“$11.32 an hour,” she said. “That’s what many people can earn sitting on their couch. How am I supposed to encourage them to get off the couch when many of the jobs they qualify for don’t pay that?” This statement came from a frustrated state career center worker tasked with getting individuals off federal and state assistance through a job placement program. I could turn this conversation into a political post, but I won’t go there. Instead, I’d like to focus on how it illustrates a basic premise of motivation. I’m going to spend the next few weeks talking about
“The whole chair situation makes so much more sense now,” said a woman in a Generations in the Workplace seminar recently. As many of us looked at her perplexed, she went on to explain, “I bought new chairs for our office. I can’t get those in earlier generations to use them. They said the old ones are just fine. I can’t get the newer generation to quit standing up in them so they can talk to someone over the cubicle wall. I never knew how much headaches new chairs could cause,” she said with a sigh, but also some excitement in having
There is a lot of hype out there today, and there has been for quite of a few years, regarding generations in the workplace. It has become one of the key topics to focus on when it comes to interoffice dynamics and diversity issues in the workplace. And its fun to talk about it and classify people as such. While it is obvious that different events and cultural norms shape us all and these things can help define a generation of people (for example, who is dumb enough to think that 9/11 and the computer haven’t shaped the thought processes,
We at Horizon Point love all things that could be considered as a personality quiz or assessment, especially if they can be tied to workplace dynamics. Although we recommend using only validated assessments for things like selection, training, coaching and teambuilding, we love a fun quiz that attempts to classify individuals along popular group lines every now and then. We came across Pew Research’s “How Millennial are You?” quiz, and just had to share it. Here’s the link to take it: http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/how-millennial-are-you/ Below is a graphic of my results. I am a millennial, so it seems fitting that I scored
Whether you’re headed out the door for an interview, starting your first day of work or wanting to move up in your career, what you wear (and what you don’t) can be an important factor in success. Although the workplace has become more casual than it once was, it’s important to know the different cues in order to dress for success. Here are three tips to identify what to wear: 1. Look around you. What the majority of people are wearing around you is probably what is the unspoken norm of acceptable. I walked into my first interview for a