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News Roundup: The Sad Office; Teaching disobedience; Disengagement; 9-11 & more news of note

by Julie Ferguson
September 13, 2015 in News & Views

The Powerful Effect of Noticing Good Things at Work
Joyce E. Bono and Theresa M. Glomb, Harvard Business Review:

“This simple practice — writing about three good things that happened — creates a real shift in what people think about, and can change how they perceive their work lives. It can also create a feedback loop that enhances its impact: we believe that people who reflect on good things that happened during the day are more likely to share those things with family and friends. Sharing positive events with others creates connections between people and bonds them with one another, further reducing evening stress. Ultimately, this also improves sleep, which our ongoing research suggests leads to greater alertness and better mood — which in turn leads to more positive things happening the next day.”

The Work-Life Equation: Solving the Sad Office
Bill Maw says that “A sad office often resembles some degree of your worst childhood nightmare: a playground full of people behaving badly to one another—bullying, lying, backstabbing, blaming, and demonstrating all types of rudeness and unkindness.” In his post at AMA Playbook, he offers tips that will contribute to solving the sad office dilemma.

Just Say No: Teaching employees to disobey orders is an essential management safeguard
At strategy+business, Theodore Kinni discusses Ira Chaleff’s new book, Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You’re Told to Do Is Wrong:

“If you are familiar with the experiments of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, who wrote the foreword to Intelligent Disobedience, you already know that most people have been conditioned to obey orders given by authority figures, including orders that violate moral, ethical, and legal norms. “It is part of the socialization process in any human culture to teach our young to obey,” writes Chaleff. But he goes on to argue that teaching employees to disobey orders is an essential organizational safeguard — that nurses are protecting patients and their employers by questioning doctors’ orders that fly in the face of their training, and that accountants can prevent massive frauds by refusing to execute orders that violate their professional standards.”

5 tips for managing the impact of employee absences
Gerry Leonard, SmartBlog on Leadership:

The impact of employee absences can be astonishing. According to a recent Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index the total annual costs related to lost productivity due to absenteeism in the U.S. totaled $84 billion. Although the annual costs associated with absenteeism vary by industry, the greatest loss occurred in professional occupations at $24.2 billion.

There are direct and indirect costs of absence that can cascade through payroll, benefits, and operations — in addition to productivity loss. And the reasons for an employee taking leave are many and varied, ranging from employee’s injury and illness, pregnancy-related issues, newborn care, adoption, foster care, or elder care, to name a few.

Understanding Why Your Employees Are Saturated and Disengaged
Prithvi Shergill, Training:

“Intrinsically, individuals exhibit different levels of passion. The anchors and drivers that account for their passion are deeply ingrained in their unique individual personalities. For example, a person who is self-driven is motivated by autonomy, creativity, and clarity on sense of purpose. A person who is secular in his or her passion orientation—i.e., someone who is motivated when they receive the required support from their organization—is motivated by recognition, meaningful work, and mastery. And a person who is socially driven—i.e., someone who looks at his friends, colleagues, or superiors for encouragement—may have collaboration, connectedness to colleagues, and diversity as his or her key passion drivers.”

9-11 retrospective

 

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