If you want to quit your job then make it an Adidas moment and just do it. But unless you want it to be remembered for all the wrong reasons then think twice before you decide to make it a YouTube event. Here are a few don’t that you might want to consider before you quit your job.
Don’t be Dramatic
We all remember the flight attendant who got all the attention a few years ago by telling off rude passengers over the intercom and then sliding down the emergency chute. And there’s a new You Tube hero who quit his job at a hotel along with a full brass brand to protest poor working conditions. Both events were funny and probably well-intentioned, if not well thought out. Unless you never want to work in any of those industries again or think you can get a job in the entertainment business then don’t be too dramatic when you resign your position.
Don’t Phone it in
You can do a lot of things with your smart phone these days but quitting your job is not one of them. Step up, be the man or woman you want to be, and tell your boss in person that you are going to quit. Unless you are seriously worried about violence then this is not a matter to be dealt with by e-mail or left in their voice mail box after they have gone home for the day. The process is that you give the appropriate notice period and yes you tell them why you are leaving. If it’s personal then tell them it’s personal. You may be able to break up on Facebook, but don’t quit your job there.
Don’t Burn Bridges
When you finally get to the point that you just have to quit your job you may think that you would never, ever want to work for this company or in this business again. You may be right. Then again you may be wrong. Lots of us have thought that once only to realize months or years later that it really wasn’t that bad after all. Especially if a few key people change and you find that where you are now sucks more than where you were before. That’s why you try and not burn too many bridges on the way out. You may need to cross back over them to get back in. Or to get a reference from them for that dream job in the future.
Don’t Leave Before You Leave
As hard as it is to not daydream about your new job, try and stay on your old job after you give your notice to quit. Now is a time when you can give a little back by helping to organize your files, clean up old projects, and if possible to train your replacement. These small acts of goodwill help leave a positive and lasting impression at your old workplace and cement your good reputation. And that’s worth a lot more than giving your friends a few laughs on YouTube.
This article first appeared on my blog at www.jobs.ca
Mike Martin is a freelance writer and workplace wellness consultant. He is the author of Change the Things You Can: Dealing with Difficult People.
Do you want to have more time in your life to do the things you really want to do? It’s easy, just stop managing your time. Throw away your micro-minute planner, your must do, have to, would like to list managers and your stop watch, especially that stop watch. (I had a manager once who would put it on his desk before every meeting with me and set it for 15 minutes. I spent the first five minutes gob smacked that he would do that and the last five frantically trying to get my request made.)
Stop wasting your time trying to keep track of it. That’s one of the real secrets to effective time management. Forget what the experts say about priorizing tasks. As if you wouldn’t do that on your own. You do that every minute of every day at work by simply choosing which tasks you are going to work on. You don’t need expert advice or a plan to decide on which call to return or e-mail to answer. Let’s see. I have one from my boss and a hot sales prospect and three from people who want to sell me stuff. Like a time management training program. That’s a no brainer.
Forget about spending your day organizing and reorganizing the piles on your desk. Decluttering, whatever that means, is highly over-rated in my book. I’m not saying that you should live and work like someone from Hoarders Anonymous but you can skip the fifteen minutes spent each morning and afternoon shuffling papers. That’s half an hour that you could be spending doing the work that they are actually paying you for. Or better yet if it’s a nice day you can get out early and beat the rush.
Other oft mentioned time management techniques like multi-tasking and delegating responsibilities are things you have probably already tried and have stopped doing. Because they take too much time in the long run. What’s the point of doing a lot of things quickly but none of them well? Or delegating a task only to have it return to your desk for a do-over. And postponing items or delaying them until tomorrow is not really a strategy. It’s more likely a good way to get yelled at and still have to do the job.
So stop grumbling about how little time you have and instead of trying to artificially stretch it, make the most of it. You may just find that you have more to work with than you think.
This article first appeared on my blog at www.jobs.ca
Mike Martin is a freelance writer and workplace wellness consultant. He can be reached at mike54martin@sympatico.ca
One of the most interesting questions I have heard asked about budgets and government spending and that great Satan, “the deficit’, was ‘Where did all the money go?” It was a person on the street who was asked for their commentary about the latest federal budget and simply asked that question and followed up with ‘We once had money to pay for all these things before, like scientists who monitor the environment or the CBC’.
So where did that money go?
I don’t really know. I suspect that some of it got swallowed up in the war in Afghanistan and lots of it got given to corporations in the form of tax cuts. Some of it got lost in government revenue when the Tories reduced the GST and there are millions of it sprinkled all over Tony Clement’s riding in fake swimming pools and gazebos. But I don’t really know.
Do You? If you do please let me know at mike54martin@sympatico.ca
For my part I am going to contact a number of really smart people, pointy-head economist types to see what they know and I’ll share it here and on Facebook.
The Canadian Federal Budget does a lot of bad things but its biggest flaw is that it takes us backwards to the days before there were liberals or social democrats. It takes us back to the glory days of conservatism. Most of us are too young to remember them but they featured hard work for little pay, no benefits and certainly no pensions. There was no unemployment insurance if you got laid off and there was no public health care system if you got sick. Ah, the good old days.
Unions were limited to a few major industries and there were no unions or even collective bargaining in the public sector. There were no environmental laws or anything like an environmental impact review to impede a business opportunity. There were no aboriginal land claims, no need to respect any of those old treaties, and no need to worry about building on or near a reserve or putting up a mine just about any damned place you want. There was no red tape for business to worry about, no regulations to follow, and no taxes on corporations.
University education was only for the children of the very rich, those who could afford it. Everyone else was expected to fish, farm, work in the mines or the forests or go to the big city to work in the factories. Women could work before they got married but only as teachers or in the banks or shops. Forget about equal wages. They were lucky to have a job.
If you think I am being overly dramatic I urge you to read the Budget document, yes all 498 pages, or as many as you can. You will note that there are 445 references to helping business in the document which might suggest both the focus of and the audience for this business. There are also 33 references to the unemployed which is encouraging except for the fact that this budget does nothing to improve employment insurance except to “remove disincentives to work”. And that’s despite the fact that less than 40% of Canadian workers can currently access employment insurance.
In addition this budget will raise unemployment and the retirement age, lower the quality of health care and dramatically increase the inequality gap that exists today. If you are very rich, a banker, a corporate executive or just a person who wishes we could go back to those good old conservative days you must be a very happy person today. For all of the rest of us, the 99%, that light at the end of the tunnel is not “Jobs, Growth and Long Term Prosperity”. It is a runaway train that is planning to roll over us and the society that we have built together in the last sixty years.
And many of us, most of us really, will not even know that it’s happened until it’s too late.
Next post… on the Alternatives
I am starting to wonder why we bother having elections if we keep ending up with politicians and governments that look and act as if they want to get rid of governments. If I had a company that manufactured widgets I would hire managers and employees who would continue to make widgets, in fact I would look for people who wanted to make the best widgets possible, not people who hate widgets and want all widgets to disappear. That would be weird. And yet we don’t think it’s weird when people get elected who want to dismantle all of the public services that we have all worked so hard to build up. I don’t get it.
I also don’t understand the political theory of creating scapegoats or pitting groups of people against each other. Really, what is that about? And once again, why would the people we elect do this on a fairly consistent basis. TheOntariobudget which came out yesterday is a prime example. The message I got from the budget was that doctors, teachers, public sector workers, people on social assistance and disability, seniors, and students are the problem. If not then why have they been singled out in the budget for cuts, freezes and rate increases?
If we have a public debt problem, then wouldn’t a better approach be to talk to everybody and see if you could get some cooperation so that together we could make a plan to reduce our collective debt? Did they miss something in the kindergarten lesson about trying to get along or is it more politically viable to have people blame each other than to have them point the finger at the people who really caused the problem? Just askin?
Well, they can try all they want but I like my doctor and I don’t think that he caused the deficit. And I know some people on social assistance and disability payments and as far as I can see they are just trying to get by. In fact most of them make regular trips to the food bank to feed themselves and their kids. And I have a kid in school who’s living on a pittance and racking up a massive debt and I will be a senior sooner than I want so I can’t see where students and seniors are the big bad guys that the government is trying to convince me of.
The politics of division and ignorance have led us to this place where a reasonable response is apathy and withdrawal. And sadly many people have taken this approach. I don’t blame them but I will never go there. Because at the end I think that’s what those small-minded politicians really want. The antidote to the petty politics that are unfolding right now is action, small, large and in-between. Doing nothing is not an option.
Mike Martin is a freelance writer and workplace wellness consultant.
Mental illness is one of the few stigmas left in our tell-all, tell-everybody via Facebook world. It is one of the few things that we don’t share with anybody, especially at work. We can talk openly about our enlarged prostate, that lump in our breast or even our leaky heart. But when it comes to anxiety, stress or depression, not a word escapes our lips.
Too many Canadians suffer in silence or do not get treatment because they are afraid that other people will see them as defective, or weak, or god forbid, mentally ill. Some of these people, our family, friends and co-workers get really sick and have to be hospitalized. Some don’t make it to the doctor and self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. Some die, suddenly and without needing to. They have chosen a permanent solution for an often temporary problem, their mental illness.
Without being too preachy, I hope, I think it’s time we pulled mental illness out of the closet and put it on live, in prime time. So for anyone wanting to be part of the solution here are a few stats. 21% of all Canadians will experience a mental illness in their lifetime and 10% of the adult population is experiencing a mental illness at any point in time. Like right now.
Mental illness also costs a lot of time and money. The top causes for absenteeism in the workplace continue to be “depression/anxiety and other mental health disorders” (66%) and “stress” (60%). In 2006 the total resource burden of mental illness inCanadaamounted to $31.3 billion. This included $7.7 billion of direct government expenditures (our taxes) and $23.6 billion of indirect productivity losses due to mental illness. Some estimates put it over $50 billion today. In 2005 alone one major benefits company reported that there was a 27 percent increase in long term disability costs that they attributed to an aging workforce, increasing productivity demands, and rising mental health claims.
So what can we do about it? We think we can’t do much as individuals because we are not mental health professionals. That’s true but we are expert friends and expert colleagues. We know how to ask someone if they are feeling okay or if they want to talk. We know when someone might be suffering from some sort of mental illness or issue. We don’t have to diagnose it. We just have to be strong enough to discuss it.
Together, once again trying not be preachy, we can make a difference on mental illness. Stick your neck out of your shell and take someone who’s obviously in distress for coffee. It won’t kill you and it just may save their life.
Mike Martin is a freelance writer and workplace wellness consultant. This article first appeared o my blog at www.jobs.ca
I have always been fascinated by the idea of synergy: that two or more things could work together to produce a result that is more and different from the result of the two things operating independently. It seemed to me to be a kind of human alchemy where two people or personalities could be melded to create a superhuman effort.
But as usual it’s much more pedestrian than that. Especially when it comes to two or more people working in a team. That doesn’t mean that remarkable results are not possible as a result of synergy, it just means that it is more easily explainable than the mystery I have described. The reason that synergy works is that it allows people to bring forward their very best qualities, skills or strengths. When that happens simultaneously with others it should not be surprising when the team effort is far more brilliant than just the sum of its parts.
Synergy also works in a team setting because there is a special sort of energy that is created out of the enthusiasm of working towards a common objective or goal. Mountain climbers feel this energy from the rest of the team as they scale the peak and it gives them an extra boost to make it to the top. There is also special strength that the team can draw from having an intense focus on one problem or one solution. And it almost always leads to success.
Of course this success only comes when a team is working well together, is communicating with each and their synergy is being harnessed and directed towards that common purpose. That’s where a good manager comes in. A good manager ensures that the team knows its purpose, has means to communicate well and builds on strengths not weaknesses. He or she encourages individual lights to shine within a clearly established framework and does not let any one ego get so big it disrupts the positive flow of synergy.
If that sounds like the basic principles of success for any team you have just passed the pop quiz. The difference with having a special focus on creating synergy within the team is that you are not just completing a project or trying to resolve a particular problem. You are actually creating something completely new, a real and tangible product that you can use over and over again.
Synergy is addictive. It’s what keeps some sports teams together for multiple championships far longer than individual awards or achievements. It’s because people who feel the power of synergy never want to go back to just being ordinary. They want the extra power that synergy brings. They can have it and so can you.
Mike Martin is a freelance writer and workplace wellness consultant.
I am still trying to make sense out of what the heck is going on with the robocall scandal. Did people really do this inCanada? Forget about the legalities or illegalities of such an action, where is the morality? How could anyone who is involved in a political party at any level think this was a good thing to do?
I don’t know exactly what happened but it seems clear that there were some actions taken that were intended to influence the electoral process and that these actions certainly influenced some people and may have interfered with their legitimate right to vote. That is scary for a democracy. Where would they have even learned how to do this? This isn’t like sending six unordered pizzas to the opposition’s campaign office or some practical joke. This really is something that only somebody like “I am not a crook” Richard Nixon could come up with.
I have tons of questions but the biggest is one that someone else posed today that really struck me between the eyes. Why are we just finding out about this nine months after the election? It reminds me of the infamous “in and out” scandal that we didn’t hear about until years after another election. Some people, maybe lots of people knew about this long, long ago and nobody said a peep. Maybe they were hoping that they could sweep it under the rug. Again.
If the allegations reported are true I think that the responsible “party” should be punished. And not with fines or jail terms although I wouldn’t be sorry if that happened. The only solution that would be fair and just would be to have by-elections in any and all electoral ridings where they took place. Never mind a House of Commons committee or a Royal Commission or another Gomery-type Inquiry. We need new elections.
And not only that but in any riding where these actions took place and they can be traced back to a candidate or political party, that candidate and political party should be barred from participating in that election. Now that would be justice!!
It’s easy to make a decision but it’s much harder to get everyone on a team to agree with that decision. Over the years that has led most organizations except the military to move away from command and control into some form of decision making where people at least get a say before final decisions are taken. That has led to a steady increase in the use of consensus building as a means to reach a decision in the workplace.
The consensus model of decision making is much older than modern management. In fact one of the oldest consensus models is from the Iroquois Confederacy Grand Council which traditionally used consensus building to make decisions. But it also has roots in many North American pioneer movements including the Quakers and the Anabaptists.
During the 1970’s it received a major boost of publicity when it was used by the anti-war and fledging women’s movements but Japanese business had been using this approach for many years before that. Just like many other positive elements of Japanese corporate culture, consensus decision making has been on the rise inNorth Americafor the past 50 years.
Consensus decision making is best utilized when there is a divergence of strong opinions on a weighty matter that has caused dissension in the ranks or when there is a very important strategic decision to be made. When you really have to decide which fork in the road to take then this approach might not only help you make the right decision but it also allows everyone on the team to feel like they have truly participated in the discussion and the outcome.
The consensus model of decision making usually includes an attempt to reach as much agreement as possible by having a discussion and a decision that meets as many of the team’s concerns as possible. Other elements include trying to ensure equal input into the process and allowing all stakeholders to have a say into the process by including their input and suggestions.
One tool which I use in facilitating a consensus comes from the B.C. Labour Development Board and it works in situations it is clear that you do not have full agreement. Once everybody has had a chance to speak and ask questions on a topic then you then you tell them that each person will get one vote on the proposal. Then you call on each person to say where they are on the consensus scale as follows:
- Yes. I agree completely
- OK, I can and will live with this decision.
- OK, but … I do not fully concur with the decision, and need to register my view to the group about it. However, I do not choose to block the decision and will not advocate against it.
- No. I do not agree with the decision and feel the need to stand in the way of this decision going forward.
- I need more information before I can make a decision
- I am totally opposed.
Usually this will eliminate most holdouts from what is clearly becoming a consensus and even those who feel strongly against an idea have a way to get out with their pride and ego intact.
This is just one example of how consensus decision making might work and there are many variations on this model and the underlying approach. Try one out for yourself and see how it works. It’s much better then “just do it because I said so!!”
My thoughts on the changes at Ottawa’s public transit service plus suggestions for the new boss to improve labour relations and customer service.
The sudden departure of Alain Mercier as the head of OC Transpo is welcome news but by no means a panacea to the troubles of our public transit service. Labour strife swirls above its head like the sword of Damocles. And we have the unsightly views of one bus driver yelling obscenities and another singing his way beautifully but almost out of a job. Almost everybody is wondering what the heck is going on at OC Transpo.
But even with all this background noise it is important to note at the outset that we have a good transit system for a city of our size. The buses and transit stations are relatively safe and clean, the buses are well-maintained, mostly on-time and with a very few exceptions are staffed by courteous and polite operators. There is a well-spring of support for our transit system and almost everybody in the city wants to make it work.
OC Transpo is a system that is strained but not broken. It works. It has some serious problems including a tense labour relations situation. But now at least it has one of the perceived barriers to fixing some of these problems out of the way. Alain Mercier as the general manager of OC Transpo certainly deserves some of the blame for the bitterness of the dialogue between drivers and management. But it also must be remembered that he inherited an LR mess at OC Transpo which has been toxic and fatal in the past. He also followed the direction of ex-Mayor Larry O’Brien who seemed to want to apply his macho tendencies to employee and union relations. And we all know how well that worked out.
Thankfully there is a new sheriff in town at City Hall and now at least an interim new head at OC Transpo. This should mean that things get better in labour relations, if only because it’s hard to see how they can get worse. But unless a few steps are taken even that is possible. The first step that John Manconi should make is to call the unions, especially ATU, the bus driver’s bargaining agent and schedule a get to know the issues meeting. The second thing that he should do is to write a quick memo to all staff saying that he is new on the job, he’s going to take some time to figure out the issues, and that he respects and supports the people under him to do a good job.
There are many more things that he needs to do, including putting some space between him and Alain Mercier’s regime, but starting off on the right foot with the staff and unions is crucial. As he is going through his review at OC Transpo I would also encourage him to take advantage of some of the resources that are available in the community to assist him in dealing with his staff and unions. One suggestion that I would offer is to set up a labour relations advisory committee made up of former management and union representatives who live inOttawaand can make suggestions and offer him and his team advice on how to improve labour relations at the company.
The other major challenge facing Mr. Manconi is one of public confidence in the transit system. Even though there have been only a few isolated problems that have surfaced there have been enough to get people, both drivers and passengers a little irritated and cranky. That is not to undermine or defer any attention from the real cases of violence against drivers or abuse by some operators, but I do think that the volume has been turned up pretty high and needs to be lowered. Mr. Manconi could do this by setting up a Transit Users Council that consists of representatives from the commuting public (not “experts”, in fact one criteria might be that you have a monthly bus pass), the bus drivers union, and OC Transpo management as a neutral chair. They could advise OC Transpo on a new rider/driver protocol and other ways to improve and enhance services, as well as being a place where both riders and drivers could take personal complaints.
The other change that needs to happen at OC Transpo is to look at making the service a real hands-off crown corporation of the City ofOttawa. There are just too many political hands trying to grab the OC Transpo football and run with it in too many directions. Set up a permanent Transit Board and let it focus on running an efficient and effective transit service. There can be a direct liaison with Council but leave the management, both day to day, and long term planning to transit experts. There may be some growing pains as Councillors are weaned from the transit trough but in the long term we will get the transit system we deserve inOttawa.
One final thought about OC Transpo is that this is that the firing of Alain Mercier is a wake up call for all OC Transpo employees, especially the union leadership, that the ownership has had enough with the chaos at the bus company. This is just like a hockey team that has fired its coach or general manager to send a message to the players that it’s time to up their game. The time is now for improvements in both labour relations and overall operations at OC Transpo. Let’s hope all of the players can get on board.
mike54martin 