In our work, we get news that affects what we are working on all of the time. There is the inevitable “emergency du jour” that gets our day off track every day. There are legitimate changes in priority of the tasks we are working on for the day. And there are surprises that we simply can’t control.

Any and all of these changes affect the schedule and quality of the work we do. The changes require us to communicate bad news to our managers.

Communicating bad news, in my opinion, is a job skill that needs developing. So how do we effectively communicate bad news?

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One of the coolest blog names out there is Evil HR Lady. Hiding behind the cool name, though, is someone offering great advice. The advice comes from questions. Since it is summer and the time for vacations, I was not surprised to see a vacation question come up in “The Strangest Vacation Policy I’ve Ever Seen.”

And it was. Wow…

Here is the question:

We are a very small company and, up until now, haven’t had a need for anything more than a vacation policy. Recently, I have been placed in charge of creating a sick leave policy or PTO policy. My research has lead me to wonder about the legality of our vacation policy. Basically we are given a set number of days off for various years of service. Where the issue lies is taking the vacation time.

If vacation is taken during the months of November through February, we are allowed to use ½ day of paid vacation time per full day off; if vacation is taken during the months of March, April, September and October, vacation time is day for day; if vacation is taken during the months of May through August, 1 ½ days of paid vacation time is used per day off. So if I take 5 day vacation in January, I only have to use 2 ½ days of my paid vacation time. If I take the same vacation in July, I have to use 7 ½ days of my paid vacation time. Bonus in the winter, but for those of us who have school-age children, the summer months are family vacation time and time off from school in the winter is limited.

Do you have any insight into this? Is it legal to require employees to use their vacation time in this manner?

I get that it is a small company. Where I go off like a prom dress, though, is having a company reward and penalize you for your vacation time based upon time of year. It is as if you were a hotel room and charging $350 a night for the week of the big convention and $150 a night when it is not.

You will note there is no focus on the work here. Simply more regulation of your time off than they already do. And, in the United States, there really isn’t enough vacation time to recover in the first place. To then take away additional time from you because of the time of year makes a bad situation even worse.

In my comment on the post, I said that if this were the vacation policy of a company I was interviewing for, I’d never take the position. And if this became the vacation policy in a company I worked for, I’d be looking for another job the same day.

I don’t get to say, “Oh, I’ll do half the work you expect between 8 AM and noon, but will give you 1.5 times the work you expect between 1 and five.” Yet, that is what the company is telling you about your time off.

It looks like we will have to wait a long time before companies finally get that work is about results and not time. If work was really about results, you wouldn’t even need a vacation policy.

What do you think? Would you work for a company with this kind of vacation policy? Does the vacation policy influence you taking a position with a company?

Scot

If your job skills are really going to work, they need to work for you and your manager. Really, if your manager can’t recognize your job skill or make great use of your skills, you’ll lose.

Getting your manager to understand and appreciate your job skills could be a daunting task. But one of the simplest ways of ensuring your manager understands your skills is…

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Do you remember your first career job? The first one where it counted? The one you had to explain to someone else what you do since you were no longer in school?

Since then, whether a year out of school or right at retirement, your whole career has changed. If you are like me, many of those career changes were unplanned.

After getting burned over something that happened at work, laid off when you weren’t expecting it, or dealing with a management’s mismanagement, we start looking for career management advice.

Advice? That’s advice?

Most of the advice, honestly, is crap. At best, the advice is theory. At worst, the advice is nothing more than trying to get you to hire someone to help you find a different job. Then they go away. This was the initial reason I started writing Cube Rules: provide solid advice about career management.

Even if you are looking for a different job, there’s little advice out there to help you decide if where you are looking is the right industry, the right company, or the right manager for your skills and ambitions. There is the theory, but no one to tell you what the theory means.

I started where you are: looking for great advice and career management understanding and not finding it. Over time, as I have written about becoming a Cubicle Warrior, I’ve found there needs to be more and better advice about career management for knowledge workers and their managers.

There is great content on Cube Rules and it will stay that way. But there are career management subjects that don’t fit neatly into a business site. Most blog articles, including those on Cube Rules, are typically short and the time spent on the site by a person is fewer than three minutes. Not enough time to learn about the context behind the article.

Yet, people looking for good career management information also want a site that provides the “deep dive” into career management. A site that offers plain talk on industries, companies, and management teams. A site where the knowledge worker toiling away in a cube is the hero and not the expendable resource in a layoff. People just like us.

Enter Cube Rules Membership

Membership will provide you with privileged access to comprehensive coverage of the most important topics on career management for knowledge workers. In addition, reporting on critical industries, companies and management teams that will affect your career management decisions.

If I carefully look at what brings people to Cube Rules over the past years, they break into five categories begging for added content:

Brilliant Basics

This is the “block and tackle” work of a career ignored by most company management and training. Subjects like setting performance goals, SMART goals, and reporting results. Writing performance reviews to status reports so your work is visible to management and distinguished from your co-workers.

Managing Management

There’s a reason you can have an entire section in Business Week about “toxic bosses” — there are too many of them. But there are also excellent managers and managers everywhere in-between. Each new manager represents another opportunity to shine — or die in the job you are in. Knowing which manager you have and how to deal with them are subjects we look at hard in Cube Rules Membership. You don’t think your company will provide this advice, do you?

Cubicle Warrior Networking

Career Networking is all about helping others so we can receive help when we need it ourselves. Yet, company training for networking rarely occurs despite the diverse workforce across the company — and the planet. How do you help your co-worker in a different country and how can they help you? And how can you help your cube-mate in a way that brings success to both of you?

Cubicle Warrior Personal Branding

Personal Brands are the rage, but what do you do to implement them in managing your career? How is Personal Branding any different from simple reputation management? The Membership articles explore building and managing personal brands in a time when your co-workers are as likely to work on the other side of the globe as well as the cube next to you.

Keeping the Castle

We put much of our heart and soul into our work. Or, if not, our time. But companies are heartless and will lay you off in a cold-blooded minute, changing your life. How to keep your life, family, and financial well-being are important and rarely discussed as part of career management. They are discussed here.

Cube Rules Membership

For a $60 annual membership, you will have access to all the articles on these topics from the archives and as written.

Plus, you will receive specific members-only monthly reports on the latest layoffs, industry in transition and company changes that all foreshadow big changes for knowledge workers.

It’s the cost of less than two lattes a month.  Membership at Cube Rules is about career management mastery.

Become a Cube Rules Member.

Scot

Cube Rules is all about working in cubes and wanting to provide our best work to us and our team.

Yet, despite all the work we do, we are dissatisfied and so is our team. We sense never-ending work on a task or project with no end in site. We hit the treadmill of work rather than the upbeat employee engagement of accomplishment.

How can this happen?

Knowledge work is different from previous work. At my summer job in college, I worked in a paper mill where, in one shift, we produced 750 cases of diapers, 12 boxes to a case and 12 diapers to a box. 108,000 diapers later, I was done for the day.

Knowledge work isn’t the same. Instead, it requires critical job skills about the work.

What’s your most important job skill about knowledge work?

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In a change of heart lined with dollars, InBev and Anheuser-Busch agreed to merge this past weekend. A brief review: InBev offered up some $65 per share for Anheuser-Busch and the American brewer would have none of it. Instead, after Anheuser-Busch came up with a “Blue Ocean” strategy to cut $1 billion in costs and improve earnings. These planned cuts included reductions in pension and health care benefits (why am I not surprised…Scot).

After nudging from shareholders and a few more billions of dollars, the deal was done.

What does this mean for Cubicle Warriors?

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