of course, and in the case of
our current money meltdown, I have found comfort in the advice being
lavished on the jobless multitudes. Consider Phyllis Korkki, the Career
Couch columnist for “The New York Times,” who just issued a ukase to the
edgy employed titled, “How to Protect Your Job in a Stormy Industry.”

Ms. Korkki focuses her advice on the folks in financial services, but I
believe her ideas have value for a wide variety of occupations in our
storm-battered economy. For example:

• Don’t let rumor and fear take over.

“Fear is your biggest enemy right now,” says Marc Cenedella of
TheLadders.com. Personally, I always thought our biggest enemy was the HR
department, but Cenedella may have a point. “Don’t rely on the rumor mill
for your information,” adds columnist Korkki, and that will truly be a
challenge, since the biggest and fastest-spinning water wheel in the rumor
mill is y-o-u.

Because it will be impossible for you to stop whispering sweet somethings
into the ears of your co-workers, perhaps you can reach a compromise. You’ll
continue to gossip, but you’ll only spread good news. “The company is in
great shape.” “No way there will be lay-offs.” “The boss really likes your
work.”

Keep up the flow of good gossip until everyone feels comfortable and
relaxed. That will give you time to slip into the good graces of management
and save your job when everyone else gets the boot.

• Develop a personal relationship with the boss.

“It’s hard to fire someone that you know and you like personally,” says
Stephen Viscusi, author of “Bulletproof Your Job.” This may be true, but
it’s amazing how many managers manage to triumph over their personal
affection and get out the hatchet. A pink slip may be easier to take when
it’s delivered with a hug, but it’s still a pink slip all the same.

With mass firings imminent, it may be difficult to develop that deep and,
hopefully, lasting relationship with your hiring – and firing – manager. You
could invite him or her out to a leisurely candlelit dinner, where you could
share your innermost feelings over a nice bottle of Ukrainian Burgundy, but
let’s be real – time is not on your side. That’s why I suggest you use a
gift to seal your special relationship with your manager. Ten thousand
dollars in cash from your 401(k) wire transferred to your manager’s Swiss
bank account is a wonderful way to say, “I like you.” And a darn good
investment, as well.

• Assess & differentiate

Mark Anderson, of ExecuNet, suggests you determine “what problems you solve
for your current employer.” This won’t be easy. May I suggest: you keep your
desk chair from floating away by sitting in it. Or, you set a low for
performance so other employees look better. Don’t underestimate the
contribution you make by not making much of a contribution at all! Someone
has to be the worst worker in the company, and better it be thee than me.

Anderson also suggests you “avoid blaming your former company or boss for
your current situation.” That’s ridiculous! After all, they were dumb enough
to hire you in the first place.

Office walls do not a prison make. Or do they?


Here’s something about this column that you don’t know. While I am writing these words I am also answering my email, juggling phone messages, cooking a six-course organic dinner, balancing my checkbook, and playing Scrabulous with a 12-year old podiatry student in Debrovnic.

Yes, reader, I am a multitasker and proud of it. Or, I was proud until I picked up a new --and refreshingly tiny -- book by Dave Crenshaw, “The Myth of Multitasking.”

Crenshaw, a Utah-based business coach, insists that we don’t improve our effectiveness by doing two or three or ten things at once. Instead, he suggests, we actually become less productive, driving our co-workers and our family moo-moo-goo-goo in the process.

Multitasking is a myth, Crenshaw writes, because the human brain simply cannot perform two tasks at once. And David E. Meyer, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan agrees: “We will never, ever be able to overcome the inherent limitations in the brain for processing information during multitasking. It just can’t be, any more than the best of all humans will ever be able to run a one-minute mile.”

I would argue with Dr. Meyer in terms of the one-minute mile. Obviously, he has never timed the race in your office when it is announced that scraps from the lunch meeting are available in the break room. But no one can disagree when it comes to the limits of the human brain. Spend five minutes with your manager and those limitations are as clear as a bell, if not an entire carillon.

Instead of multitasking, what we poor humans actually do is “task-switching.” Unable to walk and chew gum at the same time, we alternate between walking and chewing, a time-consuming, inefficient waste of brain power for which we pay a price – a price that time management types call the “switching cost.”

You can measure switching costs in minutes or in dollars, but Crenshaw’s argument is that when you go from email to voice mail to snail mail and back again, you are not multiplying your productivity, but dividing it, less a significant discount for the time it takes you to crunch those rusty gears.

“Studies have shown that on average, each person loses about 28 percent of the workday due to interruptions and inefficiencies,” Crenshaw writes. “Multitasking – or switchtasking – is probably the biggest culprit.”

In the example that takes up most of the – wonderfully short – book, the multitasker actually loses so much time in going back and forth between tasks that every “productive” hour is only 32 minutes long. [I know! Your management
would be delighted if they got 32 minutes of work every hour, but don’t give in to their outlandish demands – what you bring to the company is your sense of style and your infectious charm. Anyone can do work. Only a very special employee can be a celebrity icon.]

Another destructive aspect of the multitasking myth is the idea that you can allow yourself to be interrupted all through the day and still remain a productive employee. Having assorted managers and co-workers and flunkies bop in and out of your life on email, voicemail, Twitter and Blackberry may give the impression that you are in the mix and in the flow, but the need to deal with all these assorted humans and their various demands will inevitably take its toll on your mission-critical tasks, like playing online poker, or keeping up with the juicy celebrity news on Perez Hilton.

Crenshaw’s answer is to set certain times when you will accept visitors or return telephone calls. “There is an illusion that many people buy into,” Crenshaw writes, describing the messaging technology that can track us down in the most sacred spots, like the VIP Room at the Kit Kat Klub. “The reality, though, is that these things will make us productive only if we learn to take control of them. They are the servants. We are the masters.”

I know this is true [but, please, don’t tell my iPhone.] So, starting now, inform your managers that you will only receive their input between 3:00 PM and 3:05 PM on every third Friday of every second month with an “r” in it.

Your supervisor may complain, but as I think we’ve learned, you’ve simply got to focus if you’re going to multitask. After all, anyone can screw up one task, but it’s takes real talent to screw up three tasks all at the same time.

Office walls do not a prison make. Or do they?

There are times when being at work is wonderfully liberating. And then there are the times when being at work feels like serving an unlimited sentence in solitary confinement.

It’s that solitary confinement feeling that you get most of all, right? Everyone else is out there – making contacts, making money, making progress across the global spectrum. And here you are, trapped like a rat in a cubical the size of a face cloth with barely enough enthusiasm to press your cold, wet nose against your mouse button.

Is it any wonder that you have decided to take action? And I totally support your efforts to break free – your idea of stealing a spoon from the break room and digging a tunnel from under your desk to the back of the parking lot is a bold and daring move.

I wish you best of luck in your escape!

All of which reminds me of a March 17, 2008 article in “The Wall Street Journal.”

“Executives Teach Inmates How to Be Employees” was the title of the piece by reporter Carol Hymowitz, and lest you consider me cold-hearted, let me say right from the jump that this charitable effort by retired execs is a good deed, indeed. By sharing basic business success tips with the prison population they are turning common criminals into uncommonly productive employees. Best of all, by instructing the inmates on how to get and keep jobs when their sentences are over, they have managed to reduce the recidivism rate from the national average of approximately 66% to a measly 10%.

But is being locked behind a desk better than being locked behind bars? I’m not sure there is much difference. One successful graduate of the program, Mark, described prison life this way: “The food was nasty, I missed my family so much, and you’re dependent on the guards for everything. No one thinks about kindness in prison.”

Now consider your job: the food in the company cafeteria is so toxic that “nasty” could be a blue plate special. And with all the hours demanded by management, you also miss your family and yes, you’re dependent on your supervisors for everything. As for thinking of kindness, forget about it. The only time you’re likely to find kindness is when the security guards offer to carry your boxes to the street after they kick you to the curb.

The charitable work that is needed here is obvious. Instead of business executives going to prison to teach convicts how to succeed on the outside, we need are convicts coming to businesses to teach employees how to survive on the inside.

[No, I’ve never been in prison, but I’ve watched “The Shawshank Redemption” a dozen times, so I’m no stranger to doing hard time.]

For example:

• Serve your sentence one day at a time.

Everyone in the workforce is a lifer. So, there’s no sense in taking the long view. When you come in on a Monday, try to ignore the weekly delousing and don’t obsess on whether you can make it all the way to Friday. If you can grit your teeth and tough it out, maybe you can make it to lunch. After that, it’s an easy jump to your early-afternoon nap break, after which you can pretend to have a stomach ache and get taken to the IT department for an emergency appendectomy. For some people, this is major surgery. For you, it’s parole.

• Never turn your back on a con.

Remember that your co-workers are just as depressed and dangerous as you. They’ll turn you in to the guard (AKA, the office manager) just for the fun of it. Be smart and strike first. If one of your office friends is cheating on her expense account, or her spouse, drop a dime on the jailbird. You’ll rid yourself of a rival, and you may get extra privileges, like a second helping of gruel at bonus time.

• Keep a positive mental outlook.

A workplace, like a prison, is a depressing place. Your body has to be there, but your mind can run free. Maybe you won’t have Morgan Freeman as your work buddy for the decades ahead, but that doesn’t mean you can’t walk through your days in a happily-demented daze. Let the bulls think you’re a nitwit. And no matter what else you have to do, just keep digging that tunnel.

You can feel it in your bones, can’t you? That strangely familiar feeling wafting through the cubicle corridors whispering, “you’re about to be fired.”

One doesn’t need to consult an Oracle database to know when a firing is imminent. The same DNA that warned our ancestors when a Tyrannosaurus was around the bend also triggers our modern nervous systems when a Terminationasurus is in the hood.

The question, then, is how do you keep an active job search going under the noses of your supervisors – who also have an instinctual ability to sniff out those disloyal employees who have the nerve to work on their resumes while waiting for their pink slips.

If you don’t have an answer, then send your bread-and-butter notes to Marci Alboher of “The New York Times,” who researched the issue for us. “Prepare for your next move long before it becomes urgent,” Alboher reports, citing the expertise of one Belinda Plutz, founder of Manhattan’s Career Mentors, Inc. “That way, when you start looking for a job, you won’t look like you suddenly ramped up the networking.”

Plutz is no putz when it comes career development, but her injunction about being obvious in your networking might not apply to you – someone who is so antisocial in the office that even saying “hello” at the coffee urn will send tremors around the workplace.

“She actually talked to me!” the gossiping Gerdies will chatter. “She’s definitely looking for a new job.”

Fortunately, our wired world offers the shy job seeker opportunities to come out of their shells without coming out of their office. “Creating a presence on social networking sites like LinkedIn shouldn’t necessarily give people the idea you are looking for a search since you should be doing that all the time,” says Ms. Plutz.

True that! But you still have to be careful about the information you allow to be linked up to Linked In. To see how to gently hint at your availability, take a page from my profile, under the “Interests” tab:

“Collecting bottle caps, watching “Gossip Girl,” desperately, frantically searching for a new job, any job, even if it pays 20 or 30% less, decoupage, and tatting.”

Another semi-excellent tip from Alboher’s column concerns tipping your hand by tipping your hat. “You may also invite suspicion if you start dressing better than usual,” she reports, before turning again to Ms. Plutz, who “says you should dress well consistently so that you don’t announce by your clothing that you are going out for an interview.”

More excellent advice. Remember the fuss everyone made when you came in to work and you weren’t wearing your bathrobe and bunny slippers?

If you are going to change your work wardrobe, do it all in one fell swoop. Don’t go from locker room casual to Nordstrom Rack to Ralph Lauren Purple Label as you rise up the interview org. chart at your new employer. Better to just show up in full formal attire -- a tuxedo for men and a prom dress for ladies. [Or vice versa, depending on your potential employer.]

This way, the only thing management will think you’re looking for is a spouse. Or, they’ll conclude you’ve gone completely bonkers and immediately offer you an executive position.

Another question addressed in the “Career Couch” column is whether or not you should tell your manager if all your networking and fancy finery has brought you in proximity to a new job. Some poor deluded souls apparently think that their relationship with their supervisor is so close that the subject can be discussed freely, like you do when addressing other high-level issues, such as whether Kate will end up with Jack or Sawyer on “Lost.”

According to the experts, this is a no-no. “Keep in mind that your boss might start to recruit for your replacement,” points out Ben Dattner, an adjunct professor of organizational behavior at New York University. “That may make you vulnerable and uncomfortable.”

“Vulnerable and uncomfortable?” Hey, that would be big improvement compared to what you have now –terrorized and invisible.

In the end, the experts advise that when you finally do get a new job, don’t use it as employment ju-jitsu to get a raise. Your managers may give you money, but they’ll never again give you their trust. On the other hand, a big fat raise could ice the runners for another year or two of coasting. And those bunny slippers are awfully cozy.