I started commuting by bike just after college, when I lived on Capitol Hill in Seattle and worked in the Seattle Center. Any time I drove meant circling for 30 minutes to find parking within a quarter mile of my apartment, and walking the two miles home was often faster than waiting for the bus.Read… Read more »
What’s the logical next step after your current position? We’ve all heard stories of the CEO who started picking orders in the warehouse 30 years ago. But where a defined career path used to be a reasonable expectation (or at least a believable fairy tale), these days few careers are a straight path with aRead… Read more »
Job boards, interview jitters, resumes, and recruiters. You’ve left that all behind now that you’ve landed your dream job, right? Sure, you may be perfectly happy with your current position, but it doesn’t hurt to keep your ear to the ground for other opportunities – and in fact, it could even help you excel in theRead… Read more »
When I was working as a house manager at a regional theater, I used to ask concessions stand interviewees what their second favorite Disney movie was. It always caught people off guard – it’s not something most people can answer off the top of their heads – and got at the heart of the interviewee’sRead… Read more »
It sure would help ease the interview jitters if hiring managers made it a habit to send out a list of questions beforehand. While you’re unlikely to come across one who’ll do that – seeing how candidates answer on the spot is a pretty big part of the interview – there are some old standards youRead… Read more »
Whether it’s a simple tiff over dishes in the sink or a productivity-scuttling battle over who has authority over a project, coworker conflicts can contribute massively to office stress. As with any relationship, conflicts will pop up over time – over miscommunications, misunderstood expectations, personality differences, and a host of other little things. They’re inevitable, butRead… Read more »
Modern technology can be a total time suck, providing us with hours of distractions and novel ways to procrastinate. But the upside is that technology can help us reclaim that time, too. In my never-ending quest to squeeze more out of every day I’ve been hunting down time-saving productivity apps that help streamline your tasks,Read… Read more »
If you do your job and do it well, you get rewards – better pay, a bonus, or a promotion. If you don’t, you get punishments – like a bad review or docked pay. Sound familiar? The “carrot-and-stick” approach to motivating employees is a venerable part of a manager’s toolkit, and most of us have experiencedRead… Read more »
It possible to train yourself to become happier? This question fascinates me, which is why I was intrigued by this infographic from the folks at Happify, a site where you can sign up for a daily regimen of scientifically-backed happiness-boosting games. The infographic is based on current research on what makes people happier at work,Read… Read more »
“Company culture” is one of those phrases that gets thrown around a ton, but it can actually be quite hard to unearth just what a company’s culture actually is. The interviewer isn’t likely to tell you outright that most people in the role you’re applying for burn out after 18 months, or that coworkers areRead… Read more »