(From the New York Times) "I care about my colleagues, but there are things I don’t need to know. I’ve also found that if people know that you don’t gossip and that you don’t tolerate it, they won’t gossip around you. It might be human nature to think an unkind thought about a co-worker, but it’s a choice whether or not to actually say it.

"There’s a mix of personalities in any company, and rarely does everyone in a workplace like one another. But I believe that half the battle is in how people communicate.

"When employees are hired here, they’re given a communications assessment, a commercial program that the company uses to pinpoint a person’s dominant communications style. The styles are linked to colors that identify how each employee likes to communicate."

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Tags: workplace, behavior, teams

Categories: News

If an employee tweets on Twitter or updates his or her Facebook status at work, should an employer cringe and put up a firewall — or congratulate the person for engaging in acts of social media?

Surprisingly, in Silicon Valley it’s increasingly the latter. But for many organizations the pathway is still unclear, as businesses navigate through the emerging world of going social.

Some companies, such as Safeway Corp., allow only a small number of employees to access social media tools at work. The company has run a successful Facebook site where it offers immediate coupons and discounts for fans.

Read more.

Tags: workplace, behavior, productivity, web 2.0, social media

Categories: News

Melbourne, FL (PRWEB) November 10, 2009 -- Social networking in the workplace is a major dilemma for today's businesses. The question is: "Does it help or hurt the organization?"

Although the general issue is always the same, the specific challenges vary. They range from productivity losses, to legal risks, to bandwidth drains and security problems. And even more specifically, these challenges are associated with various types of sites that employees often visit for personal reasons. A few years ago, pornography sites presented the greatest challenge, while today social networking sites seem to be 'number one' with Facebook being the most popular.

A survey conducted by Nucleus Research showed that 77 percent of workers who have a Facebook account use it during work hours. Of those who use Facebook at work, 87% said they could not define a clear business reason for accessing the site, and some reported using it as much as two hours per day.

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Tags: workplace, behavior, productivity, web 2.0, social media

Categories: News

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) - Indiana University researchers are shedding light on the dynamics of workplace gossip with a new study that captured gossipers in the act on video.

The IU team studied the workplace politics at an elementary school in the midst of an uncomfortable transition after a new principal took over.

As part of their research, they videotaped school staff meetings and captured 25 episodes of gossip. The researchers say the footage shows the subtle ways that people who are targets of gossip are negatively evaluated during formal work meetings.

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Tags: workplace, behavior, productivity, research

Categories:

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) - Indiana University researchers are shedding light on the dynamics of workplace gossip with a new study that captured gossipers in the act on video.

The IU team studied the workplace politics at an elementary school in the midst of an uncomfortable transition after a new principal took over.

As part of their research, they videotaped school staff meetings and captured 25 episodes of gossip. The researchers say the footage shows the subtle ways that people who are targets of gossip are negatively evaluated during formal work meetings.

Read the entire story.

Tags: workplace, behavior, productivity, research

Categories: News

(From hreonline.com) Halloween is not just for children anymore. Over the last few years, the number of employers allowing employees to wear costumes to work in celebration of Halloween appears to be increasing and, in some cases, this has even been embraced by the general public.

Such celebrations are not limited to any particular type of employee or industry, individuals working in the retail industry as well as attorneys appearing in court are regularly spotted in costume on Halloween. In short, this is a custom that does not appear to be leaving the workplace anytime soon.

And it raises the obvious question -- why do employers allow employees to wear costumes to work on Halloween?

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Tags: workplace, behavior

Categories: News

(CAREERBUILDER) -- Growing up, plenty of people dished out advice about what kind of job to get. I was told to find a way to get paid doing what I love. I was also told to find a job that paid the bills because I'd resent my passion if it were my job. Each person had a story to prove why their advice was right.

Ultimately, I listened to no one and just did what felt right. As a result, I realized one size does not fit all for career advice.

The same goes for befriending the people you work with, or bringing friends into the workplace. For some people, friendship and professionalism go hand-in-hand. For others, not so much. And for certain workers, friendship was integral to the workplace until things went very, very wrong.

"It can be very good or very bad -- depending on a number of factors, including the personalities of the people who are friends and their relationship in the workplace.

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Tags: workplace, behavior

Categories: News

(From TIME.com) Small businesses already hit hard by the recession may soon undergo another pummeling, this time by the 2009 H1N1 virus, the frightening new subtype of a strain that's been around for decades.

"Right now the bulk of smaller businesses haven't prepared," says Howard A. Mavity, a labor lawyer who heads up the workplace safety and catastrophe management practice group at Fisher & Phillips, in Atlanta.

Overall, however, interest in how best to address a viral onslaught is intense, says Mavity, noting that inquiries from businesses of all sizes about his firm's free webinars on workplace-related H1N1 topics have increased "tenfold" since the summer. (See which businesses are bucking the recession.)

Why then have so few small to midsize companies executed a blueprint for action?

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Tags: workplace, behavior, preparedness, h1n1

Categories: News

(From The Australian) JULIA Gillard today will concede that Australia's industrial relations culture is holding back the productivity boost promised by her new workplace system.

The Deputy Prime Minister's push follows business complaints that the new Fair Work Australia system is entrenching an outmoded adversarial workplace culture based on the industrial tribunal, the unions and awards.

Ms Gillard will use her address to the World Congress of the International Industrial Relations Association in Sydney to announce "a new focus on cultural change in the workplace".

This has been given impetus by an unpublicised Melbourne forum of business leaders, union officials, bureaucrats and academics convened by Ms Gillard late last month to promote the "workplace of the future".

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Tags: workplace, behavior, government, australia, culture, business news

Categories: International | News

(From the Wall Street Journal) Workplace fatalities reached their lowest point on record last year, as the recession forced employers to trim back hours, particularly in risky professions such as construction, the Labor Department said Thursday.

Workplace suicides, meanwhile, hit an all-time high of 251, although that remains a tiny fraction of U.S. suicides.

Fatalities on the job dropped to 5,071 in 2008, down more than 10% from the previous year, the Labor Department said in its preliminary count. It is the smallest number of fatalities since the Labor Department started keeping track in 1992.

It is difficult to tell if safety has improved. The recession likely played a large part in the overall decline in deaths as companies laid off workers.

Using a new methodology, the Labor Department said the rate of fatal work injuries declined to 3.6 per 100,000 full-time workers in 2008 from four per 100,000 a year earlier. The new fatality rate figures go back only to 2006, when there were 4.2 fatal work injuries per 100,00 workers.

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Tags: workplace, behavior, workplace safety

Categories: News