Coworkers.com Blog

Should Salaries Be Made Public?

2008-10-09T11:05:00.000-07:00

The radio show Here and Now on NPR station WBUR in Boston had an interesting segment today. It discussed the pros and cons of "salary transparency". Here's a summary of the discussion:

"Some researchers say most of us think we are underpaid and that colleagues are making more money than they actually are. Is salary transparency the solution? We speak to Traci Fenton, founder of WorldBlu, which compiles a list of what it calls the most democratic workplaces..."

The best part comes at the end. The host asks the proponent what her salary is, and she chooses not to share that information. Telling perhaps, but there may be certain work situations where this could help. It will be interesting to see if this becomes more widely adopted.

You can listen to the full audio clip online here.

Photo credit: su.bo

How to Protect Your Job in a Stormy Industry

2008-10-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

The New York Times 'Career Couch' includes some very topical Q&A. While the questions are targeted at the financial services industry, the advice is broadly applicable.

The bottom line? “Just because financial services is down, don’t believe that there are no opportunities and lose hope in the process,” he said. “It only takes one job. Keep your perspective.”

Read the full Q&A here...

10 ways to survive office politics

2008-10-01T11:58:00.000-07:00

TechRepublic author, Calvin Sun, writes: "Office politics will never go away. It’s a fact of company life. However, destructive office politics can demoralize an organization, hamper productivity, and increase turnover. Here are some tips, applicable for both staff and management, on dealing with office politics..."

The article then goes on to list ten suggestions. Here's a summary:

Live at peace with others
Don’t talk out of school
Be helpful
Stay away from gossip
Stay out of those talk-down-the-boss sessions
Be a straight arrow
Address the “politics” issue openly when appropriate
Document things
Set incentives to foster teamwork
Set an example for your staff

Read the list in full detail...

Red Ditto offers "100 Ways How NOT To Run a Business"

2008-09-29T11:49:00.001-07:00

Red Ditto is an interesting blog written by a "previous manager" of startups. Topics are varied, and include workplace gems like:

"Mistake # 41: Is there a reason for your employees to discuss their salaries amongst their coworkers?

Mistake #23: Walk in and tell your boss you are worth it (without proven results)

Mistake #13: Evil bosses!" (13 - can't be a coincidence)

Anyway, check out the blog as they count their way up to 100.

Coworkers.com Facebook App available

2008-09-22T16:36:00.001-07:00

The Coworkers.com Facebook app enables you to easily display a badge with your Coworkers.com rating information. Choose from different styles, some more detailed than others. If you are a Facebook user, add it to your profile!

Best Corporate Practices 2008

2008-09-19T07:46:00.000-07:00

businessweek.com: "Sometimes the difference between the best and worst company policies comes down to one thing: trust. Learn how to use it..."

This is an interesting article. The best stuff is in the 'slideshow' that covers "The 10 Best Corporate Practices, 2008 - A lot of these good ideas have been around for a while. It's time for employers to put them into practice before they lose their best workers..." Here's a summary of the 10 trends:

A Real Vacation Policy
Spot Bonuses
Instant Seniority
Community at Work
Pooled Sick-Time Banks
Customized Benefit Plans
Peer Mentoring
A Room of Her Own
Flex Time and Flex Place
Word of Mouth Recruiting

Read the full article...

Working together: Teambuilding seminars gain popularity

2008-09-15T14:26:00.000-07:00

Birmingham Business Journal: "Unique seminars are popping up around the area to unite employees. Most managers would equate the thought of their staff banging on drums in a circle with other inappropriate office behaviors, such as excessive e-mail usage or gabbing with unproductive co-workers who just won’t leave your desk.

But one local “teambuilder” sees things a little differently. He’s even taking drumming to another level by using its rhythm to bring coworkers together..."

An interesting angle on team building activities. What do you think? Are these promising alternatives, or just 'same seminar, different day'?

Coworker Competitiveness Going Up

2008-09-02T06:34:00.000-07:00

"A new survey by Office Team, finds that 46% of executives interviewed, believe competition among their employees has gone up in the last 10 years...

To accumulate the information, executives were asked, "In your opinion, are employees more or less competitive with their coworkers than they were 10 years ago?" Their responses:

Significantly More Competitive- 12%
Somewhat More Competitive- 34%
No Change- 24%
Somewhat Less Competitive- 23%
Significantly Less Competitive- 3%
Don't Know- 4%"

Read the full article

Trouble at the Office?

2008-08-18T06:40:00.000-07:00

Business Week launches special "Business @ Work" report. This is a insightful collection of articles covering topics such as:

Network Your Way to Job Security

2008-07-18T06:55:00.000-07:00

getrichslowly.org guest author Brandt Smith shares his perspective on the importance of cultivating your work connections so that you can respond to unexpected changes in your career. His "Seven keys to a strong network" include:

Build it before you need it
You must make a deposit before you have the right to withdraw
Give more than you receive
Be open and genuine
Follow up and stay in touch
The devil is in the details
Your network doesn't end with your contact

Read the full article...

(thanks to The Consumerist for this link)

Best Way to Annoy Your Co-Workers? E-mail

2008-07-15T06:32:00.000-07:00

"ALL CAPS, Passive-Aggressive Copying Top Etiquette Experts' Electronic Don'ts List:

Netiquette No-No #1: The Passive-Aggressive Copy
Netiquette No-No #2: Reply All
Netiquette No-No #3: SHOUTING AT YOUR COWORKERS"

Read the full article...

Coworker Word-of-Mouth Strongly Influences Purchases

2008-07-14T05:26:00.000-07:00

WorkPlace Media & BIGResearch: "Americans in the workforce have a significant impact on their coworkers’ consumer shopping behaviors - 96% say they regularly or occasionally give shopping advice to their peers, according to a recent WorkPlace Media survey conducted by BIGResearch.

Moreover, nearly 93% indicate that they seek similar advice from their coworkers before making purchases.

Rising food and gas prices and busy schedules - in combination with a higher-than-ever-before percentage of time spent at work (60% of waking hours) - are driving consumers to consolidate shopping trips and make purchases on their drives to and from work, or during their lunch breaks, the study found."

Read the full article (plus charts) and download the PDF study here.

One in three IT staff snoops on colleagues: survey

2008-06-19T05:05:00.000-07:00

Reuters: "One in three information technology professionals abuses administrative passwords to access confidential data such as colleagues' salary details, personal emails or board-meeting minutes, according to a survey.

U.S. information security company Cyber-Ark surveyed 300 senior IT professionals, and found that one-third admitted to secretly snooping, while 47 percent said they had accessed information that was not relevant to their role...

(the report) added that seven out of 10 companies rely on outdated and insecure methods to exchange sensitive data, with 35 percent choosing email and 35 percent using couriers, while 4 percent still relied on the postal system."

Read the article
or
Try a legitimate search instead ;-)

Background Checks: What You Need to Know

2008-05-30T10:23:00.000-07:00

businessweek.com: "With background screening now the norm, employers and employees should be aware of how checks are done and how to protect themselves..."

This article offers practical advice on some things applicants AND employers need to know:

JOB APPLICANTS

Check prior background reports
Know who's checking your past
Act fast if something is wrong

EMPLOYERS

Know what you're getting from a background check
There's no national database of all criminal records
Know how reference checks are done

Read the full article...

Tech's top 10 workspaces

2008-05-07T10:39:00.000-07:00

"What makes for an appealing workspace? The envelopes they leave in your mailbox every two weeks. But after that, it comes down to design and amenities..."

Valleywag presents the ten best-looking offices

I got an email that said 'You've been reviewed', but...

2008-04-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

We recently sent out a batch of emails to people notifying them that they had been reviewed on Coworkers.com. However, in some cases, after registering, people did not see any reviews. This is due to a bug that did not properly account for reviews that were only partially submitted, or were deleted after submission.

If this happened to you, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. We are working on a fix for this.

UPDATE:

If you would like to know whether you have any active reviews, without registering, click here do a search by your email address. If no reviews have been posted, or if they have been deleted, it will say 'No reviews have yet been entered for [email]'.
For information about opting out, please see this forum entry.
For other questions, please see our FAQ.
Thank you for your understanding.

Online networks may help job-hunting: surveys

2008-04-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

"Job seekers should tap into online networking sites to help hunt down potential employers, new surveys suggest.

The polls, conducted in Canada and the United States on behalf of California-based recruitment firm Robert Half International (RHI.N), showed that most executives believe that professional networking sites will prove useful over the next three years for job seekers...

RHI provided five suggestions for benefiting from online networking:

Craft your profile carefully
Ask for recommendations
Build your list of contacts
Don't post anything you wouldn't want an employer to see
Don't stop networking once you have a job"

Don't Forget Your 4/1 Zinger!

2008-04-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

A Zinger private message is useful on any day. The question is, who are you going to send one to on April Fools' Day?

How to Deal With Bully Bosses

2008-03-28T09:24:00.000-07:00

"Do you have a bad manager? Someone who makes your life miserable all week by criticizing your every move? Experts offer their tips on handling bully and toxic bosses...

According to a study by the Employment Law Alliance, almost half of all employees have been targeted by a bully boss.

The study also revealed the following:

81 percent of bullies are managers.
50 percent of bullies are women and 50 percent are men.
84 percent of targets are women.
82 percent of targets ultimately lost their job.
95 percent of bullying is witnessed."

Ten Tactics That Could Save Your Online Reputation

2008-03-11T10:35:00.000-07:00

via mashable.com: "Andy Beal, co-author of Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online and CEO of online reputation monitoring tool Trackur...outlines ten tactics that could prevent your company suffering its own online reputation meltdown..."

Summary:

Know your achilles heel
Assume everything will make it’s way to the web
Create a great online impression; dress to impress!
Choose your blog voice carefully
Hangout at the right social network
Send blogger’s love letters, not PR pitches
Build your Google reputation now, not later
Monitor your online reputation as often as your email
Ostriches are not great role-models
Three words to remember

While definitely a promo for his book, this is an insightful article nonetheless.

How to Wake Up with Energy Each Morning

2008-03-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

We dedicate this post to Daylight Saving Time. On to the article...

Apply the 80/20 Principle with The FreelanceSwitch Client Analyser

2008-03-05T10:35:00.000-08:00

Freelance switch has just added a cool new online tool called the "Client Analyser". It is based on the 80/20 or Pareto Principle:

"The way it works is that you put in your clients, answer some questions about them and then it lines up the data into tables, showing you where the results are coming from so you can compare and contrast them. The more clients you add, the better it works.

You should note, it’s not meant to be a very serious tool, more just a lightweight look at some of your client list. If you put in the minimum 8 clients and just guess values you can go through in about 10 minutes or so, and longer for more clients and more precision..."

Freelancers can also use Coworkers.com Reviews to rate and compare their various client contacts. The more data that can be gathered about a client portfolio, the more meaningful the insight.

Coworkers.com Announces Improved Review Management Features

2008-03-05T07:04:00.000-08:00

Coworkers.com has improved its review management capabilities by allowing users to more easily dispute and exclude unwanted reviews.

“One of the strengths of our review platform is that it allows for the creation of detailed, and optionally anonymous, reviews. While this offers our users the ability to give and receive unbiased feedback, it is also open to occasional misuse. Seeking to better address this, and in listening to feedback from our users, we have simplified the process for excluding such unwanted reviews from a users profile.” explains CEO Jonathan Clay. “Should a user receive a review that does not seem legitimate – for example an anonymous review that seems like ‘spam’, they can simply login and “dispute” the review with a single click. After the user enters a reason (for example, ‘erroneous’ or ‘excessive’), the review will be excluded from their profile, and its rating will no longer count toward their aggregate score. In addition, a user can report a disputed review to Coworkers.com if it appears to violate our TOS.”

Clay goes on to say “since our ‘soft launch’ (beta release) last year, we have been listening closely to our early adopters, as well as knowledgeable business advisors, trying to find the right balance between information freedom and protection against derogatory information in the delicate area of work reputation management. We believe that we now have a solution that is fair and effective for all parties concerned. By restricting disputed reviews to premium (paying) members, we are acknowledging the fact that abuse can occur and minimizing its impact, without sacrificing the principle that honest information about people’s work histories should be accessible.” Professional reviews are just one of the many workplace performance tools offered at Coworkers.com. Review a colleague, or request feedback today.

Projection: it ain't just for the movies!

2008-03-04T08:47:00.000-08:00

Christine Hassler dispenses some excellent advice in this answer to "how do I deal with an irritating coworker?" As she points out, our temptation to lash out at a coworker often has as much to do with ourselves as with the other. Before giving them a piece of our mind, it's a good idea to look inside ourselves and think about what part psychological projection may be playing. And when we decide it is necessary to communicate our frustrations (i.e. with a Coworkers.com Review) we should keep in mind that it's in both persons' interest to keep it professional and constructive.

Take Those Numeric Ratings and - Make Them Motivational

2008-02-15T08:20:00.000-08:00

about.com: "Do numeric ratings make a contribution in the workplace? Done well, I believe numeric ratings can motivate excellent work performance; done poorly, numeric ratings undermine your positive work environment... these six recommendations set the stage for what makes an appraisal rating system, for employees or non-employees, sound, and potentially - motivational...

should be objective rather than subjective;
should be job-related or based on job analysis;
should be based on behaviors rather than traits;
should be within the control of the ratee;
should relate to specific functions, not global assessments,
should be communicated to the employee."

As the article states "Numeric ratings can have a positive impact on your company". Read the entire article to see other guidelines, as well as common things to avoid.

Already hip to this? Create a Coworkers.com review now