Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be on the other side of a firing or layoff? One of the downsides to being a boss is having to let people go, especially when it’s not because they deserve it. Well, now The Washington Post introduces you to “The Five O’Clock Club” – an “outplacement” firm. What, you may ask, is outplacement? It’s a corporate buzzword for laying people off. And companies like The Five O’Clock Club (which I’ll call T5OCC) come in to help companies figure out which people to lay off and how.
While the point of this article is probably to help people – especially ones who lost their jobs recently and are pissed about it – sympathize with what it’s like to be the layer-offer, it doesn’t do much to humanize the characters. Having employees of T5OCC spout off lists of names and numbers – six here, 20 there – doesn’t make me feel sorry for them. If anything, it makes them look like vultures, who are surviving by feeding off of the dying. Take paragraphs like this, for example:
The Five O’Clock Club has nearly doubled in size during the past two years, and Hall has guided more than 200 companies and 1,500 laid-off workers through downsizings in the past six months. The Club, as it is sometimes called, charges each company about $2,000 per fired employee in exchange for providing layoff victims with a year of career coaching. The more businesses that suffer, the better for business at the Club. When Hall joined the company in 2007, she read in the employee handbook that “from time to time, employees will receive small bonuses when the company is doing exceptionally well.” Now those bonuses come almost every month.
Maybe I should reward these people for their business acumen, but all I feel like doing is being mad that they exist in the first place.
The first time I had to write a professional work email and sign my boss’ name to it instead of my own, I was totally flummoxed. There was this particular art to that “corporatespeak” voice, and I couldn’t quite get it right. For those of you in similar situations, here are a couple of useful tips:
- Talk in the royal “we.” It helps you to think about the company being one large voice/brain and reminds you not to be personal.
- Use initials for everyone, no matter what. Why say that Joe Green and Frank Myers are having lunch tomorrow when you can say that JG and FM are having lunch tomorrow? Using any kind of code or shorthand is a good way to make people feel like they’re ‘in the know,’ plus you sound more efficient.
- Use at least two cliches for each short email and more for longer emails. Good, common ones include “at the end of the day,” “all hands on deck,” “team player(s),” and “outside of the box.”
The only thing I enjoy more than a new buzzword is laziness, so obviously I’m on board with the new word “lazylancing.” It’s defined as “when you subsidize your travel with freelance work.”
Here’s the thing: that doesn’t sound lazy to me. Traveling is the least lazy thing ever! It involves planning and moving around and carrying shit and rushing to make it to the museum before it closes and figuring out where to get lunch. Traveling requires lots of stamina. If I were to define lazylancing, it would be more like “person who claims to be working on freelance projects but is actually just putzing around on the internet and watching old Big Love episodes.” Not that I, uh, know anyone who does that.
At my last job, there was a lot of turnover, so by the time I passed the two year mark I was a bit of an office veteran, especially among the assistants. I knew how to do everything and was put in charge of training the newbies. That meant that not only was I a bit of a know-it-all, I was also pretty deep into a rut. In other words, I was the “office curmudgeon,” as defined by Canada.com:
Employees can also create their own workplace woes and not know it.
Chances are, if you’re unhappy with your job or career, you’re not at your best in the workplace, says Caston.
“Even if you’re on your days off, are you likely to be doing some of the things you do for money?”
If your answer is a resounding ‘no,’ it’s time to consider leaving. If you don’t, you’re likely to become physically ill and you won’t perform well at work.
But even those who aren’t at such an extreme point can behave poorly without knowing it.
Now, I think the real question is a little more complex – are you being grumpy and complaining about everything because you’re just a disgruntled person, or are you bored to tears? For me, it was definitely the latter. It’s time to take a good hard look at your situation and decide if you need to change up your current situation or if you need to get out of it entirely.
It never ceases to make me laugh when newspapers or magazines ’suddenly’ catch on to the ‘trend’ of working remotely. Still, as the economy sucks and people are taking pay cuts or working multiple part time jobs, these trend pieces are not going anywhere. Now, the Washington Post has coined the term ‘digital nomad‘ to identify and describe people who – like yours truly! – can do their jobs from anyplace they want (provided it has wifi, of course). Here are some of the reasons/benefits the article gives:
- You can wear whatever you want.
- No one makes you get up at 7 AM.
- You can avoid traffic or crowded public transit.
- You are able to work flexible hours, which is particularly awesome if you have kids or are working multiple gigs.
- “Meetings” can be conducted from your living room, a Starbucks, a library, or basically anywhere else.
- Buying an iPhone is a “work expense.’
- You can meet other digital nomads at your coffee shop of choice.
- If you want to go on vacation, you don’t have to request time off – you just have to make sure your laptop will work from the beach or hotel or airport or wherever.
In other words, your company needs to get with the times and let you be a digital nomad already.
“I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?”
“I think you can in Europe.”
- Ten Things I Hate About You
OK, I’ll stop with the quoting of awesome ’90s movies now. But that was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw an article in today’s NY Daily News about something called “undermanagement.” I have to admit, usually the thing people complain the most regarding bosses and the workplace is being micromanaged – having a boss who breathes down their neck all the time and hyperstresses about even the smallest and most irrelevant of tasks. Now, we’re also supposed to be worried that someone might be managing too little? This kind of reminds me of how tabloids freak out whenever a celebrity puts on a pound or two and immediately starts a round-the-clock “bumpwatch” but then castigate her when she loses any weight and accuses her of having an eating disorder. There’s no middle ground, and there’s no way to win.
Continue reading ‘is ‘undermanagement’ a problem?’
We’ve gone all week without a Tip of the Week, so here goes (with a hat tip to techrepublic.com):
- Awesome
- Dude!
- Jesus
- Basically any mention of religion, really. Unless you’re applying to work at the Vatican or something.
- “I have a chronic illness”
- Profanity (even if you did go to Asshole State University)
- What year you graduated from college (hello, age discrimination!)
- Kickass
- Degrees/Certificates: BS, Business, University of Florida; Promises Rehab Center, Malibu, CA
- “I left my last job because my boss was a total douche” (even though it’s true)
- DUDE.
- Aliases you’re wanted under in other states
- “I plan to get pregnant immediately after you hire me and I have health insurance” (see also: Hasselbeck Technique)
It usually isn’t up for debate whether abused assistants are bitter – the question is more likely to be about how bitter they are. But last week, at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting, the members discussed a new phenomenon they’ve named Post-Traumatic Bitterness Disorder. Similar to its cousin, PTSD, the newly named ailment is described as “angry plus helpless.” It’s becoming increasingly common as already-beleaguered workers cope with the results of a suffering economy, thus compounding their emotions. In addition to being disgruntled, they’re being laid off, forced into a combo job, or hanging on for dear life. Here’s what German Dr. Michael Linden, who coined the PTBD term, had to say:
Embittered people are typically good people who have worked hard at something important, such as a job, relationship or activity, Linden says. When something unexpectedly awful happens — they don’t get the promotion, their spouse files for divorce or they fail to make the Olympic team — a profound sense of injustice overtakes them. Instead of dealing with the loss with the help of family and friends, they cannot let go of the feeling of being victimized. Almost immediately after the traumatic event, they become angry, pessimistic, aggressive, hopeless haters.
Wow, so did he come and spy on me in order to come up with this diagnosis? And believe me, “failing to make the Olympic team” is something so unlikely to happen to me that I am not worried about how I might react when it happens. Trust.
Remember when the economy first started to tank and all these big companies were getting bailouts? There was a fun buzzword – buyout sex – for employees of companies that were about to go under and figured protocol didn’t matter anymore. Now, there’s the more broad recession sex, which is when people have lost their jobs and are thus poor and have a lot of free time, so they start boning more often.
AdAge, of all places, has an article about this trend. The news hook for them is that sales of personal lubricants and “sexual enhancement devices” are way up.
“When the economy goes down, sex goes up,” said a Johnson & Johnson [who makes K&Y Jelly] spokesman by way of explanation, but he and the brand team declined to elaborate on why their products seem to be booming when the economy isn’t.
“These seem to be products people are actually gravitating toward in a recession,” Mr. Daniels said. “I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know why that is. We are seeing people spending more time at home. We’re seeing people’s relationships being stressed. We’re seeing people looking for means to reconnect with their partner and invest in relationships. In some cases, people may have more time on their hands if they’re not working.”
Isn’t this the same reason why there’s always a mini baby boom nine months after a hurricane or blackout – people are stuck at home with no TV or internet and need something to keep them occupied? Regardless, if you can’t afford to go out and buy things, you might as well stay home and get it on.
This week’s BusinessWeek has a really interesting article about what the current economy means for interns. I know that when I first moved to New York, without any friends or contacts, I considered myself really lucky to snag an internship at a magazine where I could learn about the publishing world and also make contacts and new friends. However, as the economy worsens and companies are laying off lots of employees – including assistants – they are recruiting additional interns in order to force these unpaid employees to do the work that was being done by salaried workers. While it may seem like a great opportunity for an intern, who wants to do something more interesting than make copies all summer, it could inadvertently bite them in the back when they try to get a real job and find out everyone wants them to keep working for free and nobody’s hiring.
No doubt many companies are keeping interns on board for longer stints to cover up for the fact that they’ve had so many layoffs. Says perma intern, Ruben Sanchez: “I believe that I have been taking on projects not normally given to interns. I have handled highly classified information from “secret” clients due to the lack of employees.”
The article quotes Lauren Berger, the excellent resource known as The Intern Queen, about the rise of perma-internships.
Continue reading ‘buzzword: the perma-intern’
