Website of the Week: APA’s Psychologically Healthy Workplace Program

Especially given this week’s observance of Freedom from Workplace Bullies Week 2011 (October 16-22), it’s fitting to highlight the American Psychological Association’s Psychologically Healthy Workplace Program (PHWP).

The PHWP describes itself this way:

The Psychologically Healthy Workplace Program (PHWP) is a collaborative effort between the American Psychological Association and the APA Practice Organization, designed to educate the employer community about the link between employee health and well-being and organizational performance. ThePHWP includes APA’s Psychologically Healthy Workplace Awards, a variety ofAPA Practice Organization resources, including PHWP Web content, e-newsletter, podcast and blog, and support of local programs….

The website contains a lot of useful, free content, and merits some time spent exploring. A few highlights:

Psychologically Healthy Workplace Awards

Each year, the PHWP recognizes a small number of employers across the nation for creating psychologically healthy workplaces:

Nominees are selected from a pool of previous local winners and evaluated on their workplace practices in the areas of employee involvement, health and safety, employee growth and development, work-life balance and employee recognition.

You may go here for further descriptions of the 2011 Award winners:

• Cross, Gunter, Witherspoon & Galchus (Arkansas)
• eXude Benefits Group (Pennsylvania)
• San Jorge Children’s Hospital (Puerto Rico)
• First Horizon (Tennessee)
• Northeast Delta Dental (New Hampshire)
• Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research, Northwest (Oregon)
• The MITRE Corporation (Virginia)
• City of Grand Prairie (Texas)

Current Good Company newsletter highlights workplace bullying

At the website, you also can sign up for a free subscription to the PHWP’s online newsletter, Good Company.

The lead article in the October 19 issue is Dr. Donna M.L. Heretick’s “Recognizing and Confronting Workplace Bullying,” which gives a solid overview of the topic and concludes with a suggested model for organizational responses:

A step-wise model of mandated responses might be:

• “Informal intervention” for single incidents of unprofessional behavior;

• Level 1, “awareness intervention” where a pattern of behavior is being identified;

• Level 2, “authority intervention” where the pattern continues; and,

• Level 3, “disciplinary intervention” where there appears to be no improvement after previous interventions or the first offense is notably egregious (Hickson, Pichert, Webb, & Gabbe, 2007).

Personal kudos

I’m a fan of the PHWP for personal reasons as well as professional ones.

One of my earliest blog posts mentioned the Psychologically Healthy Workplace Awards. However, rather than crediting the APA for creating an awards program using important, relevant factors, I criticized them — in a somewhat snarky tone — for what they didn’t measure, then proceeded to announce what criteria I thought were important.

Yup, I had used a cheap straw man tool to make a point. But instead of taking this law-professor-turned-organizational-psychology-commentator to task, Drs. David Ballard and Matthew Grawitch of the PHWP left a collegial, even-handed comment, thanking me for my post and explaining why the APA used certain criteria in making the awards.

As someone new to blogging, their response was a gracious lesson to me in healthy online dialogue. Since then, on several occasions Dave Ballard and the PHWP have featured posts from Minding the Workplace on their Facebook and Twitter pages and blog. In short, they walk the talk, and I am very appreciative.

Website of the Week: Working Families Win

For many years, I’ve been a big fan of Working Families Win (WFW), a grassroots community education and organizing project that:

works to change the economy in favor of working families, provides education about economic decisions made in Washington and the impacts within our local communities, and engages individuals through neighbor to neighbor communication to hold our elected officials accountable.

As an initiative of the progressive Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), WFW believes that:

New trade rules can distribute the benefits of a globalizing economy more equitably to workers here and abroad.  Health care for all Americans would address a major burden facing working families today.  A real “living wage,” investment in jobs, producing clean energy, and stronger rights for workers to join unions and bargain collectively would all help maintain and rebuild our nation’s middle class.

Working Families Win was created by the late Jim Jontz, a three-term Member of Congress from northern Indiana, who understood the need to educate and organize voters in hard-fought battleground and heartland states such as Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Ohio. Jim founded WFW after serving as President of ADA.

Check out the WFW website here.

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Disclosure note: I currently serve, on a pro bono basis, as Chair of ADA’s National Executive Committee.

Website of the Week: Truckers Against Trafficking practices on-the-road social responsibility

Within certain academic and professional circles I’ve traveled, examinations of social responsibility too often are reduced to dreary panel discussions and bouts of self-congratulatory back patting. But if you want a real, on-the-road example of social responsibility, take a look at a non-profit organization called Truckers Against Trafficking.

Truckers Against Trafficking describes its mission this way:

Human trafficking, a term for modern-day slavery, is a $32 billion worldwide industry with more than 27 million people enslaved. It has been reported in all 50 states and the number of victims in the U.S. is estimated in hundreds of thousands. This website has been created to enable members of the trucking/travel plaza industry and other travelers learn what you can do to help stop this atrocity.

…Truckers Against Trafficking recognizes that members of the trucking industry and individual truckers are invaluable in the fight against this heinous crime. This site has been created to inform truckers and other travelers of the basic issues involved in human trafficking and a summary of ways you can help. We invite you to travel through this website and learn how you can join this worthy cause and save lives.

TAT is about education and action. It uses wallet cards, educational posts and DVDs, and a trafficking hotline to reach out to truckers, truck stop and road plaza workers, and students at truck driving schools.

Take a look!

As a city dweller who doesn’t even own a car, long haul trucking is another world to me. But Facebook friend Allen Smith, a trucker himself, has posted regularly about the activities that many of these folks engage in to connect their vocation to issues of public concern.

TAT is a great example of that. Many of these drivers identify their political leanings as being moderate to conservative, but let me tell ya, organizations like TAT can teach some of the liberal do-gooder groups a thing or two about the power of plain talk, public education, and direct action.

Take a look at TAT’s website. You’ll find plenty of information, including several educational videos and links to articles and news updates.

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TAT’s website is here.

TAT’s Facebook page is here.

Website of the Week: TED

If you’re into talks by people at the top of their game, check out TED, “a small nonprofit devoted to ideas worth spreading.” On the TED website (link here), you’ll find hundreds of freely accessible videos featuring leaders and innovators in their respective fields:

On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 700 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week.

General topics include:

Technology

Entertainment

Design

Business

Science

Culture

Arts

Global issues

What more can I say to whet your appetite? It’s a treasure trove of learning, enlightenment, and inspiration — and absolutely free!

Website of the Week: Richard Bolles and “Parachute”

Richard Bolles and What Color Is Your Parachute? have been around so long that it’s easy to take them for granted.  But make no mistake: With every new edition, Bolles faithfully and thoroughly updates and revises this informative and humane guide for job hunters and career changers.

Bolles also maintains an excellent website (link here). Even for those who do not own a copy of the book, it is a valuable stand alone portal to articles and links on the job search, networking, resume preparation, career counseling, and researching employers. For those in search of more personalized counseling, it also provides information about the 5-day workshops that Bolles hosts in his home.

Bolles goes beyond the world of job hunting in his blog, Dick Bolles’ Enchanted World (link here). It’s further evidence that he is not just another do-it-by-the-numbers career counselor. He understands the relationships between work, life, and the society we live in, and he’s not afraid to make his opinions known.

Website of the Week: CiviliNation

Through Facebook I recently was introduced to CiviliNation, a non-profit education and research group dedicated to advancing civility in cyberspace. Founded in 2009, CiviliNation (website here) describes itself this way:

Our mission is to foster an online culture where every person can freely participate in a democratic, open, rational and truth-based exchange of ideas and information, without fear or threat of being the target of unwarranted abuse, harassment, or lies.

I believe this organization holds a lot of promise to raise awareness and influence our national discussion about online civility, harassment, and bullying. CiviliNation’s founder and president is Andrea Weckerle, a Washington D.C.-based attorney and communications consultant. She’s well connected; her board includes Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. The seeds are there for important work to be done.

And we sure do need it. The Internet’s marvels are matched increasingly by its nastiness. Through some combination of education, consciousness raising, and regulation, we need to save ourselves from ruining cyberspace. Here’s hoping that organizations like CiviliNation can help to lead the way.

Websites of the Week: Freelancers Union and YES! magazine

If you’ve been following this blog in recent weeks, you may have picked up on my sense that we need to find new ways of working and living in an age of uncertainty and economic turmoil. Two great sources to encourage our thinking and action are the Freelancers Union and YES! magazine.

Freelancers Union

The Freelancers Union (link here) is an advocacy and support organization for America’s 42 million independent workers, who represent roughly 30 percent of the workforce. These include “freelancers, consultants, independent contractors, temps, part-timers, contingent employees, and the self-employed.”

The Freelancers Union is committed to providing “mutual support and community” and to supporting social entrepreneurship. It also endorse changes in the law that will enable independent workers to succeed. (For more on this, see my post summarizing founder Sara Horowitz’s three-part policy agenda to help freelancers.)

Spend a bit of time lurking around the Freelancers Union website. You may find some helpful information for your own career — or perhaps envision yourself doing independent work with more support than you imagined was available. Membership is free.

YES! magazine

YES! (link here) “reframes the biggest problems of our time in terms of their solutions.” Its articles “outline a path forward with in-depth analysis, tools for citizen engagement, and stories about real people working for a better world.”

What I like about YES! is its hopeful balance. It acknowledges the darkness and attempts to light a candle.

Its website is jampacked with good stuff, including a full archive of articles, freely accessible. For now they’re also offering an online special subscription rate of $17 for one year (4 issues).

Recently I highlighted a series of articles in the current issue of YES! on building resilient communities. This is a prime example of the kind of creative thinking presented in the magazine and its website.

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I must admit that I have not thought through the full implications of the ideas offered by these resources in terms of work and workplaces. After all, I can hardly claim to be a freelancer, having worked in institutional settings for all of my career. And I have a lot to learn when it comes to the resilient practices favored by YES! magazine. But I cannot help but feel that we are going to have to adapt and innovate in response to the challenges facing us, and these two entities are prime among those that will help to show us the way.

Website of the Week: Dignity At Work Now (DAWN)

At last week’s Cardiff workplace bullying conference, I enjoyed two presentations by and several conversations with David Hinton, chairperson of a British non-profit organization, Dignity At Work Now (DAWN), established in 2002 to combat workplace bullying.

Support group

DAWN’s support group invites those who:

need help and would like to share a problem

want the opportunity ‘to get things off your chest’

or simply want a chat in a friendly environment with people who understand what it is like to be bullied

Campaign work

Its campaign work seeks to:

identify, eradicate and raise awareness of issues associated with workplace bullying

promote dignity at work through good practice

and secure the introduction of legislation designed to prevent workplace bullying and its damaging consequ

David Hinton’s presentation

David’s presentation titled “One Law for the Rich” included a sharp critique of the legal profession, Britain’s employment tribunal system, and what he termed the employment law industry.  Although some of my legal colleagues were taken aback by his remarks, I found them to be a refreshing reminder of how non-lawyers may regard the legal side of the world of employment relations — and too often with good reason.

Check it out!

Check out DAWN’s website for interesting information, some free downloads, and a clearer sense of how folks across the pond are responding to workplace bullying through grassroots activism.

Websites of the Week: Two new sites about the Healthy Workplace Bill

Here are two new websites for those who want to learn more about, and advocate for, the Healthy Workplace Bill, the legislation I drafted that creates a legal claim for targets of severe workplace bullying and provides incentives for employers to act preventively and responsively toward bullying at work:

National Site — Healthy Workplace Bill (www.healthyworkplacebill.org)

This is the new website of the national legislative campaign, spearheaded by the Workplace Bullying Institute.  Here you’ll find information about Healthy Workplace Bill and the various state campaigns to enact it.

Massachusetts Site — Massachusetts Healthy Workplace Advocates (www.mahealthyworkplace.com)

As noted before on this blog, the Healthy Workplace Bill has been introduced in Massachusetts as Senate Bill No. 699 (Senator Joan Menard, lead sponsor) for the 2009/10 session.  Thanks to Deb Falzoi for her superb work in creating this site!

Massachusetts supporters of the HWB — Save the Dates — A legislative hearing for the bill will be held on Wednesday, January 27.  We also will be holding a meeting for supporters of the bill on Thursday, January 7.  Details to follow!

Employee fraud: Startups pay heavily

Writing in The Business Forum, Boston-based consultant and engineer Thomas Faulhaber notes that emerging businesses pay a high price for employee fraud:

Emerging businesses are much more vulnerable proportionally to employee theft, and are much less able to absorb these losses than large corporations. Upon completing its 2006 analysis of occupational fraud and abuse, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) in Austin, Texas reported that businesses employing less than 100 persons “were the most vulnerable to fraud and abuse” by employees. Emerging companies were the victims of fraud more often than large corporations, and the resulting losses were much larger commensurate with their resources.

For the full article: http://www.businessforum.com/fraud01.html

Tom is the founding host of The Business Forum (http://www.businessforum.com/), whose target audience is small business owners and entrepreneurs.  He contributes many articles himself, and he also solicits guest writers.  (I published a piece on workplace bullying a few years ago.  See http://www.businessforum.com/Yamada_01.html.)  His site includes a deep and varied base of articles, all freely accessible, and is well worth an extended visit.