Happy Halloween!
In honor of Halloween and the fact that career management is scary enough, let’s take a mid-week break from the seriousness of real-life. I grabbed this off Workfarce.com, which is one of my favorites, check it out.
Below is a list of best/worst houses to trick or treat at…any of them bring back memories?
The House that gives out Pennies
These depression era folks are a sad and dying breed. We can only imagine that for Christmas they hand out 1 dollar bills to members of their own family. If this guy wasn’t so old and sad his house would have been egged twenty times that night instead of just the two to three times.The House that gives out Apples or Fruit
I’m sure Mrs. Miller thought that she’d circumvent child tooth decay by handing out apples. Instead what happened was that she not only gave the kids in her neighborhood a reason to throw something at her house, but she also gave them the very ammunition to do it. Sometimes Dentists did this shit too. Worse is the dentist that hands out Toothbrushes. We got baby teeth jack! Lets decay these bitches out now while we gots’em!
The Christian House that gives out Christian Propaganda
Yikes… I imagine if you are from the south there are a lot of these people around. Instead of just closing their doors and leaving the lights off on Halloween, these devout Jonestown types decide to take on the devil himself. In this case the devil is a pack of 8-10 year olds looking for candy. Christian propaganda is usually hilarious though and even as a kid I found their brand of “Cartoons” strangely funnier than the Calvin and Hobbs I was so crazy about back then.The House where the guy jumps out and scares the shit out of you
Oh boy Dad’s got that Halloween spirit. Too bad he’s going to emotionally scar all the kids in the neighborhood with his overzealous holiday zeal. These are the same idiots that you read about getting stuck in their chimneys on Christmas. Turn it down a notch jack ass. On the plus side this guy usually stocks a good treat making the mild heart attack worth the plus size box of Dots or Reese Cups in return. You just know you’ll end up being this guy when you get older.
Image is everything
Yes, I know it was a cheesy ad campaign for some camera company, but it also has it’s place in today’s workplace. Recently Brazen Careerist published a piece on this topic albeit from a different perspective than you might think.
If you’ve ever read Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist, you’ll know that she often has a unique approach to workplace issues, but frequently offers career advice that borders on being irresponsible (in this writers opinion…and others). Recently she posted the following on the ‘image‘ question, “So manage your weight, and manage the image you project at work, and you’ll do wonders for your career.” Gee I didn’t realize it was that easy.
She went on to say: “According to a 2005 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, good-looking people make more money than average-looking people for doing exactly the same work. ” This just gets better.
And “Before you get up in arms over how unfair it is to discriminate against people who are overweight, consider that there may be some rationale behind it. If you’re overweight, you’re probably not exercising every day. Ahh, the key to career success, just hit the gym everyday.
Finally, “So don’t kid yourself that if you do good work it won’t matter if you’re overweight. It’s sort of like people who have messy desks: The perception is that they’re low-performers, poor time-managers, and not clear thinkers. This might not be true at all, but the only thing they can do to overcome the perceptions of their coworkers is clean their desks.” So now I have to be skinny and have a clean desk?
The shortest commute ever?
About 10 seconds, if I stop to admire the view of my backyard on my way from my kitchen to my home office. In case you didn’t get the clue, today’s topic is working remotely, either from home or some other remote location. It’s not a new idea, but it is one that research shows more companies should consider. I’ve been doing it for about 8 years now and I absolutely LOVE IT! I don’t ever want to work in a typical office environment ever again.
It appears I’m not alone in this feeling. A study released in June shows that seventy-three percent of the remote and home-based workers surveyed said they are satisfied with their company as a place to work compared with 64% of office workers. Now a 9% swing in job satisfaction may not seem like much, but if you factor that against retention and the cost of hiring new employees it could save a company hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Especially when you consider that of the 10,000 surveyed, fifty-three percent of the remote workers said they were not considering leaving the company within 12 months, while 46% of the office workers said leaving was not a consideration. As Jack Wiley, executive director of the Kenexa Research Institute, in Minneapolis notes “We have a significant amount of experience and research that’s shown a link between employee engagement and a whole host of very desirable outcomes, including an employee’s willingness to expend discretionary effort to get the job done and their intention to stay with their employer”. Translation, if you let the employee attend conference calls in their bathrobe and slippers, they’ll work longer and harder. Duh!
