workplace

Getting Out Alive: Escaping Academia

This week, the Inside Higher Education website reported the results of a study showing that, increasingly, university faculty members work long hours struggling to meet intensifying demands on their time. This very insightful blog post is by someone who experienced this first-hand, and decided to leave academic work as a result. It’s a sobering and thought-provoking read.

finiteattention's avatarFinite Attention Span

No escape: decal of a struck-out person fleeing One Friday in May of 2011, I locked up my shared office, went to the pub with some colleagues and students, and said goodbye to my job as a senior lecturer in psychology.

On the following Tuesday (it was a bank holiday weekend) I started a three-month stint as an intern at a then-mid-sized software company. They were pretty clear that there wouldn’t be more work at the end of it; all I had going for me was that they were paying me — a lot less than my academic job paid, but hey, it was money. (Let’s not even start on the ridiculous exploitation of young people by companies looking for free labour, or how unpaid internships exclude those who can’t afford to work for free.)

Anyway, so … lunacy, right?

Maybe. But maybe it saved my life.

I cannot possibly supply a complete list of the things that drove…

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Some Thoughts on Orly Lobel’s “Talent Wants to Be Free”

I had the pleasure of meeting Orly Lobel this past September at the Employment and Labor Law Colloquium at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. As it happened, the colloquium was held just a few days before Orly’s book, Talent Wants to Be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids, and Free Riding, was officially published. At the colloquium, Orly gave a brief talk about the themes of the book , and I was so intrigued by what she discussed that I bought the book as soon as it was available here.

I was hoping to have posted something sooner about Talent Wants to be Free. But the book was so thought-provoking for me that I ended up reading a part of it, putting it aside to think about what I had read, and then reading some more. So it took me a while to get through the entire book – but that’s an indication of how much valuable information there is in it, and how smartly it’s written.

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Anita Hill, Two Decades Later

Last week, Anita Hill appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  She was there to promote a new documentary about her experiences in 1991, when she testified to a US Senate committee that she had been sexually harassed at work by Clarence Thomas, at the time a nominee for the position of US Supreme Court Justice. (Stewart’s interview with Hill is here for American viewers; Canadian viewers can see it here.)

In her interview with Stewart, Hill explained that she got involved in the documentary to help educate younger workers about why sexual harassment is still (more…)

What Skating Judging can Learn from Workplace Performance Evaluation

At every Winter Olympics, it seems, there are complaints about figure skating judging. Occasionally those complaints lead to something more – as in 2002, when a second gold medal was awarded in the pairs event because of alleged bias in the judging. But usually the complaints are along the lines of “The judging was unfair because my favourite skater lost”, or “The judging was unfair because I didn’t understand it” – that second one often coming from sportswriters and commentators who don’t regularly follow figure skating, or who can’t be bothered to learn how the judging system works.

At the 2014 Sochi Olympics, there were complaints about the judging in every one of the figure skating events, including allegations of fixed results in at least two of the events.  The purpose of this post isn’t to argue about those results. Instead, I want to look at the judging system itself, and analyze it using the model of an effective workplace performance evaluation system. I’m using this model for two reasons: (more…)

More on Public Sector Sick Days “Abuse”

A few months ago I wrote about the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s completely unsupported allegations of rampant sick day “abuse” by British Columbia’s public sector workers. Sadly, similar accusations have also been flying around (more…)

Some Thoughts on Sutton and Rao’s “Scaling Up Excellence”

I’ve written before about my general cynicism toward most business books. But one business book that I greatly admire – not only for its eye-catching title, but also for its sensible and forthright attitude – is Bob Sutton’s The No-Asshole Rule, which should be required reading for anyone involved in any aspect of hiring. Recently Bob offered “active influencers” preview copies of Scaling Up Excellence, the new book he has co-authored with his colleague Huggy Rao. When I saw the offer on Twitter, I thought, (more…)

Stephen Colbert on Finding Joy in Your Work

The best five minutes of television in 2013 happened on August 7, when The Colbert Report aired a video of Stephen Colbert and “friends” dancing to Daft Punk’s song Get Lucky. Daft Punk had originally been scheduled to appear on the show in person – but they were also booked for the MTV Video Music Awards a few days later, and because of that MTV insisted that they not appear on Colbert’s show. So when Daft Punk cancelled, the video was quickly created to fill the sudden gap in the show’s schedule.

Because the video clearly involved considerable planning and effort, there was some skepticism after the broadcast about whether Colbert had actually made the video a few days earlier and then made up the cancellation story to get more attention for the video. In this podcast, hosted by comedian Paul Mecurio, Colbert gives a very thorough explanation of how the video came to be – which, as it turns out, is a rather complex story, involving what Daft Punk was and wasn’t willing to do, clashing corporate interests, and a lot of quick changes of strategy.

What struck me most about this interview (more…)

When the Left Isn’t Right

Anyone who’s spent any time studying or participating in progressive organizations knows that, ironically, sometimes these organizations treat their own employees worse than the organizations they campaign against (as so brilliantly pointed out by this cartoon).

I thought about this paradox when I heard about the campaign asking five hosts of MSNBC television shows to (more…)

Tell Someone “No”, Get Called a “Whore” – #StandingwithDNLee #batsignal

DN Lee received a request to write for a blog – for “exposure”, not compensation – and when she refused, the blog contact wrote back calling her an “urban whore”. Her video response is brilliant!! Kudos to her for standing up not only against blogs that expect contributors to work for free, but also against such inexcusably rude treatment.

And check out Isis The Scientist’s following post, in which she discovered that DN Lee’s post about her experience mysteriously disappeared from Scientific American‘s website after DN publicly told her story. Kudos to Isis as well for bringing this ridiculousness to our attention.

Changing the Story: A Visit with the Las Vegas Culinary Workers Union

I recently returned from presenting a paper at the 8th Annual Colloquium of Current Scholarship on Employment and Labor Law, a conference that was started by a group of American law professors, and hosted this year by the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Although I am not a lawyer or a law professor, and although there are some pretty significant differences between American and Canadian labor and employment law, this particular conference is always extremely rewarding. The program is very inclusive – people present research at all stages of development, from potential ideas to already published books and articles – so I always learn a lot and meet really interesting people.

There was some excellent research presented at the conference itself, but what I want to talk about in this post is an event that for me, as a Canadian, was (more…)