What might happen if the law changed and your work had to pay you overtime whenever you used your smart phone for business during weekends and evenings?

Brazilian Law
Brazil just introduced a new law that would require companies to pay their staff overtime should employees use their company phone to make business calls or answer emails.
According to an article in Financial Times, this could create a fierce debate among countries that seek to boost productivity in the work place as industries face increasing competition from cheap imports. Should, for example, unions insist on this overtime – as in the case of Volkswagen in Germany – companies may end up blocking after-hour emails and texts to avoid the rising expenses?
Here’s the Problem
In a recent report on CNN, a journalist asked a Brazilian how he felt about devoting so much time on the weekend to work-related phone calls. His answer? “What’s a weekend?”
And yet, psychologists generally agree everyone needs weekends. They call it downtime. The frontal lobe – that part of our brain that makes logistical decisions and puts out fires – desperately needs a break. Over-tasking our frontal lobe can force us to rely on the lower part of the brain, and the pressure it puts on us could cause us to make dumb errors.
To make matters worse, imagine an Orwellian world where companies as well as the government can track our every activity 24/7. Especially if we’re using a company account, our daily activities are easily tracked, and it is likely over the next decade we will see more and more examples of people getting in trouble for saying and doing things that can be seen and heard on their Blackberries and I-phones.

Work Emails- Anticipate The Future

Anticipate the Future
So why can’t we make better use of our time at work and forego all the hours we spend at night and on weekends answering business emails?
My first suggestion would be to make certain the Company acknowledges this issue as a problem and recognizes the advantages of downtime. Unless you’re a robot, programmed to work 24/7, every human being needs time off. Without it, we often suffer burnout.
Secondly, sit down and have a strategic planning meeting: What are we doing that’s wasting time? How can we manage our time more wisely so that a fraction of the day is devoted purely to non-work? Time management will increasingly become an essential part of everyone’s workload. In fact, someday it might be listed as an important factor when choosing a place to work.

Work Emails- The Key Is Time Management

Chosen #1 for Knowing How to Manage Time Wisely.
Learning to be a productive time manager will safeguard your valuable private time, save the company thousands of dollars in overtime, and even give the boss and her staff a well-deserved weekend off in Tahiti.
Well, we can dream, can’t we?

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Work Emails- Time Management Is Key.

Ready to Play?

Imagine the following: Your manager insults you in front of your team during a meeting. Let’s say she picked on you and accused you of something you never did.

Instead of defending yourself immediately in front of your peers, you wait – 45 minutes – until the meeting is over and confront the manager privately.

Choose a partner, decide who’s the boss and who’s the embarrassed employee, and practice what each of you might say to each other.

Let the Games Begin

What are the advantages to playing anger management games like this at a training workshop?

You can teach people how to deal rationally with explosive emotions by having them role-play safely with their peers.

Do we lose our cool sometimes? Yes.

Does it waste time and cause stress and frustration? Absolutely.

So in a couple of hours, participants can discover options. They learn inappropriate and appropriate language. They see what body language and tone gets them in trouble and what methods they can use to increase engagement as well as productivity.

Anger Management Games- Rules of the Game

This particular anger management game, for example, hits home with most employees and employers because who hasn’t been the brunt of someone’s tirade? It’s so common. Whether it’s live at a meeting or written in an email/tweet or Facebook entry – we are very likely to have to respond to someone’s brutal remarks. Rather than shut down and become defensive, what can we do to deal with it?

The problem particularly with anger management games is that sometimes they get out of control, so here are some rules that may help you run the training day more effectively:

1. Create a fun, light-hearted setting using fictional role-plays. However, zero in on one very specific issue that is important and vital to the health of your organization: i.e. bullying. Do not cover too much. Stick to one issue.
2. Discuss it as if it were a case study. Analyze the answers and come to some agreement. I.e. here’s a good way to handle that situation in the future.
3. Hire an expert (either internal or external) to run the training. A trainer, for example, should find out ahead of time what outcome the Company wants so that the games are orchestrated to create very specific results. I’m not a big fan of surprises.
4. Prepare ahead of time through research, 360s, or interviews. Unearth the problem first and then figure out who should attend, what you want to cover, and what you want to accomplish.
5. De-brief at different times during the session (not just as the end) to make sure you’re on target, meeting the needs of the entire group.

Anger Management Games- How To Register

For more help on anger management games – specifically controlling that inner jerk when running a meeting, writing emails, or delivering conversations – hire Gary Seigel for an amazingly helpful, interactive, and inspiring day of training. gary@garyseigel.com

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Helping You Deal With Anger Constructively

The planning department from a city government recently ordered workers to delete any emails that reflected badly on city leadership.

The employees were told they could face disciplinary action if such emails weren’t purged.

Then, a week later, the Mayor dubbed this decision to delete old and potentially unflattering emails a “mistake.” My suggestion for the future? Educate  the staff ahead of time so that no purge is ever necessary. Make certain employees write emails – even candid ones – that treat even challenging situations with tact and finesse.

The Problem with Email-Only Communication

In an email-centric environment, where most staff members communicate only through writing, it would not be unusual to find mistakes – casual, gossipy, unprofessional comments – sprinkled throughout emails. If your company has no policy regarding email and social media, with clear boundaries and rules, disparaging remarks could haunt your company’s reputation.

Insults Galore

A little over a year ago,  a Florida newspaper printed emails from two very well known local attorneys engaged in an insult war. One called the other a “ bottom feeding/scum sucking/loser lawyer. ” The other responded vindictively, accusing the lawyer of being…well… cuckolded: “ Better check the garbage man that comes by your trailer to make sure  (your children) don’t look like him).”

Imagine being the clients of these two, quite successful lawyers and discovering that off camera, they behave like four year olds?

A New and Urgent Policy

Whether you’re an attorney, an admin assistant, a clerk, or a corporate president, never ever put anything in writing that you wouldn’t want others to read. It’s as simple as that.

Meet with your staff and set clear boundaries as to what goes into writing and what stays out.

The alternative?

Encourage feedback, suggestion boxes, live conversations, and candid or supervised meetings.

Have you got something to say you’re fearful of saying? Teach staff members how to say it tactfully. Or encourage three-way discussions so that a neutral party, trained in listening, can observe and monitor a discussion.

Discourage any one from putting anything in writing that is unflattering and demeaning.  That way you avoid risking an exposure that could hurt reputations or even crush careers.

Want to inspire your staff to write better and faster? Save time and money poring over documents? Avoid expensive clean up, phone calls, and disciplinary action? Bring Gary in for a half-day or one-day Email Boot camp and make certain everyone understands and respects the new rules of 21^st century technology. He can be reached at gary@garyseigel.com

During a long meeting with a client, stretching into early evening hours, Daren — an advertising exec — tweeted dozens of messages while pretending to pay attention to the discussion with a difficult client.

“Dude, I should thank this agency for letting me stay here until 7:30. Who needs an evening to oneself?”
“X Industries asks the dumbest questions. I can’t believe I’ve had to sit here and deal with this for what? – four hours?”
“Oh. Wow. More stupid questions? ”
“ Blah blah blah. Who needs a life”?

Career Suicide

I’m not making this up. This is for real. I just fictionalized the guilty and modified the tweets. Imagine if you were the client or the boss and discovered this stream of sarcastic comments on twitter. What would you do?

Watch out for BIT’s

Hard to believe that someone would put these off-the-cuff comments in writing and risk not just the future of an account, but the company’s reputation and his job. Unfortunately, many of us have a compulsive need to share – anything and everything – including our innermost thoughts in writing. And to make matters worse, Darren had a beer around 4:30 and so who knows? He may be writing Beer Induced Tweets (BITs)– not a good habit to get into.

Can’t we Learn Something from Alec Baldwin?

True, Mr. Baldwin ‘s angry, full-on, expletive message to his daughter a few years ago was not a tweet but a voice mail. Still, it went viral, and it tainted his image in the public eye. Karen Friedman, in her book Shut Up and Say Something, claims he regrets those remarks every day of his life. The main difference, though, between Mr. Baldwin and us? (Well there might be a number of differences but the one that matters?) He’s a BIG celebrity whose success on Saturday night Live and the hit series 30 Rock redeemed him. In fact, even after this humiliating incident, Capital One hired him as their spokesperson.

Redemption is for Special People

Redemption in the business world is a rarity. It’s one thing to say something inappropriate, apologize, and let the words evaporate. But when written words go viral, they take on a powerful punch: We may end up paying the consequences for some time to come. Just remember for every Alec Baldwin, there’s an Anthony Weiner or a Michael Richards, or a Mel Gibson, or for that matter, Richard Nixon.

Four Rules You Must Follow, and here they are:
What can we do to prevent us from writing inappropriate entrees in Facebook, Twitter, or in an email?

1. Acknowledge Your Problem. Face the mirror. If you’re an impulsive speed writer and believe in sharing everything – whatever it might be – accept the curse and refuse to let it take your soul. Attend one of my workshops, and I’ll teach you a formula you must follow every time you write an email, a tweet, or a Facebook entry that would ensure your success.
2. Edit rigorously. We think it makes us look cool to say exactly what’s on our mind, as if we believed we’re immune from disaster. Realize that what you leave out in your writing is as important as what you put in. In social media, editing is essential.
3. Develop a healthy sense of doubt. Our personalities are such that we truly think we can get away with saying anything because, well, man, can’t you take a joke?
What’s the big deal? I’m just saying it like it is. Don’t you have thick skin? You know that’s not what I meant.

Snap out of it. You don’t know who might read your tweet. It could be shared, broadcast, or duplicated. Develop a healthy sense of doubt, and doubt every word, every adjective, before you press, “send.”

4. Turn off your cell phone. We’re trained not to speak our minds but to write what’s on our minds. That’s a strong pattern in social media; so if you experience this temptation regularly, TURN OFF YOUR CELLPHONE during meetings. It’s unprofessional, rude, and ultimately a job killer.

Final Words from a Job Savior

Think of Twitter as a way to market your business, not to gossip. Train your staff to know what goes in and what stays out of social media and have each staff member sign an agreement that shows he or she understands the rules.

It may have seemed cute, even acceptable in high school to tweet the latest and hottest news (“My gym locker smells like barf”) but in business, this comes off quite juvenile.

F Scott Fitzgerald may be precisely right when he said, “There are no second acts. “ You screw up in business – in this day and age? You may have a devil of a time finding another boss or a client who will trust you.

When Pigs Run the Lunchroom

On   her way to an appointment to close an important deal, Mary opened the refrigerator in the lunchroom at her insurance company that morning and a pile of leftover beef stroganoff fell off the shelf onto her shoes, splattering gravy all over her new white skirt.

“I was so PISSED OFF,” she told me. “They drink my sodas. They eat my apples. They don’t clean after themselves; the fridge stinks for weeks from moldy turkey. I just lost it. I went into Fred’s office, and told him he and his staff were pigs, and I can’t stand it any more!”

So how do you really feel about it?

Dealing with Refrigerator Madness

Try not waiting until the gravy hits the shoes. When things bother you at work – even simple, seemingly petty things like Tupperware management – spell it out before disaster strikes.

Here are some suggestions regarding approaching situations like this one:

1. Don’t play the blame game. Spell out the problem, because it is a problem. Get everyone to agree that not only does the problem exist, but it impacts others.

1. Spell out the behavior we (the staff) should follow (and get everyone to agree.) Work rents out behavior. We are expected to do things at work we don’t do at home – like clean the fridge.  Spell out the rules and the behavior you expect people to follow when using the lunch room.

1. Avoid autocracy but be firm. Create a lunch room etiquette manifesto.  . I know it’s a little silly but if you can get people to understand the problem, then they will more likely buy into the solution. And what is that?  Rule #1: When you put Tupperware on a shelf, make sure it is sealed and safely on the shelf.

1. Incorporate a slight sense of humor because we’re all guilty. Well, I shouldn’t say all, but when you’re in a rush to make an important meeting, the last thing some of us think about is whether or not that coke is Bill’s or mine.  Give your staff an out. If you take someone’s lunch or soda by accident, create a rule: Buy them a new lunch or a six-pack of coke.

Business is hard enough without letting silly ridiculous things like refrigerator madness get in the way, but let the ridiculous be taken seriously for a small period of time so that it will change.

Approach it as a real problem. After all, if Mary is late to an appointment with a fussy client, gravy may have impacted both her bottom and the company’s bottom line!

In the movie 50/50, a doctor speaks to the family after performing surgery to remove a cancerous tumor on their 27 year old son and recites everything that went wrong during the operation, bloody detail after detail, never mentioning until much later in the conversation, the possibility of full recovery.

Do Doctors Really Talk That Way?

A few film critics have put down this film for the way it deals “poorly” with the medical profession, but what they fail to see is the film’s satire of doctors, who, let’s face it, don’t always have the best communication skills.

So what could the doctor have done differently?  He could have shown some empathy first, stated the  core message (Adam’s  going to be just fine), and then detailed what it’s going to take to get Adam healthy again.

Placement Matters

In business, a doomsday approach to problem situations can be equally troublesome.

Imagine a manager talking like this:

“Everything went wrong with the project.  We missed deadlines. We didn’t get the package from India on time. The information was not translated correctly, and I got in a big fight with Mr. Neruda over the invoicing.  Yet, despite these setbacks, the project was finished on time and our customer is happy.”

Thanks for putting me through that torture first.

Why not reverse the order and start with the happy ending?

“ The project was finished on time and our customer is happy. The road there, however, was rocky. Here’s what happened.”

Motivate – Don’t De-motivate Your Reader

For me the issue is the “rocky” road – and how to avoid it. If I overwhelm the reader right at the beginning with all the horrible details, without putting them in a context, it’s punitive. The reader feels beat up.

My favorite example of this – that I see far too often – is the HR manager who rattles off a list of performance issues to an employee, anything from being late to missing deadlines to having little rapport with team mates, to coming to meetings unprepared.  By the end of the message the recipient stops reading this litany of errors and feels like jumping off a bridge.

At the end of the document, the writer says – “BUT I’m sure you’ll work on these areas, and we’ll discuss your progress in six months.”

What would Fox Entertainment say about this?

I call this psycho-inductive reasoning. It works great on TV. We hear it on shows like American Idol or X Factor all the time.

A whole roomful of participants are waiting to hear if they’re on or off the show, and Paul Abdul comes forward, her voice full of sadness and disillusionment, and rattles off all the things they did wrong, and then –Surprise!   She announces that they’re all safe. “You made it to Hollywood! “

As TV drama, it works wonders!  It keeps us on the edge of our seat. Makes it exciting. Creates a huge surprise.

But in the office? It’s demoralizing.

What comes first? Bad News or Good news?

Employees want information instantly, but if you play this I’m-going-to -torture you-first game, employees not only become   de-motivated, but they lose respect for their bosses.  The trust level dwindles, even disappears

So if you’re firing someone – the direct message comes smack up front.

“John, we’ve decided to let you go for the following reasons.”

Or,

If John’s job is safe, say that first. That way John will understand the purpose of the criticism:

“We’re not firing you. We’re asking you to do these three things so that you stay on target and meet your goals.”

The issue is not whether you place the good news or the bad news first.

Let me make that perfectly clear. Because sometimes BAD news does come smack up front. The real issue here is not to let the reader wait until the end of the email for the ultimate core message that puts everything in perspective.

Remember your reader asks these questions:

What is it that you want from me?

Why am I reading this?

Give me a context for this information.

Don’t make me wait at the edge of my seat to find out what you want! Don’t waste your reader’s time.  Be a visionary. State the core at the start.

A Revision of the Doctor’s Script

So if you’re in the medical field, I’m not asking doctors to cushion the news or camouflage the truth.

Uh uh.

The preferred version might go something like this.

Instead of the surgeon starting off with a description of what went wrong with the operation, bit by bit, she could say:

“Adam is going to make a full recovery (Yea!) but while we were in surgery we had to do this and this and this and that is going to force him to do some serious physical therapy. Here’s what he can expect.”

It’s not a question of cushioning the bad news. It’s a decision to hit the core FIRST – so the reader can put the bad news in the right context.  People who have a knack for this will get yelled at less frequently and earn the reputation for being a real communicator.

Bob, a highly skilled production manager for a kitchen design company, sits in his office drawing blue prints when he hears the bell ring in the showroom, indicating a client has walked in.

Normally, one of three people helps the client: the salesperson on the floor, the secretary, or the office manager. But none of them seem to be around, so it is Bob’s job to stand up, get out of his office, and answer the customer’s questions.

He does this reluctantly.

And once he starts talking with the customer about kitchen cabinets, he hears in the hallway— the salesperson, the secretary, and the office manager chatting and laughing and having a great ol’ time.

Bob Explodes

What’s Bob’s first thought? They’re goofing off while I’m here helping a customer. Grrrrr.

I should be in my office finishing the plans but here I am doing THEIR work!!

The anger grows until finally Bob explodes.

He opens the door to the hallway and shouts to the three of them,”Hey guys I’m trying to help a customer here. Would you keep it down! Thank you very much!” and he slams the door.

Repercussions

The customer immediately feels Bob’s anger and sensing a possible war, she flees to the safety of her car.

The salesperson, office manager and secretary? They go back to their offices, build voodoo dolls, put Bob’s face on it,  and stick needles in his eyes.

It’s not until 4 p.m. that the owner, a former student of mine, walks in and asks Bob if he has a few moments.

Advice That May Save Bob’s Job

“Don’t start with me, John. I‘ve been blackballed all day long. Everyone’s been avoiding me. Like I did something wrong! I only told it like it is. These guys think they can screw off all day and I do all the work. I’m tired of it!”

John takes a deep breath. He sits down across from Bob, leans forward, and folds his hands on the desk.

“Bob, are you open to a couple of suggestions?”

“Sure why not. I’m getting paid, aren’t I?”

“If you had simply asked first to see what was going on, you might have discovered that the three of them were celebrating the closing of a $60,000 kitchen job. A nice big one, that we could fit in  quite nicely next week. “

“Oh yeah?”

“Ah huh. So if you had simply asked first – ‘Hey guys, what’s going on?’ – instead of assuming they were goofing off, you would have saved yourself from acting like a human missile. People would have talked to you,   and your day would have been much more productive.”

“What was I supposed to do – ask them what’s going on?”

“Yes. That’s really it.”

John paused. “And I suppose I could have said, ‘Congratulations. Could you help me with this client? “

“Exactly. You thought they were goofing off but you don’t know what’s going on in their heads. You can’t predict or assume anything. Do your research first – then draw your conclusions. It’s straightforward. It’s easy, isn’t it?”

Bob rolled his eyes.

“Look, we’re in rapport business. You need them on your team , and they need you. Is that something you’d be willing to do in the future?” he asked his shop foreman.

The Lesson Bob Learned

Speak LANGUAGE FROM THE EDGE first. Ask questions. Don’t assume. Get the lay of the land  before the words burst out of your mouth.

Find out first what’s going on, and then deliver the message.

Imagine the time you’d save, the confusion you’d avoid, and the rapport you’d build instantly — by simply probing first instead of jumping to conclusions.  Put this trick in your tool kit because it might save you some embarrassment and at the same time help you avoid messy clean-ups as well as desperate and costly acts of assumacide.