If workers aren't being paid for their time, the real charity is the business itself… Businesses love to “contribute” to charity almost as much as they love using pizza parties as a band-aid solution for morale. For one thing, it's a great look for the business after the marketing team gets its hands on the photos taken on the day and then makes a bunch of social media posts grossly exaggerating the company's involvement and contributions. Even more importantly, almost all expenses involved in…

When it's your job to ensure important information is protected, and someone insists that you delete it, even if it's the client themself, you'd be right to pause for a moment and reassess the situation if something doesn't sound quite right. Clients tend to woefully overestimate their abilities in the matter they're contracting you to handle, so they may be asking you to do something they don't fully understand the implications of. This tech support specialist worked for a small organization,…

If you've ever worked in an industry with technicians or mechanics, you know there is one rule that must be followed: Never (NEVER) touch their tools—or tell them how to organize and manage them. This is true even if the company provides the tools, but it is especially true if the mechanics buy and use their own toolsets. As one commenter cleverly pointed out on the original thread, this story was shared: Asking a mechanic to organize or tidy their tools so that you can borrow them is like your…

There is just a certain degree of oversight that doesn't need to occur in any situation. Sure, you might like to keep a tight lid on operations and your staff, but you can guarantee there are certain things that you don't need—and probably don't want—to know. At any rate, there reaches a point in your career where enough is going on underneath your level of authority where requiring any one thing to pass across your desk will result in an amount of work that you can't possibly keep up with. You…

There's this trend that happens in every industry, across every workplace, where managers think they've come up with a clever and original new idea to increase profits. See, there are really only two ways to do this: Increase revenue or decrease expenses. However, increasing revenue is hard and takes effort and new ideas, so instead, they start looking at the bottom line. The first place they're going to look at at this point is staffing. Employees and labor are huge expenses, and management is…

Everyone is going to have bad days, but when your bad day is also someone's first impression of you, they're probably going to think you're just like that all the time, and at the very least, you can't blame them for being cautious in ensuing encounters with you. Similarly, when you're new, it's always best to follow the rules, whether or not those are written company guidelines or unspoken social agreements and the status quo of the existing team. Coming in and rocking the boat will earn you s…

Some people just don't respond well to rejection, even when that rejection comes in the perceived form of an employee handing in their notice even if they've never treated the employee well or cared much for them in the first place. Anyone who has been around the block a couple of times in their career will know how this goes. They'll say it's about betrayal and the fact that you're leaving your ream high and dry with a touch of “How could you do this to us,” this might be followed by silent tr…

“Math is important.” “You're going to use this one day, so you'd better pay attention.” Welcome to today's edition of “Is your employer smarter than a 5th grader…” These are things we were told in school, and it's clear some people didn't listen. That's all well and good; it's not like you're actually going to use differential equations in your everyday life, but it stands to reason that having a base understanding of the way the world works or even having the ability to accept that there are t…

“Rules for me but not for thee” is a phrase you'll see bandied about whenever there is an unjust application of rules by undeserving leaders in instances where they are making themself an exception to their own rules without any explanation being given. This hypocrisy will earn them the ire of their subordinates, who are disgruntled at the lack of fairness and the fact that they're having their own conditions worsened.

Turning a power-tripping authority's own methods against them b y adhering rigidly to their strict rules—turning the authority they love so much into their own downfall or to be “Hoist with their own petard,” as Shakespeare would have put it. And there's a reason why this theme is so pervasive throughout history and intriguing to us through to the modern day, the poetic justice of someone's own misuse of authority against them by turning their orders into a perfect act of defiance.

Some managers insist that their workers would take any opportunity to slack off, and this attitude is especially pervasive in any industry where staff are frequently off-site and operating in a multi-site environment, like in delivery or maintenance scheduling. Meanwhile, these same managers are comfortable at their desks obsessing over this single point and trying to thwart their workers from slacking while achieving very little themselves. This cynical view prevents them from taking any feedb…

They always say that you should fake it till you make it, and it's no secret that a little bravado will get you a long way. Sure, there might be an inverse relationship between confidence and competence—since you need to know enough about something to know how much you don't know, which makes you less confident as a result. But a lack of competence certainly doesn't stop people from getting jobs when there's confidence on display. But what do you do when you fail so epically upward that you fin…

The problem with writing or saying too much and flagging issues with your organization is that leaders will just default to considering you to be the problem, especially in instances where they are actually the problem but don't want to own it. And, let's face it, any issues within an organization are issues with leadership. At the end of the day, they're setting the course, and issues fall on their shoulders. But, they're not going to want to accept that, so someone who is flagging issues, whe…

Taking the initiative will get you far in most workplaces, even though it's technically your manager's job to make sure you have work to do. But the last thing any manager wants to do is chase staff around to make sure they're being productive, and anyone who has managed staff who never do anything they haven't been explicitly told to do knows how frustrating this can be. So, just them knowing that you're actively trying to get as much as possible done without their oversight will bring them so…

Change is inevitable, no matter how we try to escape it or ignore it by burying our heads in the sand. The thing is, change is also pain, as whenever something new is to be learned, there is always going to be a process of failure and adaption and a loss of the comfortable and familiar, which is why people might try to avoid change in the first place. We can then conclude that, by associative properties “change is inevitable” and “change is pain” can just be simplified to “pain is inevitable”—b…

Higher education is interesting in the sense that it can mean wildly different things because—well, people are wildly different themselves. We perceive, retain, and apply information completely differently from one another. No two people are the same. While holding an advanced degree can mean you're intelligent, it doesn't necessarily mean that, and it's usually the people who insist that they're better and smarter than everyone else because of their degree who fall into that “not necessarily”…