Take all the vacation you want
I recently added a Delicious feed in a sidebar to the right that features links to some of my latest writing. I would have simply added this story to that list, but the Globe And Mail chose not to put the story online. (Shocking!) So, here's my recent Saturday feature about "unlimited vacation" policies in the workplace. Enjoy.
All the vacation you want - paradise or purgatory?
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Craig Silverman
Earlier this week, Steve Swasey returned from a two-week vacation that saw him, his wife and four kids snorkel in Honduras and climb ancient ruins in Guatemala. Most people would have had to check with their employer in order to book a vacation during the peak holiday season, and two weeks would eat up a decent chunk of their vacation time.
Mr. Swasey, however, is an executive with Netflix the U.S. movie-rental company, where there's no such thing as vacation days. The company offers "unlimited vacation" to its roughly 500 salaried employees.
"We have a high-performance culture," says Mr. Swasey, Netflix's vice-president of communications. "You've got to perform and do the job, so we give employees a lot of freedom and responsibility."
Vacation days were once used to judge the relative generosity of a company. Now, organizations like Netflix view the act of awarding time off based on seniority as an outdated practice that harks back to an era of paternalistic, staid corporations like, say, IBM.
Indeed, Big Blue once did enforce office hours and track vacation time. But starting in the 1990s, it began loosening its necktie. Today, the company has a worldwide policy that proscribes the tracking of vacation days. Want time off? Let your manager know. No need to file a formal request or check how many days you've already taken. It's enough to make the Man in The Grey Flannel Suit weep into his after-work gimlet.
"Employees within IBM Canada are given guidelines that they get three weeks of vacation when they start," says Joanne Moore, the company's employee-benefits manager. "That's the guideline. But there is no policing, and employees are empowered to take vacation when they want."
Both Netflix and IBM view their vacation policies as a reflection of company values and culture. The careers section of Netflix's website lists seven reasons to work there: No. 5 is Rules Annoy Us.
"Rules creep into most companies as they try to prevent errors by less-than-stellar employees," the video company says. "But rules also inhibit creativity and entrepreneurship, leading to a lack of innovation. Over time, this drives a company to being less fun and less successful."
IBM Canada views its policy as a way to empower employees. "Allowing employees to decide when or where to work, in addition to when they take their vacation is part of that," Ms. Moore says.
The message seems to be that if you love and value your employees, set them free. Let them work from home, don't demand they keep traditional hours and stop telling them when they can and can't take time off.
This philosophy was outlined in a recent book, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. Formerly human-resources managers at Best Buy, where they implemented what they call a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), they now help other companies implement the system. "ROWE means each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as their work gets done," Ms. Thompson says. "That means 8-to-5 holds no meaning any more. I can do my work from wherever I need to, whenever I need to."
Best Buy began adopting ROWE in 2003, and today employees at its U.S. headquarters are free to take time off when needed, as long as they fulfill their duties.
Best Buy Canada implemented parts of the ROWE system, but does not currently offer unlimited paid time off. "I'm not sure that our [program] is quite as sophisticated, and theirs has been in play longer," says Colin Picard, a human-resources adviser for the company. "Right now, our employees are allowed up to two days per week where they can work from home."
The move toward a less-rigid work environment goes with the emergence of technologies that enable workers to untether themselves from a cubicle. (Think of the new Cisco Systems TV ads, featuring Juno star Ellen Page, that celebrate video conferencing.)
Of course, this won't work for every kind of job. Netflix employees who are paid an hourly wage to stuff and mail DVDs to subscribers aren't covered by the unlimited-vacation policy. Nor are the workers putting in shifts at IBM's manufacturing plant in Quebec, or employees at Best Buy's actual retail stores all over the United States.
Ms. Thompson says change is slow in coming because organizations still focus on hours worked, rather than results. She calls vacation "an old benefit," explaining: "It's outdated in a sense that there's a belief that we all need to put in our 40 hours every week and we earn vacation."
She adds, "It's also outdated in terms of the belief that that we all want to separate work from personal time. Today, with people so connected all the time, there's a belief that it's bad to be on vacation and check e-mail."
The view that people shouldn't worry about separating work and personal lives runs counter to the advice of nearly every workplace and stress expert. But Ms. Thompson argues that the issue is control, and the need to give more of it to employees so they can manage life on their terms.
"There is a belief that we need boundaries," she says. "If you think about the old workplace, yeah, we needed them because you were forced to come in every day and stay until 5. ... But when you give people autonomy and control over their lives, that whole idea of separation changes - so that now I decide when I'm going to separate."
Already, in fact, many workers in Canada don't use the vacation days they have. A 2009 Harris/Decima survey commissioned by Expedia.ca found that 24 per cent of employed Canadians don't use all of their vacation days. (The average Canadian worker receives 18.7 of them a year.) The survey also found that 30 per cent of Canadians "feel guilty about taking time off work."
"We have a hard enough time taking vacation when it's given," says Beverly Beuermann-King, a stress and wellness expert based in Ontario. "If it's left up to us to decide, then sometimes external pressures and fears may get in the way.
"Especially over last year, people were afraid to take time off because they were worried about layoffs or other issues."
Mr. Swasey of Netflix says he wasn't afraid to head to Central America for his holiday, though he did take his BlackBerry with him. "I checked it two or three times a week and loved it," he says. "I knew exactly what was going on at work, and yet I didn't feel like I was intruded upon in my vacation. I was able to log in on my own time."
But Ms. Beuermann-King argues people should think about the reasons why they're checking in with the office on vacation. "If you feel like you have to check - that you will miss out or that people will think you are slacking off - then that's where there is a real issue," she says. "You're not really taking a vacation. You're just not physically there."
Indeed, one reason companies give for adopting unlimited vacation policies, or the ROWE system, is that they increase productivity. At Best Buy in the U.S., productivity went up by 35 per cent. So does that mean workers take less vacation when given the "unlimited" option?
"I have no idea," Mr. Swasey says. (IBM Canada also doesn't have that data to share.) "There's no tracking, no record, no accounting. Take what you want or what you need. No one abuses the policy because we've got adults doing adult behaviour."
Ms. Thompson and her colleague have spoken with Canadian companies, but as of now there isn't an official ROWE company in the country. If a recent experience is any indication, it may take a while: She and her co-author were booked to speak in Toronto at a recent conference, but their appearance was cancelled.
"When the people that run the conference learned about what ROWE is, they wouldn't let us come and speak because they didn't want their people to start an uprising."
An examination of “arousal procrastination”
I recently discovered that one of the world's leading experts in procrastination is based in Ottawa. His name is Dr. Timothy Pychyl and he runs the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University. I wrote an article about him for The Globe And Mail, and you can read it below.
This story looks at some of Dr. Pychyl's most recent research. Ever heard of an "arousal procrastinator"?
Procrastination
CRAIG SILVERMAN
Special to The Globe and Mail
February 16, 2009
Timothy Pychyl takes a certain amount of pride in the fact that he recently managed to make a classroom full of students and a group of lawyers squirm in their seats.
Both groups included people who said they delay work to the last minute because it brings out the best in them. Thanks to research he recently completed, Dr. Pychyl, an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University and director of the school's Procrastination Research Group, was ready to call their bluff.
"I told them, 'It's not that you work better under pressure, it's that you only work under pressure.' "
His explanation, which was delivered during a procrastination seminar at an Ontario law firm and during a university class, caused both groups to become visibly uncomfortable. "They hate it when you call them on their excuse," Dr. Pychyl says.
The research, which has been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, found that people who claim to require the pressure of an impending deadline to produce their best work - called "arousal procrastinators" - are in large part fooling themselves. "It seems to be one of the last socially acceptable defences for procrastination," Dr. Pychyl says.
"They're saying, 'Don't pick on me, this is part of my personality and character.' But our study says we don't see any evidence of that," says Dr. Pychyl, who has spent two decades researching procrastination.
Dr. Pychyl and Kyle Simpson, a recent Carleton masters graduate, asked 311 undergraduate students to complete an online questionnaire that assessed their personality traits and level of procrastination to see if a correlation exists. Research published in the 1990s suggested there is a subtype of procrastinators who are the same people who indulge in sensation-seeking behaviours such as skydiving, or who have extroverted personalities. These so-called arousal procrastinators put things off because they required a higher level of stimulation to perform.
"It seems counterintuitive that someone would consciously wait until the last minute to do something, because most of us know that's quite stressful," Dr. Pychyl says. "These people would say, 'That's why I do it.' "
But in their research, Dr. Pychyl and Mr. Simpson found no correlation between personality type and procrastination. Their resulting research paper, tentatively titled "In search of the arousal procrastinator" concludes that "individuals who claim that they are motivated to procrastinate because they believe they work better under pressure are likely fooling themselves, providing a seemingly believable explanation to excuse their procrastinatory behaviour."
Dr. Pychyl says people cling to the idea of working better under pressure in an attempt to "reduce the dissonance of what they're doing - which is nothing - and what they should be doing - which is working."
Isolde O'Neill, the president of Getting It Together Personal Organizing in Toronto, frequently encounters clients who claim they do their best work at the last minute.
"I'm seeing it more often now among really high-performing professionals," she says. "They are near the top of their industry or profession and that strategy has worked for them until now."
Ms. O'Neill says she is brought in when a person's organizational habits are failing them - and procrastination is often a factor.
"When you defer and do things in a rush, eventually everything [in your life] becomes a last dash," she says. "It's not just that one project - you'll have the same last-minute system for getting up in the morning. It isn't about thriving, it's about surviving."
In theory, a true arousal procrastinator would thrive under last-minute pressure. But that wasn't supported by the research.
"When people do things at the last minute, what they feel when they accomplish it is not joy but a sense of relief that they pulled it off," Dr. Pychyl says. "That marks a procrastinator."
He says research has found that procrastination has a negative effect on a person's happiness.
"Just getting started on a task is a way to prime the pump to increased happiness and success," he says. "Procrastination actually undermines our well-being."
Because of the research, Dr. Pychyl feels empowered to challenge self-professed arousal procrastinators.
"One of the lawyers came up to me at my talk and told me, 'You've painted me perfectly with this brush,' " he says. "These were intelligent, articulate, argumentative people, and not a soul came up and told me I got them wrong."
He hopes these findings will prevent people from believing they do their best work at the last minute.
"There is little evidence that people work better under pressure," Dr. Pychyl says. "This doesn't mean that there aren't people who procrastinate for arousal reasons, but they are fewer in number than we ever imagined."
However, as Ms. O'Neill can attest, general procrastination remains quite common.
"Whenever somebody calls me for a job I assume it won't happen for a year," she says. "That's how much they put it off."
RenderMan to the rescue
Contained in today's Globe And Mail is the latest issuse of TQ, the paper's quarterly technology magazine. I wrote the cover story about wireless security hacker Brad "RenderMan" Haines. He's a talented white hat hacker based in Edmonton, and the profile raises a lot of important issues about wireless security. The full text is up on the Globe's website, and I've pasted it below.
RenderMan to the rescue
Dressed in a black trench coat and his trademark fedora, Brad Haines cruises city streets and malls on the hunt for wireless networks that are prime targets for hacking. Just be grateful he's one of the good guys
CRAIG SILVERMAN
Globe and Mail
July 22, 2008
One day last December, Brad Haines pulled a long black trench coat over his black shirt and pants, perched his trademark black fedora on top of his straight, shoulder-length hair and strapped on a backpack filled with a laptop and other electronics. And, like many people in Edmonton during the holiday season, he headed to the West Edmonton Mall.
The mall is home to more than 800 stores and occupies a space equivalent to roughly 48 city blocks, so Haines knew he'd have no trouble finding gifts. But he wasn't here to shop. No, this expedition was all work. His mission: Take a "warwalk" of North America's largest mall, using his equipment to search out unsecured wireless networks as he walked past the building's stores. (Do it in a car and it's called wardriving; on public transit, it's warriding.) The point of wardriving isn't to actually access anyone's wireless network—that could result in warjailing. Rather, the idea is to simply survey the number of wireless networks within the building, evaluate their level of security and alert the owners to any vulnerabilities.
Haines, 28, had been wardriving through the streets of Edmonton since 2002 and had catalogued roughly 80,000 wireless networks, whether home-based or those belonging to companies. But the mall represented uncharted territory. "Nobody had done a good wireless survey of the West Edmonton Mall, and if you throw in Christmas shopping crowds, it's a little more interesting," he says. "Everything lined up for a really good guerrilla analysis, because you have big crowds and a massive amount of spending going on. If you're thinking as an attacker, that's the time of year you want to do something, because there are so many more targets."
Haines's fondness for wardriving, plus his all-black "uniform," would lead the average executive to conclude that he's a nefarious hacker. But since he first began mapping WiFi networks in and around Edmonton, Haines has become well known as a wireless security expert, often consulting for companies and government agencies (non-disclosure agreements prevent him from naming names). And he's regularly invited to speak at major security and hacking conferences in North America and Europe, including DefCon, ShmooCon and Hackers On Planet Earth, or HOPE. (A few of his recent presentations: "Legal and Ethical Aspects of Wardriving," "Standards Bodies ... What Were These Guys Drinking?" and "New Wireless Fun From the Church of WiFi.")
Though his trademark headgear says otherwise, Haines is a so-called "white hat" hacker—one of the good guys. His corporate clients know him as Brad Haines, but he has earned the most notoriety as RenderMan, the alias he uses online and within the WiFi hacking community. Haines maintains a Website, renderlab.net, where he posts his research, reports, presentations and the occasional article. "He's pretty well known, and he's well received at the [hacker] conventions," says Frank Thornton, a Vermont-based security consultant and the co-author of Wardriving & Wireless Penetration Testing. "He's a role model for some of the people out there who are getting into this stuff."
One of Haines's key contributions to the wardriving community is a code of ethics (see page 46). It dictates that wardrivers must never connect to a network they discover, should always obey traffic laws and stay off of private property, and never use the data collected for personal gain. The seven-point list also says wardrivers should adopt the hiker motto of "take only pictures, leave only footprints." "It's one of the things he's really well known for," Thornton says.
The countless hours spent mapping and analyzing thousands of wireless networks has enabled Haines to see firsthand the rapid growth of wireless Internet access in homes and businesses, and the lack of effort put into securing them. "To put it in perspective, the first time I went out wardriving in 2002, I found 25 networks in an evening driving all over downtown Edmonton," says Haines. "I can now drive around my block and get 25 networks."
He says that five or six years ago, roughly 70% of wireless networks were completely unprotected. That means that no encryption (such as the standards WEP and WPA) was used to protect the data flowing over the network, and no password was required to join. Today, that number has shrunk to 30%, but it's still dangerously high when you factor in the huge growth in the number of networks, and the fact that many of them are now run by companies. "In absolute numbers, there are more unsecured business networks out there than before, because there's a high underlying growth," says Toffer Winslow, vice-president of product management for encryption company RSA. His company conducted a study of wireless networks in 2007 that revealed that 25% of business networks in New York, London and Paris had no encryption whatsoever. A year earlier, a survey by research firm Gartner Inc. found that 64% of U.S. businesses were planning to expand their use of wireless networks.
At the time, analyst Rachna Ahlawat said wireless networks were fast becoming a "standard part of enterprise networks, covering entire facilities, not just meeting rooms."
That means they've also become a standard target for those looking to infiltrate corporate networks. One particularly devastating corporate wireless security breach was on Haines's mind as he began planning his mall warwalk late last year. The victim was TJX Cos. Inc., a company that operates discount chains such as T.J. Maxx and Marshalls in the U.S., and Winners and HomeSense in Canada. In January, 2007, TJX revealed that attackers had gained access to systems that process and store transaction data. This enabled them to steal customer credit card numbers and driver's licence information. In the end, more than 45 million credit card numbers were compromised between 2005 and early 2007, making it the largest breach on record. "The chink in their armour seems to have been their wireless network," Haines says. "It had been a year since that happened, and so many people I know had to get new credit cards because of it. My thought was: Has anybody actually learned anything?"
Surveillance and screen envy in the office
As an editor noted in an email to me yesterday, Monday's Life section in the Globe And Mail was something of a "Silverman Show." I wrote two features in addition my usual Monday Office column for the paper, which means my name was pretty much splashed on every page. Apologies.
The first feature was about the supposed productivity benefits of giving workers a widescreen monitor. It was awarded the lovely headline, "Hold the bonus - give me 24 inches of pure joy." Ahem. You can read the article here. I recommend checking out the comments on the story, as people are sharing their experiences with big screens and multiple monitors. The piece also quotes from a blog post by entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, a big believer in the monitor-productivity link.
The second feature is about surveillance in the workplace. New technologies are offering employers unprecedented options for monitoring or tracking employees, and this story outlines some of the common ways for checking up on workers. It also details a Microsoft patent filing for a rather unbelievable monitoring system. The story is here, and the comments are once again worth a read.
How do these two stories fit together? Well, it's easier to see what someone is working (or not working) on if they have a gigantic screen. Apart from that, I've got nothing. What a silly question.
Enjoy the Silverman Show.
The 2007 Office Awards
It's been about nine months since I started writing The Office column and blog for The Globe And Mail, and my December 31 offering was a look back at the year in workplace stories. It's online here and the full text is below.
The 2007 Office Awards
Looking back at a long year on the job
CRAIG SILVERMAN
December 31, 2007
From gun-toting co-workers to bosses who bring in police dogs and hired thugs, it was a year of the ridiculous and the sublime in the world's workplaces. Here's the best of the best, the best of the worst, and the ones we still can't quite understand.
Worst Workplace: Chinese brick kilns
Office denizens ain't got nothin' on the grievances of workers at Chinese brick kilns. Kiln owners were found to have engaged in “illegal employment practices, abduction, restricting workers' personal freedom, employing child labourers and even murder.” What else? Owners “made use of fierce guard dogs and hired thugs, who bashed labourers, adults or children, at will.” Oh, poor you and your lightless cubicle.
Worse Employee: Drunk ambulance driver
Police pulled over an ambulance driver in West Virginia after they saw him run two red lights. They soon discovered he had a patient in the back and that he thought he had turned on his siren and lights. Then, big surprise, he failed a field sobriety test. Get me 40 ccs of unemployment, stat!
Best Office Time-Waster: Faceball
Two employees at photo-sharing website Flickr this year created Faceball, the latest in office gaming (check it out at Faceball.org). The concept is simple: Two people sit in chairs three metres apart and lob a beach ball at each other's face. A facial hit garners one point. The Faceball slogan? “Your face, our balls.” The lure of said balls? “It's actually enjoyable getting hit in the face by your opponent,” said Dunstan Orchard, one of the creators.
Best Office Exit: Angry auction employee
From a farewell e-mail sent by a Christie's employee to colleagues at the auction house: “I feel it is best to quickly express my fondest appreciation for some of the endearing ideas that I have seen peddled around me: like how everyone seems to be replaceable, thinking outside the box is liken to heresy, favouritism is thicker than water and speaking the truth gets you in trouble.” Anyone for farewell drinks?
Worst Workplace Idea: Police-dog training
A New Zealand grocery distributor upset employees after announcing a plan to let law enforcement officials use its facilities to train police dogs. Included in the announcement was a totally unrelated reminder that the possession of drugs and weapons at work was illegal. “This is a workplace, not a prison,” Laila Harre, a union official, told a local paper. “This is about the training needs of the police and the whim of bosses to scare the living shit out of us.” If all goes well, employees may expect to see SWAT training on the premises next year. Drop that kumquat and kiss the floor, produce punk!
Most Dedicated Employee: Carla Bird
Ms. Bird, an assistant at Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Studios, worked 800 hours of overtime during a 17-week period, which equals roughly 12 or 13 hours a day, seven days a week. But the kicker was that her claim for $32,000 (U.S.) of overtime was paid in full. Maybe it's time to hire the assistant an assistant?
Best Lawsuit Excuse: Massages and sausage
James Bonomo, a former paper-sales manager for Mitsubishi International Corp., sued the company alleging he was subjected to a night of drunken karaoke followed by a forced “non-sexual massage” at a bathhouse while on a business trip to China. While in the bathhouse, he alleges, his supervisor compared his penis to an “Italian sausage” and another colleague snapped a picture of it with a cellphone. Even Dunder Mifflin's paper salesmen would be appalled.
Serves You Right Award: The Texas shooter
An employee at Al Boenker Insurance in Texas shot himself in both legs after bringing a gun to work and placing it in the pocket of his jacket. According to one media report, “The bullet passed through the man's left leg and then his right leg and through the corner of a bookcase before lodging in the wall of a cubicle occupied by a startled female co-worker.”
The local police chief said the man “just felt the need to carry it” that day. Now he'll just feel the need to walk with a cane.
Most Evil Gadget: GZ PC-Sport
The obsession with desk-bound exercise continued unabated this year. The worst piece of office exercise equipment was the GZ PC-Sport, a step machine that connects to your computer and fits under your desk. If you stop stepping, it freezes your keyboard or mouse. As if that doesn't happen enough already.
Best Work Quote: Gregg Adams
Mr. Adams, a professor of veterinary biomedical sciences at the University of Saskatchewan's Western College of Veterinary Medicine, spends his days arm-deep in the rectums of various animals to check if they're pregnant.
When asked about his job, he said, “Have I been pooped on by an elephant and a rhinoceros? Yes. I've been up to my shoulders in it.” Keep reaching for the, er, stars, Gregg!
Outstanding Achievement in Special Effects: IvanAnywhere
Ivan Bowman is a Nova Scotia-based employee of iAnywhere Solutions, based in Waterloo, Ont. In order to make his presence felt in the office that's 1,350 kilometres from his home, the company created IvanAnywhere, a robot stand-in that roams the hallways and attends meetings. Everyone seems to like it, but wait until they realize THE ROBOT ACTUALLY CONTROLS THEM!
Sources: Daily Mail, Kitchener-Waterloo Record, PassiveAggressiveNotes.com,, Manawatu (New Zealand) Standard, The New York Times, Shanghai Daily, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, Fort Worth (Tex.) Star-Telegram, Associated Press.
Too busy organizing to be productive
Below is a feature I wrote for The Globe And Mail (link) about the exploding productivity industry.
Too busy organizing to be productive
The quest to find better ways to manage work and life may slow people down in a flood of paperwork, e-mails, blogs and books
CRAIG SILVERMAN
The Globe and Mail
September 24, 2007
Colin McKay begins most meetings by taking out two of his essential productivity tools: first, his BlackBerry; second, a Moleskine notebook he has divided into sections using coloured tabs.
To anyone in the know, that heavily tagged notebook is a dead giveaway: Mr. McKay is GTD.
"That's the calling card," says Mr. McKay, 38, director of communications for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada in Ottawa.
GTD stands for Getting Things Done, a personal productivity system created by David Allen, whose bestselling book of the same name was first published in 2001.
Today, Mr. Allen's company employs 32 people and expects to earn $6-million (U.S.) in revenue this year from book sales, public seminars, corporate training sessions and a variety of GTD organizational accessories, including wallets.
At a time when stressed, overwhelmed and unproductive workers are grasping for better ways to manage their work and lives, a whole industry of productivity systems, websites, blogs, newsletters, books and experts has sprung up, focusing on major issues in time and workload management right down to ridiculously minute and basic activities.
"GTD helps me create checklists for myself," Mr. McKay says of the method, which uses tools such as e-mail and paper file folders, index cards and notebooks to organize commitments and workflow. "It has given me that little bit of a sense of order."
But as the productivity-obsessed swap tips online and around the office about filing systems, checklists and time management, advice often moves from the practical to the arcane. And the glut of suggestions and systems can actually cause people to become less productive while trying to master a constant barrage of new methods.
"Some people are system junkies," says Janet Barclay, who runs Organized Assistant, a productivity and organization consultancy in Hamilton.
"They try something and say, 'This is the greatest!' Then next year they spend all their time learning a new system."
On Lifehacker.com, a popular productivity site, a tip about managing e-mail or running a more effective meeting can be followed by a link to "15 awesome uses for aluminum foil." (Hint: You can sharpen scissors with it.)
Gina Trapani, the site's editor, says she's surprised by some of the tricks and tips sent in by productivity-obsessed readers.
"We've run some tips about incredibly mundane everyday activities that people put a lot of thought into speeding up or making easier," she wrote in an e-mail. (Ms. Trapani preferred an e-mail interview because, she wrote, "the telephone can be an inefficient way to communicate.")
One writer for the Productivity501 website is on a mission to achieve the elusive goal of a paperless office.
At 43 Folders, another well-known productivity site, the editor declared a "War on Clutter" around U.S. Independence Day this year after reading It's All Too Much, an anti-clutter book.
Mr. McKay says he follows the productivity websites but "draws the line where people describe in detail how they made a pen holder for their Moleskine and then get into a debate about which pen they use."
Mr. McKay confessed his own moment of system overload on his blog, CanuckFlack.com, when he wrote about "staring at a desk covered in GTD flowcharts, Covey checklists, coloured folders, varying sizes of Moleskine notebooks, and the latest DIYPlanner."
While some find it hard to stick to one system, others profess an almost cult-like devotion to their chosen approach. A dedicated GTD practitioner recently created a series of GTD fan buttons for sale online. One features a picture of Mr. Allen inside a pink heart with the words, "gtd 4-ever."
"David Allen said it, I believe it, that's the end of it," reads the product description. "This is a set of three buttons that celebrate the bliss of being organized."
And it's not just adults getting carried away with the productivity craze. In January, Geoff Ruddock, a 15-year-old student in Grade 10 at St. Andrew's College in Aurora, Ont., teamed up with some friends to launch Gearfire.net, a productivity blog for students. He can now talk the GTD talk with the best of them.
"I wanted to get on the headmaster's honour roll, so I looked for tools and ways to work smarter, not harder," he says.
"I see some people that really try hard but are always run down, and others who have a lot of initiative but don't have the time-management skills. I wanted to do well and wanted to make my time more efficient."
Is this something he picked up from his parents?
"Yeah, they get a lot done," he says.
New column and blog in The Globe And Mail
The Globe And Mail, Canada's largest national newspaper, today unveiled quite the face lift, not to mention a bit of lipo. Aside from a total redesign, the paper also slimmed down a little bit. It's very Guardian-esque, and perhaps a bit sexy. (Yes, I can find newspapers sexy.) The paper also launched a new section, Globe Life. And in that section is a new weekly workplace culture column by, well, me. It's called The Office and I will also be writing a related blog for the new website. My first column is below and online here. The blog is here. RSS feed here.
WORK: THE OFFICE: A WEEKLY LOOK AT WORK CULTURE
Haunted by the ring tone from hell
When
the Blackberry service went dead last week, many people felt helpless
and disconnected. Patrick Tuite likely wished the outage had extended
to cellphones in general.
A lawyer representing John Boultbee,
who is being tried along with Conrad Black in Chicago, Mr. Tuite was at
the mercy of the court last Tuesday when a cellphone in his possession
kept ringing with the theme from The Exorcist. The judge confiscated the phone and put it in her office, where one assumes it continued ringing and speaking in tongues.
Mr. Tuite can take comfort in a 2007 survey of British cellphone
users by phone retailer Dial-a-Phone: 44 per cent of them admitted to
committing a "ring-tone faux pas."
And in a 2006 poll of U.S. workers by staffing company Randstad USA,
30 per cent listed shrill, ringing cellphones as their biggest office
pet peeve.
While movie theatres, schools and other public places make a point
of telling people to turn off their phones, the office remains the
haunt of flagrant phone ruffians.
People take calls or answer e-mail during meetings. Some cannot bear to remove their Bluetooth headpiece for even a
second; others talk at a perfectly normal level on an office phone only
to bellow on their cell as if trapped at the bottom of a well. Not surprisingly, all seem partial to ridiculous, loud ring tones.
"My ring tone is the quietest one possible," says Adeodata Czink, a
Toronto etiquette coach and president of Business of Manners. "The Exorcist was funny but not appropriate."
Ms. Czink says phones should be turned off in all meetings unless
you're expecting an urgent call, and the choice of a ring tone is just
as important as the volume. Keep it low and unobtrusive, she says. Try the vibrate setting.
Remember that a ring tone says something about you, and that something is often mouthed from behind your back.
Now that's something to be scared of.
ADVICE OF THE WEEK
Clearing the air
“I know this may sound silly, but I get very distracted by noise,
and I often hear a lot of belching from your cubicle. If you're able to
do that more quietly, I would really appreciate it.” – A workplace
expert's suggested phrasing for approaching a co-worker who burps
constantly. If that failed, moving to another cubicle was suggested.
Crumbling Rolaids into his coffee was not. (Hartford Courant)
PRODUCTIVITY
April showers bring office slackers The
rainy, slushy April weather that hit Eastern Canada last week probably
also took a toll on workplace productivity. A survey of 6,000 workers
by CareerBuilder.com found that 21 per cent admit to being less
productive when it's raining outside and 9 per cent when it's snowing.
ART MEETS OFFICE
The creepy old guy “I think every office has some guy like Creed in it,” Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight Schrute on
The Office,
told New York magazine when asked if the show's characters mimic real
life. “You know the character Creed? He's the old guy – there's always
some creepy old guy sitting in a corner, and nobody knows how long he's
worked there or what exactly he does. Everyone has worked with a Creed.”
BY THE NUMBERS
Size matters
291 Average amount of square feet of an executive office in 1987. Today, the average executive office is 241.
98 Average square feet of a “senior professional's” office. The average call-centre employee's? Only 50.
International Facility Management Association
Craig Silverman is a Montreal-based writer and the editor of
RegretTheError.com. His first non-fiction book will be published by
Penguin Canada in the fall.
Mobile technology hits the oil patch
I'm a bit late updating some of the recent work I've done. Below is a technology story I wrote for TQ magazine, which is published by The Globe And Mail. It's also online at their site here.
Bonanza in the oil patch
A Calgary company hits pay dirt with a wireless ticketing system for its workers in the field
CRAIG SILVERMAN
April 11, 2007
Tucker Wireline Services Canada; Calgary
Business An oil services company that provides oil well logging and perforation services to energy companies
Employees 200
Project
Equipping its field workers with mobile technology to eliminate an
error-prone and costly paper-based system for data capture, pricing and
invoicing
Initial cost $1 million—about $7,000 to $10,000 to
equip each team with a notebook computer, network access and
electronic-signature capture pad
Ongoing costs Network access for transmitting data from the field
ROI Close to $500,000 a year in savings thanks to improved billing and invoicing, and increased productivity
Dave Jellett was talking to a field engineer at Tucker Wireline
Services Canada a few months ago when he realized just how successful
the company's new wireless field-ticketing service has been. Jellett,
Tucker's president and chief operating officer, listened as the
engineer bemoaned the recent theft of his laptop. "He was crying the
blues because he'd lost the system and was back to paper," says Jellett.
Without his laptop, the engineer would have to go back to the
way things were done before the company began rolling out its new
remote workstations about a year ago. Roughly 75 of Tucker's 200
Canadian employees work in oil fields across Alberta, providing
services to such companies as EnCana and Suncor. Tucker lowers sensors
into newly drilled wells to take readings from the rock that help
decide how the oil company should proceed. "It's like doing an MRI for
the rock," says Jellett.
Tucker also provides "perforation" services—drilling holes
into the steel casing placed inside a well to enable it to start
producing oil. Tucker's field teams are constantly on the move,
gathering new data from different wells and performing whatever work
the oil companies need. At each stop, the team fills out a so-called
field ticket that includes all the key information about the job, along
with the cost of the services performed.
In the old paper-based system, each team had to fill out
several pages of forms and produce an invoice using a large pricing
book they had to lug from site to site. "They usually filled out the
paperwork on the fly, and it certainly added a couple of hours to every
job," says Jellett. That's big money: Each lost crew hour costs Tucker
$500.
Allowing
workers like Jack Domet to complete their paperwork in the field saves
Tucker Wireline roughly two hours per job or about $1,000.
The paperwork was then delivered by hand or sent via bus to
one of Tucker's field offices, in Medicine Hat, Leduc or Grand Prairie.
From there, it would make its way by car or bus to the Calgary
headquarters. "One of the big problems we had was the two to three
weeks' time it took to get the information into the office," says
Jellett. "That also meant delays in terms of invoicing customers and
getting paid, and getting the data associated with our operations into
the office."
Another hassle: engineers would often make mistakes while
filling out forms in the field. "Any time you're doing paper records,
the error rate associated with it is very high," says Jellett. "We
would have everything from pricing errors right though to
data-recording errors."
Tucker knew that field tickets wasted time, degraded the
quality of data and delayed the time between doing a job and getting
paid for it. So three years ago, the company partnered with Spira Data
Corp., a Calgary-based oil-field technology company, to turn its paper
forms into software. As for transmitting data directly from the field,
that fell to Telus. (The telco now sells the new system, dubbed
wireless field ticketing, to other oil services companies.)
Tucker's system works like this: Each three-person field team
(the company has 25 of them) gets a basic laptop loaded with the
ticketing software and a network card so it can connect to Telus's
high-speed wireless network (in remote areas where cell coverage is
unavailable, they can connect via satellite).
When they arrive at a well and assess what they need to do,
the team fills out an electronic field ticket; the software
automatically calculates how much the job will cost, thus reducing math
errors, and generates an invoice that's signed by the customer on site,
using a signature capture pad that plugs into the laptop. Then the team
sends all the data and invoices over the cell network back to the head
office, where it's processed.
Tucker spent about $1 million to get the system up and
running (all its field teams were wireless by August, 2006), and
Jellett says the company will save close to half a million dollars a
year, two-thirds thanks to the faster billing process, the rest from
increased employee productivity. "We felt we would pay for the whole
development of the system within the first two years of usage," says
Jellett, noting the company is on track to meet that goal.
There are other, less tangible savings. Jellett says his field teams are now able to better analyze the data.
"It allows them to focus on issues other than data entry," he
says. "Now they're actually looking at the data and trends of activity,
and analyzing and making decisions based upon the data."
Telus's projections for the system show an average reduction
of four weeks' invoicing time for clients, "a significant advantage
when you're talking about tens of thousands of dollars earned each
day," says
Telus's Allison Vale. "The default business case on the ROI
calculator for the wireless field ticketing solution comes up with a
return of $1.8 million over five years" in cost savings and faster
invoicing.
"Everything is captured within that notebook instead of in a
huge briefcase," says Jellett. "The field teams find it easier to use,
and the buy-in has been terrific. We had to do some work on the
education side with a few customers because they're stuck in the old
way of doing things.
But it's a better system for them as well because it makes
for less paper and material for them to handle." Still, he admits some
customers prefer having the old few weeks' delay before seeing an
invoice from Tucker.
"I'd be lying to you if I said that wasn't the case," Jellett says, laughing.
Canada’s best small business employer
I recently wrote a profile of Teva Neuroscience Canada, a pharmaceutical company located in Montreal that was named the best small company to work for, according to a survey conducted by Queen's Centre for Business Venturing and Hewitt Associates. The story is on The Globe And Mail's website here, and the text is below.
How one firm saw the light on hiring
Teva Neuroscience nurtures a happy and productive work force by sticking to the HR basics and making sure employees strike a chord with its culture, writes CRAIG SILVERMAN
MONTREAL
-- The offices of Teva Neuroscience Canada are almost more remarkable
for what they don't have: You won't find slick furniture, a gourmet
kitchen or foosball table -- the bells and whistles that some companies
have come to believe are essential to employee satisfaction and
productivity.
Rather, people like to work there because they believe they belong
there -- and they're rewarded for their loyalty and commitment.
"Five years ago, I was reading Fast Company [magazine], and they
talked about having chefs to make lunch and playing basketball during
the day," Teva Canada general manager Jon Congleton says in an
interview at the pharmaceutical company's Montreal office. "That's the
fluff -- not the substance that can feed people long-term and sustain a
career."
"We focus on three clarities," he continues. "Clarity of structure:
Where do I fit in with this company? Clarity of direction: Where am I
going? And clarity of measurement: How do I know I did a good job?
"Maybe it's not as sexy as a lot of other things, but it is sustaining and it feels more real, and I think people value that."
Largely because of this fundamental approach to human resources, and
the way the company implements it, Teva has been selected as this
year's best small company to work for, based on a survey conducted by
Queen's Centre for Business Venturing and Hewitt Associates. It beat
out about 120 small companies for the honour.
The 62-employee company borders on obsessive when it comes to living
its values. It strives to hire the right people, keep staff
well-informed, gather feedback from them and ensure that employees know
how they fit in with the organization, Mr. Congleton says.
Teva stands out because it creates the activities, programs and
environment that make those goals a reality for all employees. And it
acknowledges their contributions with 18 different awards and other
forms of recognition, such as reward trips for meeting corporate
objectives, trophies and cash bonuses.
Advice for business travelers
I recently published a feature in the travel section of The Globe And Mail. It offers advice to business travelers heading to some of Canada's fastest-growing trading partners. Excerpt below, and full story is here.
Chinese patience and Norwegian punctuality
During his business travels, Sass Peress learned to always throw back his drink when a business associate in China said “
gambai” — bottoms up. “It is seen as rude and an expression of insincerity” to pass up the shot of strong spirits, he says.
Peress, the chief executive officer of ICP Solar Technologies in
Montreal, prepares for business trips that take him from Mexico to
China to South Korea by reading up on the culture, traditions and
business practices for each destination. “It endears you to your hosts
when you have made the effort, even though you may not get it right or
look the part,” he says. “The fact that you've made the effort will be
appreciated.”
A little forethought and research can accelerate the relationship and
save business travellers from an embarrassing faux pas. Peress
advocates being a close observer and mimic of your host's actions, but
it also helps to know ahead of time that you will be sharing drinking
glasses in Seoul, or to prepare for a four-cheek kiss after you sign a
big deal in Algiers.
Though the familiar U.S. remains our largest trading partner, these
five countries are among the largest, fastest-growing places for
Canadian trade. You could find yourself heading to one of them soon, so
here's your guide for making a valuable first impression...
Welcome
Hey there. Thanks for stopping by. I'm a freelance journalist and author in Montreal, Canada. I serve as an associate editor for PBS MediaShift, a website that reports on trends in new media and journalism. I edit RegretTheError.com and wrote a book of the same name. I'm also the co-author, with Michael Calce, of Mafiaboy: How I Cracked The Internet and Why It's Still Broken. Both books are listed to the right.
I write weekly columns for Hour and Columbia Journalism Review online, and am a former columnist and blogger for The Globe And Mail. Read my bio by clicking on the "About Me" link above, or check out the "Writing Samples" page to read some of my work. If you're interested in speaking with me about an assignment or project, email me at the address listed below.
Recent Writing/Work