business

Illness And Silicon Valley

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I worked from home for a day because I took rather ill.  What’s odd is I could deal with the mild nausea and weakness of what’s going around – I was worried about infecting my teams.

In many jobs I’ve had there’s always one or two patient zeroes, people who come in when sick and end up infecting everyone.  There are the inevitable statements by managers that yes, if sick, work from home, that are then promptly ignored.

Then everyone gets sick.

So I had a few thoughts:

First, despite the ability to work from home, many people forget they can do it.  It’s kind of automatic.

Secondly, people worry working from home looks lazy.  This is probably subconscious, but is still an issue.

Third, I don’t think the statements by many a manager to stay home have settled in for many people.  Which is kind of weird when you think about.

I think those of us in technical fields need to rethink how we handle illness, sick days, and so forth.  We need to do so because right now it’s hard to effectively manage the issue.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

The Truth Of Meetings

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Meetings seem to be the bane of most businesses.  And employees.  And people.  I judge this by what people tell me, and by my own experiences of slowly fading out as I sat through a meeting that had no reason to be.

Of course meetings are necessary.  I find them useful to resolve conflicts or sign off on agreed-on things, but why do people schedule so many meetings?

I find meetings are usually held when other things don’t work.  Meetings are treated as the duct tape of management.  The greatest reason for these meetings is to tell people stuff, so meetings are often done because statuses and status reports aren’t clear or communicated.

Of course sometimes you don’t even need the status reports, but people make them anyway.  Long, pointless, complex, unneeded, too short – we’ve all seen bad status reports.

Of course status reports are needed when simple communication isn’t enough.  Sometimes that’s the truth – and sometimes people just communicate poorly.

So really – too many meetings are often due to people just not talking to each other.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Promoting Professional Geekery #13: Involve Your Business

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Trying to promote professional geekiness, encourage your fellows to turn hobbies into jobs, or at least hook up fellow fans with careers?  Get your business involved.

Maybe it's your business, maybe it's someone you work for, but find ways to get your job directly involved in promoting the fan-to-pro lifestyle. 

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