Job review sites, useful or useless

The eggs are no longer just in the employers basket

Despite the recession of 2008 and a very high ratio of applicants to job roles,  employees still have a lot of power. Employer review sites such as glassdoor.com and jobcrowd.co.uk have become extremely popular among savvy graduates and curious job searchers who need advice in choosing an organisation to work for.

Employer review sites give people the ability to look at employee reviews of popular organisations,  giving them the ability to gain a unique insight into the organisation they may be working for. The ability to check this in the past was extremely limited. Often the only chance someone had to check the credibility of a potential employer was by finding a friend or a friend of a friend who had worked at said organisation before. Assuming that that person hasn't scared you half to death with tales of axe wielding line managers individuals were given a very limited view of the organisations'. Employer review sites give information on salaries, benefits, interviews and company backgrounds.

Individuals can vote with their feet and view a summary of company reviews. These sites give people  the chance to have more of an objective view companies. It gives people the opportunity to go into organisations a with their eyes a little more open.

Companies need to be aware of the importance of the candidate experience in attraction, selection, assessment and development of staff. These opinions and experiences with the advent of employee review sites can travel very far and have the potential to be damaging for organisations.

Emailphobia

I'm going to confess something to you, something strange and something I thought was unusual. I have major work related EMAIL ANXIETY, yes e-mail anxiety. It starts before I get to work, where I envisage the number and type of emails I may have waiting for me in my inbox. The questions, requests and advice, the reports, unfinished work and other things, sometimes haunt me hours before I even get there. The fear or attaching the wrong document, or forgetting to attach the correct document to the e-mail, the repercussions can be utterly devastating.   The worst email anxiety episode may occur when returning from a few days off or holiday, there can be hundreds, even thousands of them lurking in your inbox.

I think that this form of communication in work places although convenient, quick and easy but I am sure too much of it is unhealthy. Hiding behind emails instead of picking up the phone or actually talking to the person next to you is sometimes a systematic trend of modern work environments.I encourage work places to rely less on the dreaded email, talk to colleagues face to face, pick up the telephone. Of course it is necessary to have a paper trail some times to save your bacon for proof if something dodgy does occur, but it shouldn't be relied upon.

So those of you that think that I am exaggerating, e-mail anxiety  is a REAL thing and work places should do every thing they can to minimise this.These things can be:

• Talking face to face?
• In meetings discussing as much as can be verbally and using emails to confirm and support prior information. 
• Picking up the phone for a short conversation

Following these tips may minimise the hundreds of emails that you may get. 

Do workplaces focus too much on perfection?

During an episode of Celebrity Masterchef earlier on this year, I came across a curious phenomenon. The head chef said to the celebrity that each plate that he/she produce should be perfect, flawless and consistently the same. It then dawned on me, is this even possible in an environment that is hot, highly pressured and loud?   Having worked in probably too many organisations (I blame the recession), public, private and charities I have observed a trend, a trend that has really started to disturb me; this trend is the obsession of managers to expect their employees to be "perfect". To eliminate mistakes, to consistently produce the same winning formula, but to improve and to strive for better all of the time, but is this too much to ask? As unpredictable as humans are and a constantly changing working environment with goal posts moving, is it realistic to expect perfection everyday? Or is it more realistic to allow employees to make and learn from their mistakes so as to work in a comfortable environment?

I am no philosopher, but I don't think we can be perfect consistently and especially not in the work place. Insisting on this is unrealistic in often confined, restricted employment environments with rigid job descriptions and archaic management structures is probably not a good idea. Focusing on perfect work I believe is not only destructive, can be short sighted and highly counter productive. Insistence on perfection can increase mistakes, increase anxiety, reduce productivity, decrease motivation and overall job satisfaction.

Instead I feel that work places should endeavour to minimise and  embrace mistakes. Allow employees to  learn from and develop strategies to prevent mistakes harming the productivity of the organisation.  A theory of organisational learning by a couple of researchers Argyris and Schon (1978), double and single loop learning suggests that organisations should try and eliminate mistakes before they happen in order for them to grow and develop effectively. In eliminating mistakes before they happen, an organisation has to learn from previous mistakes that have been made, perhaps from individuals, groups and the organisation as a whole.

So I think organisations should:

• Create an environment that is open and allows employees to make mistakes but have a forum to learn from them 
• Empower staff and allow them to create new ideas and allow them to implement them
• Open communication channels to make it easier for employees to share concerns
• Make work environments less formal in order to make work less stressful
• Praise staff when needed and  have development points for staff in 1-1s and appraisals
• Give employees time to absorb tasks, new environments and new ways of doing things 

I think if these things are done I believe staff will naturally begin to reduce mistakes and become more productive and happy. 

So what if i think that fat people are lazy?...

Everything we do, and how we behave is governed by our experiences, stereotypes and biases. Its a fact of life. In the workplace this is also the case, thoughts we have about blondes, or tall people are people with red hair, are all governed by our preconceptions.

Perception is a way that humans can make mental short cuts and put people into boxes. However, percpetions, stereotypes and biases affect a lot, especially the way we behave and react to people in the workplace. So if we have a preconception that all fat people are lazy, or all blonde people are students, we would have to adapt these feelings to ensuure that we don't wrongly judge people or behave badly to them in the workplace. An article in The Voice Newspaper looks at the prejuidice faced by people with dread locks conjures up images of drug use. This obviously is not the reality, not every person with dreadlocks is like this, however some times dreadlocked people are treated with more suspision.



Famous psychological experiements have looked at how perception affects group behaviour and decision making accuracy. Solomon Asch in 1958 designed a condition where a group of people had to solve a simple task of deciding which line was the same length as a sample line.

The groups of 8-10 people had to individually say the correct answer, that exhibit 1 is the same length as line A. Out of the 8-10 people, only one was being tested, everyone else in the team were actors. Asch wanted to test the power of group conformity, so all the people but the person being tested said the wrong answer, and the person being tested was monitered to observe how many times that person said the wrong answer (conformed) or said the correct answer.

Asch repeated the procedure with 18 sets of bars and the actors were instructed to offer wrong answers 12 out of 18 times. The findings were surprising to the experiementer, 74% of people conformed to the majority at least once.

Asch commented on this and stated that "The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct."


The implications of this in the work place and society are great. Human beings are extremely sociable and essentially want to be liked. This explains how some bad policies can be made by policical parties, organisations or social groups. It shows the extent of how we may not always follow our thoughts and feelings about particular things, just to keep the peace.

The curse of the temp...

Some people really like temping, not really worrying too much about finding the career, good way for students to earn money or to try out different parts of a profession and getting your foot in the door. I have personally temped so much and at times it has made me feel dirty, sad and used (in a non hooker way.../ simple clean admin work).  A lot of  people's experiences of temporary work are unhappy, brain numbingly boring prison sentences. Here are some tips for employers of how to get
the most out of your temporary workers.

• Never refer to them as the "temp", they have names, it's rude.
• Try not to humiliate them with work that simpletons can do, especially if they have a degree, like from personal experience " can you turn my computer on?" response in brain- I AM NOT YOUR PA and even if I was, not on your nelly.
•  Give them fun stuff to do- to stimulate innovation and increase well being this will increase output
• Integrate them into the team as much as possible
• Give them time - they aren't going to learn over night, give them space and time

For temporary workers:

• Always look bothered to be there, even if you aren't.
• get involved, if you have run out of work, find some thing else to do
• Be polite, it always leaves a lasting impression
• Be on time!!

You never know where these tips will get you...

B:Has any one seen Dave? G: Yeah he's sick, bedbound even. B: thats funny, ive just seen him at the post office

Have you ever taken an extra sneaky half an hour at lunch, pulled a few sickies to have a slob day, accidentally borrowed a pen and forgot to give it back or written down your hours wrong on a time sheet? Do you think ah,  everyone does it, Jane was late all last week and no one said any thing, or the boss has been getting on my nerves all week, so i'm going to pull a sickie even though he's short staffed.

The "scientific" term for this is counter productive workplace behaviour, in other words doing bad stuff which doesn't help the organisation. This includes: thieving, taking unauthorised absences; extending you half an hour lunch to 2 hours for a shopping spree; and being just a meany that doesn't contribute to any thing. Figures from  1985 show that apparently 50 hours per employee per year are lost to unauthorised extensions of break, 50 hours! Apparently also $50 million is lost to businesses who thieve, so next time you steal that pen or take a sneaky extra 20 minutes at lunch, think twice about it, the next thing you know you could be out of a job.