They found that when employees worked from home half the time:

• Employees saved more than $1,700 per year in gasoline and car wear and tear.
• Office equipment energy consumption fell from approximately 130 watts per hour at the office to 64 watts per hour at home
• Commuting was more than 98% of each employee’s carbon footprint
• Working from home saved the employees an average of 2.5 weeks of commute time

Work Green, friends.

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It’s estimated that about one in four people suffer from a phobia of some sort. When we think of phobias, most point to arachnophobia — the fear of spiders — or claustrophobia — a fear of tight spaces. One of the most common phobias is a fear of public speaking, a usual part of office life. But when does a fear turn into a major phobia? That happens when you’ve lost the ability to control it, when it becomes extreme and irrational and it has a detrimental effect on your life.

Some phobias that can pop up at the workplace are a fear of speaking in front of others, a fear of socializing, a fear of heights or claustrophobia are all phobias that could affect your working life.

How can you tell if your fear has gotten out of control and is verging on panic? If you feel that you’d rather quit your job rather than make a presentation to your co-workers, then you should think about getting some help. If you work on the 20th floor of a building but refuse to take the elevator and are always late because you’re hiking it up 20 sets of stairs, you need to address the problem. It’s normal to get nervous before a presentation but you should be able to manage that anxiety, even if it’s a deep-seated fear that harks back to forgetting the words of your speech to your Grade 5 class.

If you get bitterly cold feet about speaking in public, your best defense is to make sure you’re completely prepared. You can at least take solace that you’re ready to face the crowds if you know all your facts and papers are in order. Confidence is key in this situation. You can also rehearse your speech in front of a friendly crowd, say your favourite co-workers or friends or your spouse.

The best way to deal with your intense anxiety is to face your fears head-on. Take a deep breath and take the elevator to the 2nd floor. Then get off and walk the rest. Then try taking the elevator to the third floor — repeated exposure will help you realize that nothing bad is going to happen to you. Desensitizing is the best way to manage phobias.

Some phobias can be too debilitating for people to manage on their own. To get rid of that fear you’re going to have to face what terrifies you and it might require the intervention of a professional.

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Blogging, and the latest craze, Facebook.com, are all the rage now. And more and more people are turning to the Internet as an avenue to vent their frustrations with their job and their workplace. But that can lead to trouble. Workers need to think twice before they start complaining about their job online where it can be read by anyone — including your boss. Even comments on other blogs can be found and read.

The first tip? Keep your comments to yourself, and don’t spout off in a public forum. And if you insist on blowing off some steam about your workplace on the ‘Net, then it’s best you learn how to keep yourself anonymous online. That could mean using a pseudonym and making sure no personal details are connected to the site. (very hard to do, and I don’t recommend this)

What about writing on your blog or lingering on Facebook during work hours? That can get you into even more trouble than spouting off about your boss or workplace. The best advice is to keep to your work if you’re on the job. A survey in the U.S. found that more people were fired for goofing off on the ‘Net during work hours than for criticizing work on their blog.  Almost every party or social event I go to these days, someone has a story or anecdote about someone getting fired at their office because too much time was spent on facebook.

For example, reports say earlier this year a worker at a brokerage in the U.K. was warned by his employer after he was clocked at spending about four hours a day on Facebook. But instead of heeding the warning, the employee posted the note on his Facebook site.

If you are writing personal stuff online either on a blog or on a Facebook profile, you really just need to use common sense. Racy or revealing pictures, lots of swearing, negative comments about your workplace are best avoided it you want to play on the ‘Net and not have it affect your job.

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That’s profound. Users found the site using 226 thousand different keywords.

That’s the nature of users. They simply don’t fall into just a few select keywords, like the obvious jobs, work, job board, or employment. What we’re talking about here is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to our web site from search engines. It’s not, necessarily, the effort of focusing in of a few select keywords. It’s also a marketing effort where we chase the ‘long tail’, and SEO (and SEM, or Search Engine Marketing) is a great example of “long tail marketing”.

I’m obsessed with metrics and analytics, and there’s some interesting things happening here. I’ll give some examples. The site got lots of traffic from people keying the single word “jobs”. But that’s not the complete story. When a person finds the site using the word “jobs”, how long do they stay on the site? How many pages do they visit on average? Important to know for ALL inbound keywords (yes, all 226 thousand of them) because it gives us a clue into the “good” keywords (those that drive lots of traffic) and “bad” keywords (those that only drive a little traffic). To paint another example, people came to the site from the keyword “Air Canada jobs”, but because the site has no jobs from air Canada, they quickly left unfulfilled (not spending much time, or viewing many pages). So, it’s not a quality keyword, even though it has the word jobs in it. Other keywords, “find brampton unemployment news” for example, gave the site users viewing an average of 155 pages, and spending close to an hour on the site. Who do we chase after? Hopefully the answer is easy. The answer is far more complex, however, than simply looking at the few obvious keywords.

Also, it’s very important to understand that search engines are becoming more and more localized. Google, for example has had national versions of search (google.ca vs google.co.uk) for a long time. It’s because they “localize” the results. When in the UK, I’ll find different results when searching for “jobs” than I will while in Canada. Well, it’s only a matter of time before the search engines localize further (to the city? to the province?). Someone sitting in Vancouver might get different results than someone in Halifax. For a site that has lots of jobs in Vancouver and none in Halifax, it’s reasonable to expect that the site should show higher in Vancouver than in Halifax because it’s more relevant and useful. In fact, I think it might already be happening on Google. That’s important for us to understand, because it means when we look at search, it might show different results for us than for others. Google is beginning to customize based on YOUR personal history too, so two people searching the same word sitting next to each other, might in fact show different results.

It means that it’s important for us NOT to judge our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) effectiveness in search by looking at search! (the same holds true for Search Engine Marketing, or SEM paid keywords). The only way to really look at our effectiveness is by looking at our inbound traffic and the analytics. The fact remains for the jobsite was well over 1/3rd of all traffic was coming from Search Engines (orgainic listings, not paid search), proving that it’s being found, and seen, and clicked on. There’s always room to grow and get better, but I don’t think it’s wise change or optimize only for a few select words. We’ll get far better traffic trying to get traffic from other less obvious keywords (the long tail).

Food for thought:

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… and these data tables:

March 28 (Bloomberg) — U.S. newspapers suffered their worst drop in print advertising sales since industry record- keeping began 57 years ago, hammered by the housing-market slump and competition from the Internet.

Revenue plunged 9.4 percent to $42.2 billion, from $46.6 billion in 2006, the Newspaper Association of America said today at its Web site. A 19 percent rise in Internet ads to $3.17 billion cushioned the decline.

From: http://www.bloomberg.com/

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The first thing a worker who is “pink slipped” should do is try to relax and not panic. Take your severance and take stock. Remember that life after layoff doesn’t have to be bleak. There are other jobs out there. But don’t just slap together your resume and jump at any job that happens to come your way. That’s not the best way to move forward in your career. Take this change as an opportunity to look for a better job, to take stock of your career path and decide which direction you’ll take now. That could mean going back to school, starting a new career entirely, or starting to work for yourself.

“Don’t Panic.” That’s tough to do when you’ve just lost your job. True, but it’s vital. Even when a slew of people are laid off from one workplace, the jobs they do are varied so people won’t necessarily be competing for the same job openings. But get help to make this next transition. If your employer – soon to be former employer – offers any kind of job placement or transition assistance, take full advantage of it. It can only help.

Next, set in motion everything else you can to find what job opportunities are available. Of course, use the Internet, update your resume, talk to friends and former colleagues about what’s going on in their workplace. The more people you talk to, the more you’ll find out about new opportunities.

Nowadays, it’s almost commonplace for a worker to be laid off, downsized, or get fired. Few employees stay in one workplace for a long time anymore. However, the weeks or months after a layoff can be really tough with emotions ranging from shock, and loss to sadness and anger. Since you can’t change the fact you’ve been laid off, it’s best just to take a deep breath and starting moving forward.

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It looks like having a negative mood at work might not be such a bad thing. A recent study by professors at Rice University determined that a mix of workers with bad and good moods is what fosters the most creativity in the workplace.

The study’s results contradict traditional management thinking that the only mood wanted in the workplace is a good one.

The study found that bad moods are required to make things better on the job. Rather than trying to stamp out bad moods, they can be fruitful if bosses treat them as a necessary part of the creative process. The research suggests that negative moods are a natural part of any job and workers and supervisors should use them as a way to identify problems and find unique ways to fix what’s not working.

With the right outlook from the boss, a worker with a negative attitude can alert everyone to shortfalls in the status quo and that can then be an incentive to develop new ideas and creative solutions.

What about good moods? The study found that when workers are in a great mood, that, of course, things are going well at the moment and staff are confident. The bonus is that a positive mood can free employees up to think of the future, come up with new strategies, ideas and long-term plans.

So bad and good moods work together to boost creativity. Good and bad moods can contribute to creativity in different ways. Bad moods can pinpoint what’s not working right now and come up with ways to solve these issues while good moods can get staff thinking in new directions for the future.

The study suggests supervisors be supportive to their staff whether they’re in a good or bad mood. That means bosses need to provide meaningful feedback to workers to improve their skills, be honest about how any decisions are made, and be trustworthy. With that support in a workplace, employees will feel safe enough to voice their concerns or ideas, whether they’re in a good or bad mood, and that boosts creativity all around.

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There are more than 4.3 million BlackBerry subscribers in North America (and growing rapidly) and some of them are so addicted to their BlackBerry that they have a Pavlovian response when it silently jiggles on their hip or in their purse. They just must check it immediately, regardless of what they’re doing — whether they’re in the middle of an important conversation with their boss, in a big meeting, typing on their computer, or at home with their family. No wonder the device has garnered the nickname “CrackBerry.” One recent study by Toronto’s Ryerson University found these were “dangerous, distracting, anti-social” usage patterns that also intruded on employee’s personal time.

Some heavy users say they write and check emails even while driving down the highway, admitting they had several times narrowly escaped getting into an accident because they were too busy typing on their BlackBerry to watch the road (I personally know one woman that had three car accidents that were BlackBerry related). Still, these users didn’t see anything wrong with this behind-the-wheel multitasking. Others admitted to paying more attention to their BlackBerry than their colleagues while in meetings, and regularly checking their BlackBerry while on vacation. But the study found that these users don’t see their actions as harmful, they only see the benefit of being able to access and respond to email no matter where they are.

But BlackBerries have also freed people from their desks. The benefits are the easy and instant access to email for employees, no matter where they are, which obviously gives them more freedom to choose where they work and who gets a quick response. The device allows workers to multitask silently since they don’t have to talk on the phone. It also means they have the information on hand to make decisions immediately if necessary.

Other recent studies have examined how technology that lets you be contacted and connected all the time can hurt your productivity. Studies in the U.S. have found workers are interrupted up to 70 times a day and that distractions such as instant email notifications from ever-present BlackBerries, can take up 25 per cent of a worker’s day. However, the users in the Ryerson study acknowledged the device is a distraction, but they argued it was a necessary one that helped them manage their busy jobs better and makes sure they don’t miss a beat wherever they are.

My personal horror story happened as I was, well, ahem, “sitting down”, shall we say, in the mens’ room, and I got a BlackBerry message from my neighbour; “is that you?” Dude, that’s just wrong.

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