Thriving in the Workplace

The book I read to research this post was Thriving in the Workplace All in One for Dummies which is an excellent book which I bought from Amazon. Apparently the most stressed workers are managers & executives & the least stressed are the self employed. Also americans work longer hours than anyone on average except the south koreans & the czechs. In america even when employees are on holiday or on sick leave they are often expected to do work. I live in britain where we on average do 50 hours less work than americans per year. Meetings 71% of the time are unproductive according to microsoft employees. In another poll 39% admitted to having fallen asleep in a meeting & 73% brought other work to do in the meetings. Meetings that work on a project with a small group of employees can help a large corporation compete with smaller companies on an almost equal footing. It's important that every department affected by the project has at least one representative at the meeting. The meeting should be structured to get the best results it's no good saying has anyone got any ideas or something similiarly vague. Your immediate superior is often the singularly most influential person in the workplace. The most common type of problem employee in terms of you getting on with them is the screamer. The last thing you should do is scream back especially if you are not a screamer yourself. One thing worth trying is paraphrasing back to the person what they are saying & trying to relate to them so they can see you understand how they feel. Many employees are looking at online courses to help them get promotion or a new career, there's a fallacy that they are mainly youngsters when in fact many are middle aged. Many people do a course which helps them carry out a role ie design a website, hence making them a more valuable employee. Your whole career should be a continuous process of learning. Many people go on sites like linkedin & link them to eportfolio sites & also many people at university are instructed to set up an eportfolio site to encourage employers to take them on.