On-site part-time and flextime employees will incorporate similar strategies around their schedules, particularly if they do not overlap with their bosses’ and colleagues’ schedules. Punctuality and reliability are key for part-time and flextime workers.
Sharing an Office
When telecommuters eventually come to the office, they need somewhere to sit! Enter “hoteling” and “hot-desking.” The terms are often used interchangeably, but there is a distinction between the two. Hoteling is reservation-based unassigned office seating, while hot-desking is reservationless unassigned seating. Both are designed to provide dedicated, supported office space for those who only need it occasionally. In addition to adhering to the guidelines for open-plan spaces, a considerate hoteler or hot-desker observes these rules.
GUIDELINES
Reserve only needed time and space. Cancel reservations you no longer need or can’t use. Tying up space unnecessarily may impact your ability to secure future reservations.
Introduce yourself. Smile and offer a friendly greeting to those sitting nearby, but take care not to interrupt them if they are obviously busy or concentrating on work.
Keep the space clean. Sanitize all surfaces and equipment with disinfectant wipes upon arriving and departing. Take trash with you when you vacate.
Leave the space as you found it. Store personal items in desk drawers while using the space, and make sure to take them with you when you leave. Do not rearrange or remove furnishings.
Sharing a Job
The concept of job-sharing is increasingly the answer for parents wanting more time with their children, millennials interested in volunteering, older workers looking to design their “portfolio lives,” and employees seeking less stress and more work-life integration. Employers benefit, too, from improved employee engagement and retention, increased accountability and productivity, and the combined intelligence, experience, and perspective of two employees.
Employers can help ensure the success of job-sharing by pairing employees with complementary skills and temperaments, setting clear expectations, and supporting efforts through ongoing feedback and coaching. Job-sharing partners will explicitly define their roles, agree upon reporting methods and frequency, communicate consistently, hold themselves and one another accountable, learn to respectfully disagree and reach consensus, present a unified front, and share both the responsibility for, and success of, their efforts.
The Benefits Buffet
Forty-one year-old Lori was a billing department representative at a large hospital. For 12 years, she had juggled the responsibilities of two children and a Monday through Friday 9 to 5 job, an hour away from home. After work, she’d go grocery shopping and hurry home to make dinner, hoping to spend at least a little time with her young daughters before it was time for bed.
It bothered Lori tremendously that her job made it impossible for her to attend any of her girls’ school plays or soccer games, even though they never complained. (Well, maybe they complained a little.) But the billing department needed staffing during normal work hours, and Lori needed her job. And so when it was announced that the billing office hours were being expanded to 7:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. and that employees could now self-schedule their hours, Lori was elated. Lori did not know who was more excited—her nine-year-old daughter or herself! Today, for the first time that did not involve her taking personal or vacation time, Lori was going to see her little girl play soccer. The cookies made, Lori would be there on the sidelines, cheering away and smiling from ear to ear.
Are you a parent concerned about new baby expenses? Facebook has you covered with $4,000 in “Baby Cash.” Worried about how to feed that new baby while traveling for work? Zillow will pay for moms to ship their breastmilk home. Travel bug biting? Airbnb will give you a $2,000 travel stipend to any of its lodgings worldwide. Eager to finally finish (or start) your novel? Deloitte will pay you for four weeks off, for any reason at all, and another three to six months at partial pay for volunteer work or a career-enhancing opportunity.
Employers know perks matter. According to a Glassdoor survey, “nearly three in five (57 percent) people report benefits and perks being among their top considerations before accepting a job, while four in five people say they would prefer new perks over a pay raise.”8 The same report indicates that while perks may get key talent in the door, they will not necessarily keep them there. Once on board, a company’s culture, values, senior leadership, and career opportunities are the things that get the best to stay.
Subsidized transportation, company paid meals, dry cleaning services, and closing early on Fridays in the summer are now almost ubiquitous. Depending on the industry and company, today’s work-life smorgasbord might include concierge services, web-monitored day care, adoption subsidies, family leave, prayer rooms, tax preparation assistance, paid volunteer time, free subscriptions, pet sitting, massages, on-site doctor’s visits, nap pods, organic food, wine bars, home cleaning services, marital counseling, vacation money, help for aging parents and grandparents, in-home dinner delivery, international assignments, and paid sabbaticals.
Perks are defining the workplace. In the New York Times article “Housecleaning, Then Dinner? Silicon Perks Come Home,” Matt Ritchel says, “That shifting mind-set—the idea that life and work must be blended rather than separated—is increasingly common.” The article quotes Google spokesman Jordan Newman saying, “What you’ve seen is benefits moving away from free food into thinking more holistically about individuals and their health.”9
Amenities cannot make up for bad corporate cultures and, if they are seen as ways to buy employees off, can even backfire. But if the culture is healthy, and everyone is happy, perks can provide a win-win situation.
The New Realities
The 21st century workplace can be disconcerting, even as employers try to make the lives of their employees ever more comfortable. Recognition of new workplace realities is everyone’s responsibility. This starts with accepting the fact that we are under digital and visual surveillance many of our waking moments and virtually all of our working moments. Our commutes are chronicled by tollbooths, stoplights, and highway cameras that take our pictures while recording tolls paid, lights run, and speeds travelled. Mobile phones track our movements. Office parking lots, garages, entrances, and elevators are watched. Walks through security and to desks are logged. And once at our desks, Internet use, email communication, and telephone calls are monitored.
In the Financial Times, Adam Jones writes, “The Spies in the cellar are now sidling up to your desk.” He says, “Offices, in particular, are becoming havens for monitoring equipment with varying levels of intrusiveness.”10 Among them, he writes, are sensors in name badges that monitor how people move around the office, who they talk to, and even their tone of voice. Workplace occupancy sensors indicate how often desks and meeting places are used.
Organizations defend these and other measures as ways to identify problem workers, maximize resources, and save costs. While few would object to the green benefits of smart rooms turning off lights when unoccupied, we find it disconcerting to realize that these rooms also know exactly when and for how long we are in them. Those seemingly unnoticed late arrivals, long lunches, and early weekend departures are perhaps not so unnoticed after all.
Perhaps this is not a problem in laid-back cultures, but it could be in more formal ones. Debating whether such monitoring is legal (it is), whether the information it provides to employers is useful (it is), whether the atmosphere it promotes feels like “Big Brother is watching you” (it does), and whether employees like it (they do not) are all nonstarters. As with all elements of corporate culture, our options are these: Accept them, reject them and join new ones, or start our own. The surveilled workplace will become more and more the norm.
Success in today’s professional arena requires more than a job well done. Surviving and thriving requires that you accept the realities of the new workplace and manage them as well as possible.
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sp; REMEMBER
Everything is different on the other side of “the glass door.” Your agility in adjusting to a new corporate culture will determine your chances for success and happiness within it.
Know that everyday manners matter more than anything else. Good manners define your character and brand. Pay careful attention to the little things. They are huge.
Evolve with and embrace new workspaces. Or start your own.
Respect your colleagues’ work arrangements, hours, and time zones. Consider these before scheduling meetings or otherwise attempting to engage with them.
Know that workplace realities mean that our brands are always on display. Always!
chapter 5
business communication
Making the Connection
“Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.”
—OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.
Today is the day. After a long process of winnowing candidates for an associate’s position at a leading real estate law firm, Rebecca has narrowed it down to two: Paul and Frederick. On paper, there is no comparison. Frederick was on the law review at one of the country’s top-tier law schools, graduating at the head of his class. The latest in a long line of very successful lawyers in his family, his social connections and avid interest in golf and sailing make him a natural to rub elbows with just the kind of clients the firm is looking to attract. Frederick dresses impeccably from head to toe. And he is confident—maybe too confident—Rebecca thinks, as she remembered how he jumped in to finish her sentences and dropped names with abandon.
Paul had also graduated first in his class, but from a second-tier school. His LSATs would have gotten him into a top school, but he needed to attend part-time so he could work to support himself and his young family. This let the elite schools out. Paul did not have Frederick’s social connections, expensive hobbies, or bespoke wardrobe. What he did have, Rebecca thought, was a respectful nature, a quiet self-assuredness, and a genuine warmth. When Rebecca spoke, Paul listened intently. He asked excellent questions, deftly responded to her comments, added relevant information, and smiled and laughed when appropriate. He made Rebecca feel like his primary interest was how he could help the firm, not how lucky the firm would be to hire him. Considering the many obstacles Paul had overcome to get to the finalist stage and the kind, respectful way in which he communicated with her, Rebecca was sure his intelligence, tenacity, and authenticity would serve the firm and its clients very well. Her decision was made.
Well-honed communication skills are necessary at every stage of one’s career, but are even more critical as one ascends—or tries to ascend—the corporate ladder. One need look no further than to Doug McMillan to support this point. At 49 years old, he is the youngest Walmart CEO since Sam Walton and is by all accounts a brilliant communicator. Named to Decker Communications’ “The Top Ten Best (and Worst) Communicators of 2015,”1 he is described as a warm, humble, approachable man who communicates care for his employees. Walmart board member Kevin Systrom, cofounder and CEO of Instagram, agrees. In Fortune’s 2015 article entitled “The Man Who’s Reinventing Walmart,”2 Brian O’Keefe describes Mr. McMillan as the most intensely friendly person he has ever met. He says that “his focus is on you, like there is no other thing going on in his mind when he talks to you. He’s not distracted, he’s 100 percent focused on you.”
Walmart’s CEO seems to have taken the advice of its founder to heart. So important was good communication to Sam Walton that he devoted 2 of his “10 Rules for Building a Business”3 to it. Mr. Walton advised:
Rule 4. Communicate everything you can to your partners. The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care. Once they care, there is no stopping them.
Rule 7. Listen to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking. To push responsibility down within your organization, and to force good ideas to bubble up within it, you must listen to what your associates are trying to tell you.
Communication can make or break business relationships, careers, and even companies. Effective communication provides you with opportunities to expand networks, raise profiles, showcase skills, and engender confidence. Despite all these benefits, developing good communication skills is still an intimidating prospect for many.
Conversation, especially spontaneous, unscripted small talk, is particularly problematic. Millennials would rather do anything than engage in simple conversation, finding it superficial, boring, pointless, and altogether too much work. Chatting, unless it’s via electronic devices, is just not their thing. Truth be told, older generations are not too crazy about small talk either. But it’s very important, because substantive conversations, crucial to professional success, emerge from small talk.
Opportunities for conversation are everywhere, and the professionally savvy take advantage of as many as possible as often as possible. The chances to promote one’s personal brand through conversation are endless: on public transportation, while waiting in line for coffee, walking down a hallway, or riding an elevator, and at business meetings, lunches, dinners, events, parties, or conferences.
Nonverbal Cues
Liam needs advice from his boss. The 33-year-old biotech engineer is not sure how to proceed with the new project he’s been assigned. He approaches his boss’s office and peering through the window, sees him hunched over his computer screen in deep concentration, frowning intently. The thought quickly flits through Liam’s mind that his boss is probably working on the quarterly reports due later today. He quickly brushes that thought aside and says to himself, “This will just take a second.”
When Liam tentatively knocks, his boss looks up with an impatient “this had better be important” expression on his face—an expression lost on Liam. He clears his throat and asks his question. His boss, incredulous as well as annoyed, shakes his head and says, “You interrupted me for that?”
The ability to read and send nonverbal cues is critical in the professional arena. In face-to-face interactions, studies tell us that approximately 60 percent of communication is nonverbal, 30 percent is tone of voice, and only 10 percent is the words we say. Nonverbal communication governs how we think about ourselves, according to Amy Cuddy, social psychologist and associate professor at Harvard Business School. In her TED talk, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are,” she says, “Our bodies change our minds, our minds change our behaviors, our behaviors change our outcomes.”4
Ms. Cuddy says to convey high power—and conceivably change our minds in the process—we should lean in, stand with our heads high, our arms open, our legs uncrossed, and our hands on our hips or clasped behind our necks. Conversely, we would avoid the appearance of low power by refraining from looking down, having our hands in our pockets, crossing our arms and legs, or slouching. Ms. Cuddy recommends that we not only “fake it ’til we make it” with our nonverbal communication, but fake it until we actually become as strong and confident as our body language conveys. There is not complete agreement that nonverbal communication changes minds, but there is virtually universal agreement that nonverbal communication affects the perceptions others have of us.
Nonverbal communication can be obvious or subtle. Body language experts Patryk and Kasia Welowski say people convey unconscious emotions through “micro expressions” and that true feelings can be transmitted in as little as half a second.5 Through nonverbal cues, we express feelings, disseminate information, reinforce messages, provide feedback, and exert control. We encode the information we send and decode the information sent back to us through body language.
In the U.S., it is generally agreed that hands clasped behind the back show confidence, clenched fists show firmness of resolve, a hand on the heart indicates a desire to be believed, and finger-pointing conveys aggressiveness or arrogance. Rubbing ones hands together equals anticipation, steepling fingers shows confidence, and hands in pockets indicates mistrust or reluctance.
Hands folded in front indicate vulnerability, arms across the chest shows the person feels threatened, and talking with palms open suggests honesty. Smiles, laughter, and frequent eye contact signal friendliness and courteousness, head nodding shows empathy, and eye contact transmits credibility.
Note that nonverbal communication has different meanings around the world. Among the Japanese, smiles may indicate embarrassment, confusion, or discomfort. The A-okay sign means a variety of things in different countries—virtually none of them good. Unless we make a point to understand the meanings of nonverbal communication in other cultures, it is better to refrain from gesturing among international colleagues and clients.
Striking up a pleasant conversation is easier and less threatening if we first learn how to read others’ nonverbal cues. It enables us to know when to approach others, when to keep talking and when to let others talk, how others are responding emotionally to what we’re saying, and when to end conversations. If we see that someone is otherwise engaged in conversation, concentrating on a task, reading, eating, or praying, it’s clearly not a good time to begin a conversation. However, if they smile, make eye contact, stand, nod their heads, look interested, or speak, they are conveying that they are open to an exchange.
READ THE CUES
If someone doesn’t want to talk, she will look away, frown, sigh, cross her arms, offer a quick furtive smile, keep her eyes on her device, or put up a physical barrier.
If someone is bored, he will look around the room, check his phone, fidget, slouch, stand at an angle, avoid eye contact, sigh, roll his eyes, or have a vacant look.
Excuse Me Page 9
