Funny (or not so funny) searches that led people to my blog

 

Indirect path to my blog!

The WordPress software that powers this blog provides bloggers with lists of searches that led readers to find us, and I thought it might be a humorous diversion to share a few with you today.

Before I start, let me offer a HUGE reassurance: WordPress does NOT supply identities of. or links to, those who do a search, nor would I be interested in such a function if it was available. Also, I’ll omit any of the endless combinations of searches related to workplace bullying, employment law, etc. Given my work over the past decade, those searches should come as no surprise.

Here goes, with my annotations:

“workplace” — I guess I should be happy that this search actually led someone to this blog!

“pressure to conform to societal expectations to become a lawyer” — Alas, a lot of law students are in law school for this very reason.

“lawyers are horrible people” — I’m not taking it personally. Wonder if it’s the person above, having succumbed to those pressures.

“what free series no account” — Huh?

“inner child in the workplace” — We need more of these.

“Amazon.com quick customer response” — Sheez, I’ve written about Amazon a few times, but enough that this search would lead here?

“funny pictures of bad employers and employees” — They rarely allow themselves to be photographed.

“post-blam med school” – An M.D. will have to explain this one to me!

“butterfly effect Stephen King” — Wow, one post mentioning King’s 11/22/63 led someone here.

“David Yamada salary” – A sugar baby must’ve been getting desperate. I hope she stopped by long enough to read a few posts.

Minding the Workplace: Changes for 2012

Thank you, everyone, for your ongoing interest in Minding the Workplace, which has attracted over 200,000 hits and a bevy of insightful comments since its launch in December 2008. During the coming year, I’ll be making some modest changes to the blog. They will include:

1. Interviews and podcasts — I’ll be doing short interviews with a wide range of people connected with the world of employment relations, and I’ll be using the podcast format to introduce more multimedia content.

2. Slightly less frequent publication – During the past three years, I’ve covered a lot of ground here, with over 700 articles entering the blogosphere. Consequently, I’ll be blogging an average of 3 times a week rather than the 4-5 times a week pace I’ve maintained since the blog’s inception.

3. More “aggregator” posts – With hundreds of blog posts here, and an abundance of relevant content by other writers available online, I’ll be doing more “aggregator” posts that assemble articles and other sources on relevant themes and topics.

What won’t change is a focus on topics such as workplace bullying, employment law and policy, psychological health at work, and related issues of economics, politics, and social justice. This blog entered the scene during the 2008 economic meltdown, and we continue to face tough times in our workplaces. I hope that Minding the Workplace will help to keep you informed and enlightened as we weather the storm.

Best wishes for a fulfilling, secure, and healthy New Year, especially to readers who have been struggling with some of very challenges discussed in these pages.

-David Yamada

Sunday School: A video about a different way of seeing others

On Monday morning, many of us will start into our daily and weekly routines, and some of which will include life’s everyday hassles and aggravations.

This video starts out that way, too. And although the man featured in it may seem a bit whiney and self-centered as he deals with bad drivers, long lines, and inconsiderate people, it’s not as if many of us haven’t felt the same way.

Give this 4+ minute video a chance. It’s produced by a church whose beliefs I don’t fully agree with — my own faith being very much a work in progress — but the video itself makes no effort to proselytize or even talk about religion. It has nothing to do with work, politics, or the economy. It’s just a good, healthy, yet modest life message that could stick with you longer than a dozen sermons.

It makes me think about my subway commute to and from home and work. Although I like the convenience of being able to read the paper or a book on the subway, people can be loud and rude, and on occasion I let it affect my disposition. Maybe this will encourage me to look at the experience a little differently.

***

Hat tip: Andrea Gamba Mariani

 

Minding the Workplace in 2010

Dear Readers,

Here is a slightly edited summary of a short report on Minding the Workplace sent to me by the host site WordPress.

Thank you for your readership and helping to grow this little blog in 2010. I look forward to sharing more commentary and further exchanges in 2011.

Sincerely, David

***

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

This blog was viewed about 78,000 times in 2010.

In 2010, there were 218 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 468 posts.

The busiest day of the year was August 23rd with 939 views. The most popular post that day was NBC’s Today Show on bullying-related suicide of Virginia journal editor Kevin Morrissey.

Where did they come from?

Top referring sites in 2010 included:

facebook.com, workplacebullying.org, and huffingtonpost.com.

Visitors came searching mostly for articles about workplace bullying, suicides related to bullying at work and school, and work & the economy.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

NBC’s Today Show on bullying-related suicide of Virginia journal editor Kevin Morrissey August 2010
7 comments

2

Jobs, Unemployment, and the Great Recession: Articles Worth Reading February 2010
2 comments

3

Workplace bullying and mobbing in academe: The hell of heaven? February 2009
11 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com

4

The school bullying suicide of Phoebe Prince, age 15 March 2010
5 comments

5

The workplace bullying suicide of Jodie Zebell, age 31 April 2010
17 comments

Being a Good Mom is Hard Work

I usually write about work that earns a paycheck, but let’s pause on this Mother’s Day to recognize the hard work that doesn’t earn an hourly wage, a retirement plan, or health care coverage.

Simply put, being a good mom is one of the hardest jobs in the world.

The story that caught my attention is that of Eva Briseno, who spends her days and nights caring for her 27-year-old son, Joseph Briseno, Jr.  Joseph was catastrophically wounded in 2003 during a tour of duty in Iraq.  From AP medical writer Marilynn Marchione (link here):

And then there is Eva Briseno.

Joseph Briseno Jr., Eva’s 27-year-old son, is one of the most severely wounded soldiers ever to survive. A bullet to the back of his head in a Baghdad marketplace in 2003 left him paralyzed, brain-damaged and blind, but awake and aware of his condition.

Eva takes care of “Jay” in her suburban Virginia home where the family room has been transformed into an intensive care unit, with the breathing machine and tubes he needs to stay alive.

Try to imagine this life.

Each day starts with two hours of bowel care, an ordeal as awful as it sounds. She labors over his body, brushing his teeth, suctioning fluid from his lungs, exercising his limp arms and legs, and turning him every other hour to prevent bedsores.

She sleeps a few hours at a time, when the schedule says it is her turn, often slumped in exhaustion by his side.

She has been out to dinner with her husband, Joseph Sr., once in seven years.

Overtime pay?  Forget it.  Benefit plan?  Right.  Work-life balance?  No balance.

Fortunately not all mothers face such challenges.  But even for those moms whose responsibilities are more typical, it may be impossible to put a price on a job that requires self-sacrifice, continuous juggling, exquisite time management, and emotional intelligence beyond what any CEO must exercise.

***

P.S.  Mom, if you’re up there somewhere reading this, thanks for everything.

Volcano-induced hiatus

Hello dear readers!

More posts to come, but for now I’m in Germany with fingers crossed that I’ll be able to get home to Boston by the end of the week.

I’ve been in Augsburg, Germany since Thursday, participating in what turned out to be a great little conference on transnational legal perspectives on workplace bullying, mobbing, and discrimination, hosted by the Faculty of Law at the University of Augsburg.  I’ll have more to say about the conference later.

But for now I’m one of the multitudes whose flight home was cancelled.  (Note that I didn’t use the term “great unwashed,” and hopefully it won’t apply before the adventure is over!)  If you’ve been following the global news, you know that it is a quite a scene here across the pond.  This shutdown of air space is unprecedented in Europe, and it is causing massive disruptions in travel plans and business and shipping transactions around the world.

Impact on workers

For some of us, this is proving to be an increasing inconvenience and a source of genuine anxiety.  But there are others who already are experiencing significant hardship:

• Laborers in less-affluent nations who subsist on the farming and sale of perishables cannot ship their goods to their destinations due to the air traffic shutdown.
• There are families who will not be reunited with loved ones on short leaves from military service because their uniformed family members cannot get home. 
• Airlines are talking about temporary layoffs, and an already struggling industry is taking a huge hit that will impact their workers.
• And I can only imagine what it must be like working in customer service for the airlines and other transportation carriers.  (If you’re a stranded customer, try to remember as you struggle with your understandable frustration about the honey vs. vinegar distinction.  Easier said than done, I know…)

This semester I’m teaching a course on International and Comparative Employment Law, and we spend considerable time discussing the implications of globalization.  This freakish, wholly unanticipated event is showing us just how easy it can be to send that world economy into chaos.  I’ll have some lessons to discuss with my students, assuming I can get back before the end of the semester!

(Post revised as of Monday morning)

Minding the Workplace turns one

This week marks the first birthday of Minding the Workplace, and I’d like to thank all of you who have discovered this blog and become readers.  Also, many thanks to those of you who have posted such thoughtful comments and questions in response to posts.

Several readership patterns have become evident during the year:

First, posts about workplace bullying are by far the most visited.  That shouldn’t be surprising, and hopefully those posts have been informative and useful to readers.

Second, posts about psychological health at work, management practices, business ethics, and similar topics attract a fair amount of interest.  Given the close connection of workplace bullying to these broader topics, that makes sense too.

Third, despite the sour state of our economy, posts about unemployment, the labor market, and jobs have been among the least popular.  I’m guessing that people in search of commentary on those topics rely on plenty of other, more established online sites.

The blog’s readership has grown steadily, with a modest growth spurt occurring in the fall.  Weekly “hits” averaged around 600-800 through August, and then jumped to around 900-1000+ since then.  Because of the topical content, the kind of writing, and the technological frumpiness of the blog, I don’t expect to enjoy overnight surges in popularity.  However, I hope that readership will continue to increase.

Content-wise, you can expect more of the same.  In addition, I will be adding more bells & whistles during the coming year.  I’m even taking some blogging classes to learn about how to snaz up the blog and make it more visually appealing.

Again, thanks for being among the first readers of the blog.  I really appreciate it.

Our search for meaning

One of the most personally influential books I’ve read is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.  Frankl was a psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor who lost almost all of his immediate family in the Holocaust. Wikipedia describes his landmark work this way:

Viktor Frankl’s 1956 book Man’s Search for Meaning chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding a reason to live. According to Frankl, the book intends to answer the question “How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?” Part One constitutes Frankl’s analysis of his experiences in the concentration camps, while Part Two introduces his ideas of meaning and his theory of logotherapy.

According to a survey conducted by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Library of Congress, Man’s Search For Meaning belongs to a list of “the ten most influential books in [the United States].” (New York Times, November 20, 1991). At the time of the author’s death in 1997, the book had sold 10 million copies in twenty-four languages.

Frankl believed that life’s essence is about a search for meaning:  “We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.”  He founded a school of psychology, logotherapy, based upon these premises.

Work is only one way in which we can find meaning in our lives. In fact, some of us take it too seriously!  Raising a family, helping friends, caring for animals, contributing to our communities, and pursuing hobbies and pastimes are other vital avenues to fulfillment and service.  Nevertheless, the current economic crisis, along with the numerous other challenges facing us, provide an opportunity — or perhaps impose a mandate — to examine how our work contributes to our own lives and to the greater good.

Wikipedia on Man’s Search for Meaning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man’s_Search_for_Meaning

Wikipedia on Viktor Frankl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl

Viktor Frankl Institute for Logotherapy: http://www.logotherapyinstitute.org/

Follow up: Psychologically healthy dialogue

Those of you who read my earlier post, “What’s a psychologically healthy workplace?”  may want to read the thoughtful comments that were submitted by Drs. Kathy Rospenda, Curtis Reisinger, and — on behalf of the APA’s Psychologically Healthy Workplace Awards Program that I critiqued in my post – David Ballard and Matthew Grawitch: http://newworkplace.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/whats-a-psychologically-healthy-workplace/.

Let me thank these four individuals  for responding to me as a colleague, even though I am very much a layperson in their areas of considerable expertise.  I hope they understand that my commentary is grounded in part on a firm belief that employment law scholars and practitioners must pay much greater attention to psychological health at work.  When specialists give non-specialists space to enter a dialogue, we all benefit, and we all learn.

A month of blogging — and thanks for reading!

It’s been roughly a month since Minding the Workplace hit the blogosphere, and I’m grateful for the readership and recognition the blog has started to attract.   

Yesterday we reached 3,000 “page views,” reflecting a still modest but steadily growing cadre of readers.  In addition, there has been a welcomed uptick in comments to posts.  We’ve also been mentioned on other blogs relating to the workplace (some of which I’ve added to our blogroll), including some very gracious posts from folks who may have views contrary to those expressed here.  Amidst all the “flame wars” on the Web, it’s good to know there’s room for healthy and well-articulated differences of opinion.

Coming posts include “Labor, EFCA, and the Obama Administration,” “Diagnosing Your Workplace” (a quick little way to assess your workplace, combining ideas from psychological and organizational leadership), and a number of entries on workplace bullying.  I look forward to sharing interesting ideas, information, and analysis about work, workers, and workplaces, and I hope you’ll share your feedback and responses.

Thanks for reading so far, David