Consider All Your Options

Quitting may seem like the only way out of an untenable job situation. If your job is making you sick, making your feel stuck and stunted, or disconnecting you from your family, the idea of quitting, once formed, may seem irresistibly appealing. Still, you owe it to yourself to be certain that quitting is the right answer, and that you have considered all options. Would work-life conflicts be helped by a reduction in hours, or the option to work at home some days? Might personality conflicts be resolved by facing them frankly, or asking for help from a third party? In large organizations, can human resources or employee health services help with situations you cannot resolve on your own? The most attractive option is not always the best one. And if there is a bad situation developing with your immediate management, you may want to be able to declare both to yourself and to any prospective new employer that you exhausted every channel for resolution.

Discuss Your Situation With Someone

If you are single, you may have the relative luxury of making a decision on your own. Of course, stress impairs judgment, and it would be smart to discuss your situation with a sympathetic and perceptive friend who knows you well — preferably a successful one, and definitely not a co-worker. (Human nature being what it is, you want to be unshakably certain that your decision is not known until you have a departure date in mind and are ready to announce it, personally and in writing, to your boss.) If you have a family, of course you have an obligation to discuss your thinking with your spouse or partner — and once the two of you are in agreement, with your children as and if appropriate.

Security

Can you get another job before you leave your current one? This, of course, may make for a busy month or so as you wrap up and get started — a piece of cake compared to the complication and uncertainty you may face when you’re quitting and still searching at the same time.

Do you have enough money to ride out a job search? A friend once remarked, “You are not well paid until you make twice what you live on.” By that criterion, every day worked equals a day one doesn’t have to work. Now, relatively few of us can squirrel away half our income. Like human squirrels, though, we can save year-round, in lean years and fat ones, and not be tempted to tap our hard-times trove until hard times are upon us — and in an economy that increasingly resembles a casino, they are bound to come sooner or later.

Skills and Networking

Your resume or CV has to be current of course. Even when satisfied with your current job, keep a comprehensive version that you update with every new training or newly developed skill set, every milestone and accomplishment, as they occur. You will be maintaining a living catalog of your marketability, which can help you be realistic about your prospects and whether your current job still matches your needs and your employable assets. When you apply for a specific job, rather than scraping together qualifications, you just need to hone the master document into the best fit.

Likewise, your professional network needs to be kept current. You want to be in touch not just when you are in need, but when you are in a position to help others, or simply want to talk about current developments or controversies in your industry. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. Keeping current also will let you know when you need to develop new skills, or polish old ones, whether on the job, through local classes, or through distance learning.

Is the Timing Appropriate?

Is it time to change careers completely? If this has been a longtime dream, do whatever prep work you can while still working your present job, carefully calculate the cost in training time, networking, and job searching, and in lost income that such a change might entail. Be realistic as you can – again, with plenty of reality checking from people you trust – and know whether it’s time to take the plunge or to kiss that particular dream goodbye.

You often hear the advice to make looking for a job your new job. Sound advice as far as it goes, but don’t become your own slave driver. You can be disciplined without being obsessive. If the reasons you quit include family time, or time to take better care of your health and well being, remember that such changes won’t happen automatically. You need to learn to build those times into your life as well, and not to miss the opportunities you risked so much to create.

Thanks for the opportunity to give you a little feedback on your performance as my manager. I always thought the employee evaluation process was a little one-sided. Especially the way you conduct them. But I digress. I hope you’re seated.

1. Nobody should be hired to do more than one job. Am I the research database developer or am I your personal assistant? Since you seem to want me to do both jobs, and seem to think the workload for each should be full time, something’s got to give. Apparently that something is neither you nor my workload(s).

2. OK, I get it! The research update is a Very Big Deal. And even though I can’t do it without current input from all the research managers, somehow the production pressure is all on me, not them. Fine. That I can live with. But boss? When I’ve finally begged, pleaded, and cajoled the information out of all of them, and submitted the report to you for your approval…please don’t sit on it for six weeks and then drop it off with a shrug and a regretful smile, reminding me that I have to do it all again, because it’s no longer current.

3. Now, I couldn’t agree more that when Henry had his kidney transplant, and Lois had her knee replacement, they needed our support and accommodation. I arranged a lot of that support and accommodation, didn’t I? So why is it that when I’m recovering from my repetitive strain injury, all I seem to hear from you is how troublesome it is dealing with my paperwork, and how expensive my adaptive equipment is, and when will my physical therapy finally be over, and how disruptive to the office it is for me to use dictation software to avoid reinjuring myself? Well, not disruptive to the office. Disruptive to your protégé’s protégé. The one who is on the phone all day. Having personal conversations. Loud ones. I seem to be breaking her concentration.

4. As icing on the cake, there was the time I was out with a cold nasty enough for me to fear a return of bronchitis. Remember, I was doing you the gratuitous courtesy of calling in every day, only to be greeted daily with an impatient “When will you be back?” The capper, though, was when you said, “I’ve scheduled an appointment for you on Friday.” “Uh, Janice, I’m still very sick…I’m not sure I’ll be in by Friday.” “Well, it’s a very important meeting. It’s on your schedule.” So I dragged myself from my bed of pain to get to the office on Friday. The very important appointment, of course, was a no show.

5. Well, I think that covers the highlights – or is it lowlights? – of the past year. I look forward to continuing to serve you in the challenging environment you never seem to tire of filling with further challenges. At least you’re consistent. I’ll give you points for that.

Sincerely yours,
me

What motivates people to leave jobs, even when the market is still tight? Here are ten of the many reasons people are leaving their jobs.

1. Improving Job Market

An improving job market is the biggest single rising driver of workers’ willingness to quit. Employees who have been hanging on out of uncertainty may have all the more dissatisfaction built up and be all the more ready to jump ship.

2. Your Own Terms

The recession itself did and continues to exacerbate conditions that can help people make the decision to quit. Underemployment is still high among many who have had hours cut and are eager to get back to full time work. Often arbitrary-seeming layoffs create a climate of fear and insecurity, which reduces morale and may convince employees the best course is to leave on their own timetable. On a positive note, compensation packages for voluntarily leaving rather than playing the layoff lottery convinces some workers they can weather the storm long enough to find something better.

3. Stress

Job stress affects at least eight out of ten workers. For four out of ten – some of whom have suffered injuries or had other stress-related disruptions of their lives away from work — it’s bad enough to make them quit. Stress has intensified with layoffs and budget cuts. And stress can, in a vicious cycle, be caused by and contribute to many other of the common reasons for worker dissatisfaction.

4. Who You know

Not all reasons for leaving a job are negative. Better opportunities arise for many who keep working their networks during the hard times. As more people are in a position to do this, the market becomes more fluid — every vacancy is an opportunity for someone else. And although anti-worker sentiment has been strong in recent days, America still admires and often rewards its entrepreneurs. Employment uncertainty pushes some to make the leap to start their own business.

5. Going No Where

The dead-end job. Workers who see no future, or a cloudy one, in their present job, account for somewhere around a third of workers who intend to quit. Communication of opportunity may be as important for retention as opportunity itself. While a quarter of potential quitters don’t see a long-term future at all in their present jobs, nearly four out of ten say they just don’t know what their prospects might be.

6. The Boss

As is often said, “Employees don’t quit their companies, they quit their bosses.” About 35 percent of workers who have quit a job cite a bad boss as the deciding factor. And if a relationship with a boss is deteriorating, workers may quit not only to avoid being fired, but perhaps also to salvage the best possible reference under the circumstances.

7. Showing Value

Although employee recognition issues are widespread, with four out of ten workers being dissatisfied, about one out of five lists this as among the factors in their leaving. Significantly, this group is also about three times as likely to believe – rightly or wrongly – that the employee evaluation system is unfair.

8. Show Me The Money

Inadequate pay. Whether via official freeze or a general tightening up, wages have been stagnating. There has been some toleration for this while alternatives to freezes and cuts seem scarce and scary. As things look up, workers may be more ready to rethink what they need and deserve, and what risks it may take to get it.

9. Balance

Work-life balance. Not quite a third of workers who mean to stay fault management or corporate culture in this area. Among those voluntarily on the way out, two-thirds feel unsupported in balancing work needs with other areas of their lives. And depending on other factors in one’s life, sometimes personal reasons for leaving are simply too compelling: starting a family, caring for aging parents, relocating with a partner (or not relocating along with one’s job), giving up an exhausting commute, or even returning to school in preparation for a career change.

10. Management

Among workers who plan to stay with their current employer, three out of four believe management tries hard enough to get opinions and insights from the workforce. Leavers are less satisfied, with six out of ten faulting management for a deaf ear to worker input. Management communication is unsatisfactory for a bit over a third of employees who are planning on keeping their jobs. By contrast, over two-thirds of intended quitters cite this as a factor pushing them out the door.

Yes, there is such a thing as an exaggerated stress response, and you may have one. So pay attention if you seem to be more often or more easily upset or argumentative than your co-workers, or if you get feedback that you’re difficult to work with, or that people are reluctant to approach you. These are legitimate concerns about appropriate response to stress that you will want to address with behavioral changes, and perhaps with professional help.

Stress itself, though usually refers to conditions created by an objective condition imposed from outside – the “stressor.” According to the National Institute for Workplace Safety and Health (NIOSH), this happens in the workplace, “when the requirements of the job do not match the capabilities, resources, or needs of the worker.”

This is not the kind of extra push sometimes needed at work, where additional effort results in greater accomplishment or better mastery, followed by a relaxing sense of satisfaction. The job stress that makes people sick – and it does so more often than even stress from finances or family – is the day-in, day-out mismatch that can cause many of the following symptoms:

• Headaches (including migraines and vertigo)
• Back pain and neck pain
• Concentration loss
• Sleepless nights
• Tumult in the gut
• Heart palpitations
• Short temper
• Deteriorating personal relationships
• And on-the-job injury

The body recognizes stress as something it has to respond to quickly and decisively, and goes into a protective mode, which raises heart rate and respiration, sharpens the senses, and tenses the muscles for action: fight or flight, as the response pattern is often known. This is handy in the short term, and when fighting or fleeing is both possible and effective, as it has been for much of human history. Of course, in the typical modern workplace, neither response is satisfactory. And continuous stress keeps the body constantly on edge, creating at least wear, tear and fatigue, and possibly compromising the immune system and/or inciting chronic low-grade inflammation, each of which invites chronic disease.

The good news about this physical response is that it is largely physically reversible, at least in the short term:

• Exercise does a lot to discharge stress – outside the workplace, this can be regular participation in sport or exercise; in the workplace, modest physical activity like standing and stretching periodically, straightening the spine and rolling the shoulders help to discharge stress.

• Ergonomic stress can be addressed by some of the same techniques, although the most critically important measures involve adapting worker conditions to the body and the range of motion of the worker, not the other way around.

• Stress management programs offered by many employers, directly or through their health plan, teach both how to recognize stress and its sources, the range of workable and inappropriate stress responses, and methods of coping and correction.

So how did we get from “It’s not your fault” to “These are the things you should do”? Well, let’s be practical. Management is invested in how things are, even when things are bad. They may be stressed, too, and effectively, if not intentionally, charged to make sure that everyone else is. So it may be that your best option is to take whatever personal steps you can while you can look around for a less stressful situation. Perhaps that’s the department down the hall that seems to have such a different atmosphere from yours, another company, or another industry entirely.

Of course, it does make sense to address the external causes of stress, from bad workstation ergonomics to unreasonable workload expectations to constantly shifting and late-announced deadlines. Research suggests that longer term, this is the most effective strategy to reduce workplace stress and the low morale, absenteeism, sickness and injury it fosters. To address objective stressors effectively – which may mean confronting not just your local management but an entire corporate culture – you don’t want to be making your points sounding like a hysterical wreck. You want to be the coolest cucumber in the vegetable patch.

And while you’re saving the workplace, remember:
• Be clear.
• Be polite.
• Be firm.
• Cut management a little slack. They’re probably under a lot of stress.

An End To Office Politics

I have to admit, you got to me, Marjorie. Poor dear, left out of the clubby atmosphere of your colleagues, isolated, lonely, unappreciated and threatened by our boss and desperate to keep your job for the sake of your three little boys. Who couldn’t be affected by such a tale of woe? Not this sap, apparently. So here I am first being grilled by HR over things I’d said to you in (apparently misplaced) confidence, and then called on the carpet by one of the people there whom I admire most, who has been kindest to me, whose livelihood is being threatened because you’re using the information I indiscreetly gave you to carry out your personal vendetta. Marjorie? Take a hike!

An End To Sleazy, Cozy Relationships With Supply Vendors

OK, Jim, at first it was kind of fun having you take me out to lunch on the tab of your high-rolling supply vendor. That was before the ink cartridges you had me buy for the print room started jamming the printers. Which I was apparently not supposed to mention. Any time. To anyone. Least of all your buddy. The one who might, you know, be able to do something about it? I sort of lost interest after that in the ongoing banter over whether the Rolex he gave you for Christmas was real or fake.

End To Scheduling Flip-Flops

And George, I always thought it a little strange that I wasn’t included in those scheduling meetings, since you always seemed to come out of them with more work for my staff. And I was pleased when I finally got invited to one. One. Because at that one, the question of scheduling my staff for a conversion weekend came up, and you said “Oh, no, we don’t need your guys, it’s only a conversion.” It honestly felt great to turn around and quote you when you came bustling up to me on the weekend in question saying, “I hope you’ve got coverage all through the big conversion weekend.” And I could walk out the door and sleep that night. Whether you slept or not doesn’t really concern me.

An End To Having To Pry Work Out Of Management

Look, I like my work. I do it well. That is, when I’m not sitting around bored to tears because I have to be on site to babysit a manager who can’t quite let go of her pet project yet but keeps insisting it will be ready for me any second. I feel a surge of sympathy for Hannibal Lecter: Tick-tock, tick-tock, Clarice!

Decent Public Transportation

And now you, City and County of San Francisco. So I moved back into the city from the suburbs because I thought it would decrease my commute. Wrong! I guess the urban transit has declined as much as everyone says. I must have been dreaming of that long ago time when I first moved here, when public transportation was something we bragged about to visitors. At this rate, I may have to get a car. And move back to the suburbs.

Verbal abuse, and other forms of workplace bullying

By verbal abuse, we don’t mean the occasional outburst of profanity, or even the salty speech of some ex-military now in the civilian workforce, or the almost cadenced vulgarity of some fields of manual labor, or even the frank sexual metaphors indulged in by both sexes among the young – although the latter can be problematic as the workforce becomes increasingly multi-generational. Verbal abuse needn’t be vulgar, profane, or suggestive at all, although such forms are common. Rather abuse is defined by its belittling, antagonistic, or dismissive intention, and is classed as a form of workplace harassment, and under the latest thinking, as a kind of bullying.

Victims of workplace bullying are often diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – in some cases much like that of battered women and victims of child abuse. Co-workers who witness bullying may suffer from stress, fear and emotional exhaustion. Morale goes down, absenteeism and sickness goes up – the IT industry and the health professions both show such a pattern – and workers are driven from work, costing probable billions in health expenses, lost productivity and worker replacement. Bullying sometimes seems to go viral within an organization; a pattern that can persist after the original bully moves on and may hinder constructive group dynamics for years. Turnover stays high, as newcomers are subjected to a kind of institutional hazing by the self-congratulating “survivors”.

There is a movement to pass anti-bullying laws in the U.S., as has been done in some other countries. Such laws seek to define an “abusive work environment,” modeled on the notion derived from anti-discrimination and anti-harassment laws: the “hostile work environment.” Since bullying does not necessarily involve animus against the characteristics – race, sex, religion, age, disability, sexual orientation, etc. – “protected” by such laws, the proposed legislation instead treats the behavior as a threat to public health.

With legal protection uncertain, workers may have to deal with the problem on their own. One union of IT workers suggests that a victimized worker directly tell the manager the effects of his or her behavior (or if such a meeting seems impossible, describe the behavior and its effects in a memo). Although bullying — and business success — are linked to several psychopathologies, it is also thought that some bullying behavior may simply arise from top-down pressure that increases as it moves through management’s ranks down to the front-line managers who end up “kicking the dog”. With either psychopathology or poor stress management skills — whether the bully is simply uncaring or genuinely ignorant of his or her effect on employees — the initial conversation puts the offending manager on notice and offers a chance for correction. It also, if done in person, removes the charge of the worker “sneaking around behind the manager’s back” in some of the subsequent steps:

• Doing a reality check with coworkers — do they experience the same thing?
• Keeping a log of all instances of bullying.
• Keeping copies of written references, and notes on any oral reference, to the inability to do one’s job.
• Avoiding being alone with the bully so that any untoward incident has witnesses.
• Seeing if colleagues will join a collective complaint.
• Checking any new responsibilities against one’s job description.
• If nothing changes, reporting the problem to HR.
• We can only suppose that the direction to think of Human Resources as a last resort comes from the union’s probable experience that HR would be unlikely to be helpful before the previous steps had been done.

Unethical

As reported by Harold MacNeil at BuffaloNews.com, in retrospect, Sherron Watkins wishes she had closed one chapter of her life earlier than she did. In 1993, she started at Enron, reporting directly to Andrew Fastow, the company’s high-flying chief financial officer: “I realized he lacked a moral compass…In a perfect world, I would have left Enron in ’96 based on what I saw happening.”

Apparently Watkins reconciled herself to some degree of imperfection back in 1996, when the sharpest business graduates from the most prestigious schools were flocking to Houston to touch the magic of Enron, which seemed to be able to pull profits out of thin air.

Besides the lure of the carrot, there was the stick. A “yank-and-rank” performance review system showed the door to those not competing on Enron’s terms — or who were asking questions about Enron’s way.

Although Watkins initially saw the CFO’s office as a kind of safe haven, it brought her up against evidence that the fishiness she’d already observed extended to — or from — the core of the company’s fictitious finances: “It was cooking the books to almost 50 percent of our earnings in 2000.” Two weeks after that realization, and her raising the specter of its risk to high-flying CEO Lay, the house of cards collapsed.
MacNeil reports that Watkins is dubious about the effectiveness of whistle-blower protective measures in last year’s Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. She sees the WikiLeaks model as “the concept [that] will prevail” for disseminating evidence of wrongdoing.

Watkins now uses her own history as a cautionary tale, advising those entering business to go beyond what she did or failed to do, and to stop fraud “in its infancy”. She offers the “make sure it’s comfortable” criterion for judging entry into doubtful schemes: would you be embarrassed to discuss participation in such a deal with someone you admire and from whom you hope for respect, or to have the details published on the front page of the daily news?

Dirty

Suppose you were counting microbes on various surfaces people touch in the workplace. You might not be surprised at the relatively low 49 per square inch on the toilet seat, given that it’s cleaned each work night. And if this was your profession, you wouldn’t be taken aback by the 69 bugs per square inch on the photocopiers. Any mice scurrying around the kitchen will check in at the standard 1700 or so microbes/sq. in. — a bit more than half the density of 3,300 invisible creepy crawlies that inhabit each square inch of your keyboard. That of course pales in comparison to the 21,000 microscopic bacteria, viruses, yeasties, and even parasitic beasties per square inch of your (actual) desktop. And about the 25,000 microbes per square inch on your telephone, we maintain a tactful silence. Hey, can I use your phone for a seccChhCHHh…! Oh, and lemme grab this pen, huh? You get the picture.

Now disease bugs can travel around the office pretty efficiently with all the things like keyboards, doorknobs, hand tools, faucet taps, elevators and banisters people put their washed or unwashed hands on. We can quantify this during cold and flu season. And a few environmental reactions like contact dermatitis can usually be traced to their source irritant or allergen. Somewhat harder to trace are longer-term health effects as cancer and diabetes that can also have an environmental component. In the middle sits asthma. Its most common irritants are known, and they include both dust mites and such critters and the cleaning materials used to control them. Asthma that develops in the workplace even though it doesn’t manifest itself until after employment ends follows a predictable enough arc that it can be verified. So watch out, folks, when employers – as many as two out of five, in some markets — cut back on cleaning schedules and other maintenance, or have to indulge in more aggressive cleaning once problems develop. Either way, there’s a good chance we could see follow-on cases of asthma for years to come.

Unsafe

Some dozen people a day are fatally injured on the job — an obscure statistic, not catching the attention, imagination, or press garnered by the oil rig explosion or mining disaster that may claim plural dozens of lives at one time and in one place. Still, it adds up to some 4300 deaths as of the latest data year — a figure paled by the 3.3 million nonfatal injuries and illnesses that can be directly attributable to workplace conditions.
And though when we hear those numbers we may think of the dangers of mining, drilling, construction, and possibly even of driving, what corporation turns our inquiring minds to the hazardous employment of suburban retail?

What is it with WalMart? The business of America is business? Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb? It’s our company and we’ll do what we damn well please? Could Ayn Rand be behind it all? Oh, just don’t worry your pretty little head about it!

The largest and most profitable corporation in the U.S. likes to get its money’s worth out of every deal it makes – and then some, apparently, when it’s dealing with its own employees. It has a well-established history of frequent violations of labor laws and standards: locking staff overnight in stores, for example—where they have suffered heart attacks, been unable to join wives in labor, weathered hurricanes, and been effectively unable to get medical care when suffering on-the-job injuries, except at the risk of their jobs. Apparently WalMart doesn’t think much of child labor laws, either, at least when it comes to illegally letting minors operate chainsaws and other hazardous equipment.

For bald-faced cynicism, though, the prize may go to Safety Bingo Inc, which markets its eponymous product along with Safety Poker as lowering worker compensation costs by offering game-based incentives for lowering accident rates. Actually, what the games do is create peer pressure among workers to lower injury reporting. A neat trick, at least for a while — till the game gets reset by an unavoidable injury report, and all the workers who have been hiding their injuries come out of the woodwork. Amazon and Costco, among others, lap it up. It must net out.

Wage theft

Wage theft was known in the Middle Ages as “a sin crying to Heaven for vengeance.” Despite the crying, the theft goes on. The greatest number of forms of wage theft are inflicted on the lowest wage workers, about two-thirds of whom get short-paid an average of $50, about 15 percent of their earnings, each week. Businesses in just three American cities studied rack up some $56 million in ill-gotten gains from that theft, again each week, according to the most comprehensive survey. Despite nominal legal protection, forget the minimum wage for immigrants, whether undocumented or credentialed “guest workers” — over a quarter of them are paid less. Report early or stay late off the clock? You betcha! Legally required statement of earnings and deductions for employees? Nah, better not – understandable, in a criminal kind of way, since many supposed “deductions” are illegal charges for tools, uniforms, materials and transportation all required by the employer or the work, or dockings for spurious “damage or loss” charges. Think you’re helping food service workers make ends meet when you leave a tip on the table or drop it in the jar? Well, yes, you are — especially if management doesn’t even meet their obligation to cover the minimum wage when tips don’t – and provided that management doesn’t just flat out steal the tips.

OK, in a large corporation, with higher visibility and more fiscal accountability, such things don’t happen, right? Wrong. WalMart, for example has a history of not being very punctilious about paying for overtime. Remember those locked in workers? Too bad for them if they get stuck at work off the clock because the manager who was supposed to spring them at the end of their shift overslept, or had a flat tire.

All right, all right! Still, minimum-wage abuse affects mostly those who would be happy to be actually getting minimum wage. Professional workers, though, the better educated ones? They get and demand their stubs, and their overtime…
Well, maybe not. With overtime, the social dynamics may be different; the power relationships may seem to be different; but the effect can be the same. Technical or creative workers employed in production shops may not go hungry if they don’t collect their statutorily guaranteed wages, but a perverse amalgam of craft pride and elitism, underbudgeting, peer pressure and corporate culture may keep workers compliant and silent in the face of underpayment, through unspoken “off the clock” requirements.

Cases have even been reported in companies with a thousand or more employees where HR departments, nominally charged with worker protection and legal compliance, collude with management to retaliate against workers who even raise questions about illegal practices. And if you see the writing on the wall anyway, are you going to go out of your way to piss off your reference?

And all that is IF you get can land yourself an employer operating with enough good faith to admit that you’re an employee.

Besides the classic dodges of short-paying workers, paying them under the table, or simply stiffing them after otherwise abusing them — as has been reported by about half of day laborers — traditionally more circumspect businesses are in a frenzy of “misclassifying” employees as independent contractors, typically along with manipulation of schedules to realize the same number of person-hours from a larger, more dependent staff at lower cost.

Meanwhile state and federal governments are losing billions in revenues each year in income tax and employer-funded programs for workers.

The IRS says misclassification costs $54 billion a year in employment tax and $15 billion in Social Security and unemployment insurance taxes.

As just one example of a state study, Ohio numbers misclassified workers in the hundreds of thousands, and estimates that unemployment compensation payments, workers compensation premiums, and state income taxes suffer losses of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars for each fund each year, thanks to tax-cheating businesses. A pretty good setup for corporate mouthpieces in governors’ offices to blame “worker entitlements” for busting the states’ budgets!

Play the numbers. This is one of those random-sounding tips that has the potential for becoming counterproductive if it goes viral. But the current data, at least according to LinkedIn, is that raises are typically granted in January, June and July. So somewhere in the prior month might be a good time to bring up a raise. Apart from whatever effect holiday spirit may have, January makes sense because most American companies use the calendar year for budgeting. Management begins each year with funds available and a reasonable forecast of the year’s prospects.

Accounting is an exception

Tax season revs up in January, and workers and management have their hands full with workload and clients — not the best time to take up administrative issues. Better to go for the June-July cycle, when again the year’s revenues are known, and the workload lessens, as it does in some other industries.

Be realistic

Sure, in January your boss may have a fresh budget. But is it a flush one, predicated on growth in revenues and profits in the prior year? Or is it anemic, with a bad quarter or two behind it and rumors of layoffs in the air? Be realistic and discreet, or you risk being seen as weirdly out of touch with what’s going on in your own company.

In public employment and some corporations, there may be nothing discretionary about raises, which are determined by formula. Or raises that normally are subject to management discretion may be locked down by a temporary freeze. In such cases, random conversations about raises are going to be pointless at best. Concentrate on knowing the system and making sure what you see on your paycheck follows the rules.

Do your homework

In cases where local management is known to have discretion they will still often operate within guidelines based on pay grades — always in government, and nearly always in large private enterprises (at least in “non-exempt” positions subject to wage labor laws). In small businesses or startups, things may be a little less codified. If you work in a graded job, keep an eye on the range for your grade, and have a strategy for making reasonable requests to keep your pay current not just with your increasing tenure, but with increasing experience, productivity, and if applicable responsibilities. Also, don’t forget to pursue options for a grade raise if responsibilities change, or as other opportunities present themselves. You want to avoid being “maxed out” and stuck in your present job.

Most companies still frown on employees discussing their wages with each other. Although that often unspoken rule may be eroding, it’s probably best to play it safe. And anyway, water-cooler conversations about pay are so twentieth century! Check out pay-tracking sites like Payscale.com or GetRaised.com, and you’ll have a sense of how your pay compares with the labor market for your job type, not only in your industry and perhaps your company, but also across all industries that hire people to do what you do.

Prove you deserve it

Pass praise you receive on to your management as you receive it, and keep a record of it for your reviews and/or any discussion of pay you initiate. Objective accomplishments (i.e.: finally making the resource library useable, spearheading setting up your unit’s intranet site, improving the vacation scheduling system or establishing processes, which then become the standard for your department) need to go on this list, too, especially if you have metrics for improved service or reduced costs. Frame that raise as a good investment for the company. Remember, your local management has to justify every raise. Do your boss a favor — have that justification good to go when the time is ripe to raise a raise.

Another critical – if often stated – insight for anger management: it’s all too common for an angry reaction to have little relation to its proximate cause. And that’s really a longer-winded way of saying that sometimes, caught up in an angry reaction, what we need is perspective.

So how can we make or steal the time to gain some perspective, and allow the physiological heat of anger to cool?

Many of our emotional reactions are physical. Not without reason do we speak of the flush of anger. That rush of blood is part of the body’s fight-or-flight response: in this case the angry response, tipping toward fight. The good news about these physical responses is that they can be diverted and reversed physically:

• You can force a smile before you speak.

• You can pick up the nearest handy envelope or file folder, stand, and answer both responsively and noncomittally: “Hey, I’m sorry, I need to drop this off now. Can we talk in about ten minutes?” (Or just plead the need for a bathroom break.)

• Carry that envelope or folder over to a neutral corner – the desk of a friend, say, where you can confide, “I’m in a lousy mood and need to get away for a few minutes before I blow a gasket. I’ll be back in a few to pick this up, OK?”

• By standing, walking, and acknowledging the “danger,” you’ve discharged some of your stress, and prudently redirected a toxic (in this case) fight response into a healthy, temporary flight response.

• Now, as you walk away, remember to breathe – deeply, from the belly – to renew and redirect your physical energy away from conflict and back toward maintenance.

• If you can, take a walk around the block. Or go ahead, take that bathroom break; if you’re under stress you may have been unhealthily deferring one anyway.

• Check yourself. Are you stressed, overwhelmed, in pain, short on sleep? Could your angry reaction be coming from anywhere other than its apparent cause?

• Determine a strategically appropriate response. “Busy morning for everyone, I guess. What’s up?” leaves both you and any “intruder” with a lot more options than

“I’m booked solid. If you need any of my time, you’ll need to speak to my boss.” At the very least you’ll learn what the nature of the request is, so your response can be more informed. And you won’t look quite so silly if the request is to sign a birthday card or is being delivered from your boss by a third party.

Of course, no set of quick tips fix can address a rage disorder or other deep-seated anger problem. If you or a subordinate are having recurring problems with inappropriate anger responses, it’s time to call in the professionals.

You can search the Internet for “typical” questions, and pay particular attention to what people identify as pitfalls in answering them, but you can’t really cram. Fashions in interview questions come and go. As questions become known and popular, some interviewers avoid them. Other questions come with a theory behind them, and promises that they will elicit the real you. None of that is going to matter much in the interview, because your best friends will be honesty, relevance and substance. And those things come from knowing yourself, knowing why you want that particular job with that particular company, and why you sincerely believe you’re a good fit for it.

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, Practice, Practice!
If you know those things, then you can answer questions like “Why should I hire you?” “Why do you want this job?” “What are your strengths and weaknesses?” directly and concisely. Of course, you’ll be better able to do so if you practice — not necessarily to the point of having a canned answer, but hopefully to the point where you realize that:

• The first time you responded you avoided the question
• Half of what came out of your mouth the second time was filler
• The third time you kept talking past the point where you’d answered the question
• And so on…

As you rehearse (in the sense of repeat) the answers, they should get better. You don’t need perfection. You do need to sound like you heard the question and answered it as simply and honestly as you could. And a trick for that is, as you repeat each question, don’t just repeat the words, really ask it of yourself. Put yourself in the shoes of Ms. Bigg with the Shiny Expanse of Desk. Why should she hire you? Can you convince her?

You can certainly do this exercise with a mentor or an intimate, which may have its own value. And it’s also possible that the most valuable way for you to rehearse questions is with yourself, if you can really get into your imaginary interviewer’s head.

Behavioral vs. Expertise – Both Are Important in Selling Yourself
Monster.com has some useful tips for the one kind of question or interview you should know about: the “behavioral” interview, which uses questions in the form of “tell me about a time when…” or “give me an example of…” The correct answer to all such questions is something that you have actually done, preferably from a business context that addresses the substance of the question. Again, put yourself in the shoes of the interviewer, using your own imagination applied to the givens of the job description. What would you want to know about your history that’s relevant to the requirements for the job?

Also, as Monster very helpfully points out, any answers you prepare for a behavioral interview can be adapted for any interview: “So what is your greatest strength?” “Well, the best business complement I ever got was from my boss at FuFuCorp, when she said I was so effective there because of my empathy. I really think that’s a strength I’d be bringing to making sure your widget teams are all in sync.”

Finally, we have a quick note which should cover all the thought you have to give to office politics and power arrangements (hint: as little as possible).

Your Momma Gave You Two Important Tools – Good Graces and Common Sense: Use Them Both!
You may be interviewed by a pair or a team; this is becoming almost standard. In your handshaking, listening, eye contact and speech, treat all parties to the conversation as equally important. Avoid social bonding rituals with, or apparent avoidance of, or excess deference to, any party to the interview. Even if this is only natural shyness or nervousness, or relief at seeing someone from your age cohort, it may be read as ageism, as suckupism, or as problems relating to authority figures of the opposite sex.

Your livelihood and at least this phase of your career may depend in one way or another on the impression you make on any of the people you meet, and there is no way for you to know whose judgment is most decisive. Rather than worrying about any such thing, pay attention to the content of the conversation. For the moment, you are all professionals, and all peers. Relax. In a formal kind of way.