Time should have taken a page out of Slashdot's book and named their POTY "the anonymous coward". If they had, they could have discussed the nature of anonymous discourse on the internet (and talk radio) [the freedom to take a more radical position than you would talking face-to-face with people since your neighbors can't be sure it's you]. From there they could discuss Coulter, Colbert & Stewart, S. R. Sidarth, MSM vs. journalistic blogs, etc.
I was a manager and am now back to being a regular employee (who leads a team).
Coming up through the ranks I thought that staff meetings were a waste of time, but I was wrong. I rarely held formal staff meetings and attempted to manage by wandering around. The problem I found with this was that certain people were easy to talk to one-on-one and others weren't, so through reticence messages I needed to give to the team as a whole were delivered late to some. These people felt I played favorites, and unconsciously, I did.
I rewarded people with monetary rewards and always accepted comp. time, but the reward that got the best response from people was just not having them come in when their project was finished (not employee-initiated comp. time, but like a suprise holiday).
The perk I always liked was free t-shirts commemorating a project. I didn't wear them much, but I liked wearing them outside work as a badge of what I do. This perk died at the turn of the century. Am I alone in this?
Since I stopped being a manager these are the worst things I've seen that you can do as a manager in your staff meetings:
Read powerpoint slides from meetings you've attended without offering any insights or interpretations.
Start your meeting with the phrase "I really don't have anything to talk about" then proceed to talk for 45 minutes anyway.
Say "Well, I know something about that, but I can't say anything" and then not say anything.
Differences between managing in 1999 vs. now:
More people telecommute and never come in so you need to manage over the phone. This is much harder than you'll think it will be.
The "R" in VCR was always an extra for most people once the video store took off. Only a tiny minority of VCR owners recorded television on tape (time-shifted). Most VCR owners barely recorded anything, they just rented tapes. Judging by the tapes I've bought on eBay, most people who did record things recorded movies from the premium cable services because buying a movie on tape was $79.95 and up. The $20 dvd purchase price made taping movies less cost-effective. Once DVDs were rentable (and DVD players became as cheap as VCRs) the VCR was dead.
The automation of recording daily material with a PVR (i.e. soap operas) may revive time-shifting, but the purchase point for most television shows on DVD is low enough that long-term storage (or write-to-DVD) is probably a niche market.
I still have a lot of VCRs and a lot of tapes, but they don't get much use now.
In the case of burned-out employees that companies care about, I'd bet the tasks they're working on now that burned them out take less hours than the interesting tasks pre-burnout they spent 60 hours a week thinking about.
Part of this is how forward looking the work is. Would you rather tell people "I helped create Google's latest internet toy" or "I helped Windows load 2 minutes faster"?
Slashdot Mirror
Time should have taken a page out of Slashdot's book and named their POTY "the anonymous coward". If they had, they could have discussed the nature of anonymous discourse on the internet (and talk radio) [the freedom to take a more radical position than you would talking face-to-face with people since your neighbors can't be sure it's you]. From there they could discuss Coulter, Colbert & Stewart, S. R. Sidarth, MSM vs. journalistic blogs, etc.
I was a manager and am now back to being a regular employee (who leads a team).
Coming up through the ranks I thought that staff meetings were a waste of time, but I was wrong. I rarely held formal staff meetings and attempted to manage by wandering around. The problem I found with this was that certain people were easy to talk to one-on-one and others weren't, so through reticence messages I needed to give to the team as a whole were delivered late to some. These people felt I played favorites, and unconsciously, I did.
I rewarded people with monetary rewards and always accepted comp. time, but the reward that got the best response from people was just not having them come in when their project was finished (not employee-initiated comp. time, but like a suprise holiday).
The perk I always liked was free t-shirts commemorating a project. I didn't wear them much, but I liked wearing them outside work as a badge of what I do. This perk died at the turn of the century. Am I alone in this?
Since I stopped being a manager these are the worst things I've seen that you can do as a manager in your staff meetings:
Read powerpoint slides from meetings you've attended without offering any insights or interpretations.
Start your meeting with the phrase "I really don't have anything to talk about" then proceed to talk for 45 minutes anyway.
Say "Well, I know something about that, but I can't say anything" and then not say anything.
Differences between managing in 1999 vs. now:
More people telecommute and never come in so you need to manage over the phone. This is much harder than you'll think it will be.
The "R" in VCR was always an extra for most people once the video store took off. Only a tiny minority of VCR owners recorded television on tape (time-shifted). Most VCR owners barely recorded anything, they just rented tapes. Judging by the tapes I've bought on eBay, most people who did record things recorded movies from the premium cable services because buying a movie on tape was $79.95 and up. The $20 dvd purchase price made taping movies less cost-effective. Once DVDs were rentable (and DVD players became as cheap as VCRs) the VCR was dead. The automation of recording daily material with a PVR (i.e. soap operas) may revive time-shifting, but the purchase point for most television shows on DVD is low enough that long-term storage (or write-to-DVD) is probably a niche market. I still have a lot of VCRs and a lot of tapes, but they don't get much use now.
In the case of burned-out employees that companies care about, I'd bet the tasks they're working on now that burned them out take less hours than the interesting tasks pre-burnout they spent 60 hours a week thinking about. Part of this is how forward looking the work is. Would you rather tell people "I helped create Google's latest internet toy" or "I helped Windows load 2 minutes faster"?