On Work

Katie Boone on called to the mundane

Too often, Christians talk of call the same way a teenage girl gushes about true love. We pine and rely upon it to give meaning to our lives. We buy into the falsehood that there is one true call for each of us. If only we can get there, and only there, we will truly be who God made us to be.

This mentality shortchanges the ordinary toil of our lives.

Keep reading "Called to the mundane" by Katie Boone.

Fired!

 

"Fired!" is a film about just that, getting fired. Annabelle Gurwitch made the film after Woody Allen fired her after just a short stint on one of his films. Well done and worth watching if you want to find humor and camaraderie in one of life's more gut-wrenching experiences.

Reading between the lines in job ads

“Jargon is our way to grow lazier decision making in corporate cultures,” says Kevin Fleming, owner of Grey Matters, a neuroscience-based executive development and coaching firm based in Jackson Hole and Tulsa. “We use these words to cover up something. It could also be a way to hide some ambivalence.”

Keep reading this article from Fortune to find out what buzz words like “team-player,” “detail-oriented,” and “self-starter” really mean.

Facebook and your shot at a job

A study just published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology (“Social Networking Websites, Personality Ratings, and the Organizational Context: More Than Meets the Eye?”) found significant correlations between Facebook profiles (including content of posts, photographs, and number of friends) and five personality traits particularly important to employers: conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness, extraversion, and openness to experience.

This indicates that evaluators can reach independent agreement as to personality-related phenomena posted on Facebook. The results also show that the evaluators exhibited an acceptable degree of internal consistency reliability. Together, these results suggest that evaluators trained to assess participant profiles can provide reasonably reliable estimates of Big Five personality traits from SNWs [social networking websites].

Particularly relevant is the use of SNWs in employment selection, as an increasing number of HR practitioners are using SNW information to aid in decisions made at early stages of the selection process, though little formal research has been published focusing on the substance or measurement qualities of such information.

Read the full paper here.

Worker and beneficiary face to face

For many of us it's rare to see with our own eyes the ultimate outcome of our work, or in particular, a person who has been helped by our work. Likewise, how often do any of us see the people behind the technology or conveniences or cultural offerings that keep us alive or that make life easier or more fulfilling?

I really like this GE commercial.

 

John Wesley on doing good

“Do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, to all the souls you can, in every place you can, at all the times you can, with all the zeal you can, as long as ever you can.”

 John Wesley

Peer-To-Peer Job Sites

(Reuters - By Darren Dahl) - Chris Mok, like many Americans over the past few years, lost his job in the wake of the Great Recession.

While Wok, 46, diligently sent out resumes trying to replace his Macy's marketing job he lost in 2009, he also kicked in to help his wife, Isha, run Hi'iaka, her Hawaiian-themed florist shop in San Francisco.

It was early last summer, when many florist businesses see a bump in business from graduations, that Wok first heard about a site called Task Rabbit, where people can post jobs of any just about any kind - such as helping with a move, painting a room or even running an errand - or bid to work on a job posted by someone else via computer or on the go with a GPS-enabled smartphone. Mok suggested that his wife try the site out as a way to hire on a few extra hands for the busy season.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Keep reading the article: Wok says he now makes about $3,500/month picking up jobs through Task Rabbit.

Here's the link to Task Rabbit.

The Great Divorce - NYTimes.com

An excerpt from David Brook's column today in the New York Times, "The Great Divorce," about Charles Murray's new book:

"I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.

Murray’s basic argument is not new, that America is dividing into a two-caste society. What’s impressive is the incredible data he produces to illustrate that trend and deepen our understanding of it."

Josh Haner/The New York Times

via www.nytimes.com

A photo tribute to the cubicle

By David Greusel for Comment magazine.

A Christmas meditation on worth and meaning

Margie Haack writes in The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation & Culture, "Comfort ye my people: A Solace for Any Man’s Heart":

"I recently read about a man who was sent to Indonesia with his family to live and work for a global corporation. He had a lively interest in natural history, so in addition to his regular employment, he began describing and drawing the island’s plants. Having learned much about the flora from local people, he included extensive cultural lore and medicinal uses. He pressured himself to complete the drawings because he was losing his eyesight to glaucoma. The effort became a large body of work, so large that he hoped to get it published. Then came a series of tragic events. His wife and daughter were killed in a tsunami. Shortly after this, his house burned down and all his drawings were lost in the fire. He eventually had them redrawn with the help of an assistant. He sent half the manuscript back to Europe, but the ship carrying it sank. Finally, after thirty-seven years of research, writing and re-writing, the completed manuscript reached his company’s headquarters. However, the company decided to suppress publication declaring that the manuscript contained trade secrets having to do with medicines and spices.

The year it arrived in Europe was 1697. His employer was the Dutch East India Company. The author, Georgius Everhardus Rumphius, died in 1702 without seeing his work published. It was finally printed in 1741.

Rumphius’ seven-volume masterpiece, The Ambonese Herbal, was not available in English until Dutch scholar E.M. Beekman began the enormous process of translating it in the year 2000. That same year he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. He, too, pushed himself to complete this massive project. It was finished in November of 2008, just before he died. This past year, (2011) it was published posthumously by Yale Press. Beekman never saw his translation in print."

Keep reading.

CareerBliss' 50 Happiest Companies for 2012

"We’re proud to reveal the winners of CareerBliss’ Happiest Companies in America Awards for 2012, thanks to thousands of employees from around the country.

Of the thousands of companies nominated for this award, the 50 winners have been designated as the happiest places to work in the nation, based on their own employees’ company reviews and ratings posted on CareerBliss!

CareerBliss’ 50 Happiest Companies ranked the highest among their employees on the key factors that contribute to the overall happiness at work, including the company culture, the work they do, how they work and the people they work with."

Read more.

On reading list: The Wage Slave's Glossary

On reading list: The Wage Slave's Glossary by Joshua Glenn. Listen to an interview with author Joshua Glenn. More here at the book's homepage.

Silk vs burlap

From Joseph Roth's, Report from a Parisian Paradise:

"They make silk in this city [Lyons]. The business districts are full of it. All the signs refer to silk. In every shopwindow you see silk. All the women wear silk, even poor working-class women.

Are poor people who weave silk ten hours or more each day in any way better off than their fellows who produce merely burlap sacks? They don't earn any more. You can't eat silk. Social science isn't used to computing the value of refinement of the product as a factor in the weal or woe of the workers.

But it's my conviction that it does make a difference whether you produce silk dresses or burlap sacks. A little glimmer of the deluxe product touches those who make it. And just as coal miners are the saddest workers in the world, so I think silk weavers are among the happiest, after confectioners. If someone spends twenty years weaving shiny, luminous, glowing threads in the all the colors of the rainbow, then his soul will be cheerful, his hand tender, and his brain apt to think consoling thoughts."

Eric Gill

"The most important motives for man's activity in doing or making are neither animal instincts nor caprice. We hold that love is more important and not merely prettier than instinct. Upon such a ground and from such a place of vantage we survey the works of men. We see all things as evidence of love. We make what we love—in accordance with our loves so we make. A pair or scissors, no less than a cathedral or a symphony, is evidence of what we hold good, and therefore lovely, and owes its being to love."

Eric Gill, A Holy Tradition of Working.

An interview with Tom Nelson

 

An interview with Tom Nelson, author of Work Matters.