Links You Can Use: March 25-29

In this week's Links You Can Use, we want to highlight one article in particular that had us thinking.

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a great feature about how to get ahead in the workplace. The proposed solution may seem counter-intuitive in our competitive corporation-driven world: altruism. How would helping others make us happier with our jobs? Adam Grant, the organizational psychologist interviewed for this piece, explains it this way.

“In corporate America, people do sometimes feel that the work they do isn't meaningful. And contributing to co-workers can be a substitute for that.”

This is an echo of a sentiment we've expressed in an earlier post about job satisfaction -- that a meaningful connection between effort and reward is one of the three job factors that encourages employee retention.

Links You Can Use: November 12-16

Find out how to establish a cohesive work culture, how to "manage up" when a supervisor seems difficult, and why it's best to have zero expectations about privacy when using work email. All this, and more, in this week's Links You Can Use.

What's the most important thing in establishing a culture at work? One expert says it is the people you choose to hire and offers tips on selecting candidates. (Chicago Tribune)

A clinical psychologist offers advice on how to "manage up," especially when dealing with difficult bosses. (American Psychological Association)

Plugging the Brain Drain

The statistics are breathtaking: according to the Pew Research center,  every day from now until 2030, ten thousand Baby Boomers will turn 65. (1) Every day.

In other words, hordes of working people are retiring, planning to retire, or thinking about retiring.

Who are these people? Very often, they’re the people in your organization who best know the whys and wherefores of your projects and procedures. They’re the ones who have so internalized tasks and deliverables that they’ve never even written the steps down. They’re the ones who remember why a certain project succeeded and why another failed and how that affected the company’s direction. In short, they are the holders of what’s known as organizational memory.

And they’re retiring.

What can you do to capture their knowledge? How can you make sure they don’t take the organizational memory with them?

Study: Communicating Benefits to Employees? Better Do It in Person

We've already shared with you that employees have trouble understanding their benefits. But has there been research done to reveal solutions to the problem?

Gallagher Benefit Services recently released its 2012 Benefit Plan Report, which includes information based on a survey of 264 regional employers employing over 135,000 people.

Many interesting topics were discussed; this post focuses on one in particular: Methods used by employers to communicate benefits to employees and their perceived levels of effectiveness.

The methods used are not surprising. Email tops the list with 95.4% of respondents utilizing it to tell employees about their benefits; group employee meetings follow at 81.8%; and webcasts come in last at 40.5%. But what is surprising, at least to this blogger, is how little faith the respondents have in any of the mediums used.

Only one method received a “very effective” response of over 25%: one-on-one employee meetings, at 42.1%. In terms of combined “very effective” and “effective” responses, only one method received over 80%—again, one-on-one employee meetings. These are the methods that received a combined total of over 50%:

Friending Colleagues on Facebook: Pros and Cons

With over 900 million people on Facebook, chances are your coworkers are on the popular social networking site.

Is it ever OK to friend a colleague? That’s a tricky question. People you friend on Facebook will be able to see your information, photos, and life updates. If you have anything personal or potentially embarrassing on your profile, it could affect your professional image.

But Facebook has been around since 2004, and many users now know how to control what others see by tweaking their privacy settings. And it could be beneficial for your career to be friendly with the people you work with.

So what to do? Let’s go over the pros and cons.