Is asking your secretary to perform the act of fetching coffee, one of the modern office’s most mundane chores, an implied form of sexual harassment?

“Yes” is according to Tamara Klopfenstein of Levittown, NY.

Tamara’s story, first brought to my attention by Ask A Manager and covered in more depth by the Philadelphia Inquirer, highlights how delicate the relationship between boss and employee can be:

After working for a few weeks, her (male) bosses asked her to get their coffee for them. She declined, and her manager e-mailed her, saying: “This is not open for debate. Please don’t make an easy task a big deal.” Klopfenstein felt that getting coffee “reinforced outdated gender stereotypes,” so the next day, when she was asked to get coffee again, she sent an e-mail that read: “I don’t expect to serve and wait on you by making and serving you coffee every day.” Nine minutes later, she was fired. Klopfenstein promptly sued the company for sexual discrimination and sexual harassment. The judge ruled: “The act of getting coffee is not, by itself, a gender-specific act,” and dismissed the case. But Klopfenstein’s attorneys argue that “Some tasks are inherently more offensive to women.”

Ultimately, a federal court judge threw the case out due to lack of merit, which in my opinion, was the right call.

While a woman fetching coffee for her male bosses smacks of historical discrimination against women in the workplace, the Philadelphia Inquirer points out that,

To show discrimination, Klopfenstein would have had to be able to point to a male worker with a similar status who didn’t have to get coffee.

But the previous receptionists were all women and didn’t object to getting coffee for vice presidents Jay Shrager and Richard Blum, Jackson said.

Putting the harassment angle aside, the real issue at stake here is: can we refuse the parts of our jobs we don’t like?

Ms. Klopfenstein openly refused a directive from her bosses, to bring them coffee everyday at 3pm, something that all of her predecessors had willingly done in the past. Her bosses reiterated their request and explained that it was non-optional. Ms. Klopfenstein then refused to carry out an ‘essential’ (and I use this term loosely) job function and was fired.

I once watched a co-worker go through a similar battle. After several years of working at the company, she one day flat out refused to do half of her job duties—duties which were essential to the business. Management went out and hired a younger, cheaper replacement and a few months later let my co-worker go. Is it disappointing that an experienced employee was let go for a younger, cheaper version? Sure. But management hadn’t wanted to go out and hire someone new. By refusing to do her job, my co-worker forced management to make a choice, and can you really blame them for not wanting to be loyal to someone who “wasn’t a team player?”

I myself have had to do my fair share of grunt work outside the scope of my official job duties. One of the best bosses I ever had the pleasure to work for used to ask me to schedule department meetings for him. I wasn’t his assistant and I wasn’t the leader of the team, although I was in his department. Generally it was common practice for the leader of a meeting to schedule it themselves, so it felt weird that he would ask me to do something like that.

But did I do it willingly and without complaint? Of course.

For something as mundane as scheduling a meeting or fetching coffee, why start a war? Even if you don’t necessarily like doing boring tasks like copying, filing or delivering mail, someone has to do it and why risk ending up on your boss’ bad side over something so trivial? As Audrey Jackson, an administrative assistant at an engineering firm in Center City, put it:

“I would do anything for my boss except sleep with him, because he’s married,” she said.

Last week I wrote about a three-year old New York Times article featuring interviews with Ivy-League academics criticizing their female students’ choice to become stay-at-home mothers instead of members of a “diverse professional elite” upon graduation from their elite institutions.

One critic who was interviewed went so far as to question the value of educating females if their only goal was to become mothers:

“It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?” said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Coincidentally, that same Monday my post appeared, a new article surfaced in the New York Times, again tackling the issue of what is expected of today’s Ivy-League graduates. According to the article:

Professor Howard Gardner hopes…seminars will encourage more students to consider public service and other careers beyond the consulting and financial jobs that he says are almost the automatic next step for so many graduates of top colleges.

“Is this what a Harvard education is for?” asked Professor Gardner, who is teaching the seminars at Harvard, Amherst and Colby with colleagues. “Are Ivy League schools simply becoming selecting mechanisms for Wall Street?”

Interesting that a man is questioning whether students (male or female) belong in the boardroom and that a woman is advocating to put more women in it. Why is success always measured by job title and salary? Why are so many young people being blindsided into a handful of careers, simply because these careers are viewed as successful by a handful of adults?

After years of watching friends and family getting laid-off and overworked, many of today’s college students are questioning the true value of corporate life:

As Adam M. Guren, a new Harvard graduate who will be pursuing his doctorate in economics, put it, “A lot of students have been asking the question: ‘We came to Harvard as freshmen to change the world, and we’re leaving to become investment bankers — why is this?’ ”

The official word on the value and purpose of higher education comes from the President of Amherst (also male):

“We’re in the business of graduating people who will make the world better in some way,” said Anthony Marx, Amherst’s president. “That’s what justifies the expense of the education.”

If the purpose of an education is to help its recipients make the world a better place, does the role of parent not fulfill that purpose? Most universities claim that they are training the leaders of tomorrow, but why does their vision of leader stick so narrowly to the C-suite? Isn’t someone who cares for, educates, motivates and encourages considered a leader? Are mothers and fathers not the leaders of a family?

I think it’s time for the elder academics to stop wasting so much time on what their students are accomplishing after graduation and more time ensuring the quality of their education. Trust that the younger generation can decide their future for themselves and stop hovering over us like helicopter parents.

As I transition from “young woman” to simply “woman,” I spend more and more time contemplating just exactly how the rest of my life is going to look. Deciding what I want in my life has been easy. Exciting and fulfilling career? Yes. Loving and supportive husband? Yes. 2.5 kids with a dog and a house in the suburbs? Yes. What is proving to be more difficult is figuring out exactly how I’m going to be able to realistically meld all of these aspects together.

While family and friends tell me I’m too young to be worrying about such things, it seems I am not the only young woman who is creating a life plan. Three years ago, an article appeared in the New York Times that catalogued interviews with hundreds of young women undergrads attending an ivy-league university questioning them about their future plans. The women surveyed were all highly educated, accomplished and appeared to be quite ambitious, several even expressing plans to pursue advanced or professional degrees. These were women with unlimited potential, who, according to the article, were:

“being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these [top] institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.”

The world was their oyster, their opportunities endless. So what did 60% of these women want to do with their futures?

Become stay-at-home moms—at least for a few years anyway.

This has stirred up considerable controversy and dismay from academic leaders:

“It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?” said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.”

I find it interesting that the very academics who instill education are now questioning its value. Does education lose its value based on the actions of its recipient? Is the value of an education directly correlated to how it’s applied? And how exactly do universities measure the “return on their investments?” By the ratio of tuition dollars to an alumni’s charitable donations? Stay-at-home mothers would be less likely to donate as much as their working counterparts, so does that make them less valuable, less of a productive force in society?

I always thought learning was important for learning’s sake. Few academics seem to agree:

University officials said that success meant different things to different people and that universities were trying to broaden students’ minds, not simply prepare them for jobs.

“What does concern me,” said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, “is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn’t constructed along traditional gender roles.”

Think outside of the box? I thought that’s what most of us went to college to learn? If these universities aren’t teaching their students that, then perhaps their education is not as valuable as the university thinks it is. But what if these universities are succeeding? What if they are opening women’s minds to all of the possibilities that exist for them, but young women are looking at everything and still deciding that motherhood is important to them? What implications does that have on feminism and current gender roles?

Traditional feminists were not entirely surprised by these findings, criticizing society for forcing women to choose between motherhood and a career:

“They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they’re accepting it,” said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women’s and gender studies at Yale. “Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.

“I really believed 25 years ago,” Dr. Wexler added, “that this would be solved by now.”

I tend to agree with Dr. Wexler. I would love to work full time in a high powered career and be good wife and mother. But the current state of corporate America makes this very challenging for most women. I think that many young women witnessed how difficult it was for their working mothers and are deliberately choosing to take the opposite path. Does this make these women anti-feminist? Not exactly.

My interpretation of feminism is that women should have options, the same options and opportunities as men. Fifty years ago, women were not able to have their own credit cards, rent an apartment without a male co-signer or control her own reproductive system. Now, women are able to buy their own property, occupy the C-suite and even walk on the moon.

Becoming a parent is also a choice, one that both women and men can select. Why do we automatically de-value the choice to be a parent because fewer men than women opt to be an active one? Isn’t this a form of discrimination, the type that feminists have been fighting against since the beginning of the 20^th century?

We have given women choices, it’s time to stop condemning them for making them.

What if you could come into the office anytime you felt like it, or even stop coming in altogether? What if you could take a late morning run or volunteer in an after-school program but still get paid a full-time salary? What if you only had to work 4 hours a day?

Sound like your dream job? Sure, as long as you’re not the manager.

There has been much ado about Results Oriented Work Environments (ROWE), the latest in work/life balance programs. Under ROWE, there are no office hours. As long as workers complete their projects and deliver results, they are allowed to work whenever and wherever it suits them. Most notably being implemented by electronics giant, Best Buy, ROWE is promised to be the panacea for worker (dis)engagement.

Trust workers with their freedom and they will reward the company with riches.

If only business were so simple.

I’ve often fantasized about working from home. How great would it be to sleep in on weekdays, grocery shop without the crowds, never worry about missing a meeting because of a doctor’s appointment? As an employee, the freedom to not work would be an awesome benefit.

But as a manager, I realize that working from home takes discipline, a lot of it, and that most people don’t have the focus to work three feet from a bed and HDTV. This spells disaster for me and my bottom line.

In my own experience, most people who “work from home” (WFH) aren’t really working (exempting people with home offices or special set-ups who actually do work from home). How do I know this? They’ve told me. I once worked in an office with a very liberal WFH policy and the employees abused it so much that upper management had to revoke the policy. Now no one there is allowed to work from home without authorization from the president. Sound harsh? It probably was, but considering employees would send emails like the one below, you can see why they would do that.

Actual example (altered to protect privacy) of an email sent to all employees at my company:

Hello,

I will be working from home today. If you need anything my email is xxxx@notworking.com and my cell is (123) 555-1234.

But I will be watching [insert important sport event here] all day so I probably won’t answer or be much use to you.

See you all tomorrow.

So much for all this extra productivity when working from home. You could make the case that this employee watched the game and then did some work. I can tell you that he most likely didn’t.

In a guest post on Penelope Trunk’s blog, Ryan Healy says this in praise of ROWE:

It’s a win-win situation. Half of the American population will no longer hate their jobs, which will inevitably lead to increased production for the corporations. The only sector that could possibly lose out is pharmaceutical, when clinical depression reaches an all-time low. And that’s just fine by me.

Is freedom from office hours enough of a reason for people to stop hating their jobs?

I highly doubt it. If you hated working in sales because you had to make 50 cold calls a day, would you really be that much happier if you got to make 50 cold calls a day in your bathrobe? If you disliked proofreading press releases, would sitting on a park bench make looking for commas that much more enjoyable? Maybe. Maybe not.

Case in point, the above email writer, someone who took an unlimited amount of “WFH” days to watch football, basketball, soccer or whatever sports event he wanted, with little to no financial or professional ramifications, left after 2 years with the company, allegedly because he felt “unappreciated.”

A change of scenery can’t cure everything.

No one tells you how exactly your life is going to change once you graduate college and enter the “real world.” Graduation day is a flurry of family, friends and long speeches by strangers, all assuring you that the $10/$40/$120,000 you spent on school was well worth it. And you now have the $2 piece of paper to prove it.

You’re young, your life is just beginning, you have your entire career ahead of you.

Here’s what you recent college graduates have to look forward to:

Office Butt
Gone are the days of all night study sessions, Frisbee on the quad and shleping from class to class. Instead, you get to spend 40 hours a week on your duff, staring at a computer screen. Fortunately, sitting in an air-conditioned office on an ergonomically designed chair is a lot more fun than running across campus to make it in time for your 9am lecture. Unfortunately, your butt (and even your hips, thighs and stomach) like it so much, that they continually expand into every inch of that comfy desk chair. Learn to start loving exercise now. It’ll make it that much easier to stick with once you’ve finally decided to lose those extra 10 lbs.

Listening to Idiots
If you think you escaped having to listen to long-winded blowhards espousing meaningless drivel once you stopped entering a professor’s lecture hall, think again. Most likely you’ll have to work with someone in authority who’s just as long-winded and pointless except this time you depend on them for a paycheck instead of just a letter grade. Practice the art of humility. You may know more than your boss does (maybe a lot more) but you won’t do yourself any favors by trying to show him or her up all the time.

Smaller Dating Pool
College is one of the last places where you’re surrounded by lots of single, attractive people in your age group. Once you start working, you’re surrounded by a cross section of several generations, a good majority of whom will be married or otherwise romantically engaged (and generally not that good looking). Not only that, but you spend more time at work than you ever did in class, and your social life will suffer accordingly. Just remember that “work-life balance” means nothing if you have no life to balance the work with—and start polishing that online dating profile.

Doing It All Yourself
Most colleges and universities make their services easily accessible to students. Need to talk to someone about your recent break-up? Just go down the street to the student counseling center and talk to a licensed counselor. Have a cold and want some antibiotics? Pop-in to the on-campus health center and get a same-day appointment. In the “real world” your company won’t have a medical clinic in the lobby (unless you’re really, really lucky) or a room full of graduate students to read through your business report that’s due tomorrow. Getting access to any kind of professional service is about twice as hard since you have to go out and find a professional and then pay for it all yourself. No matter how tempting it might be, don’t let your health slip. You don’t want put things (like Dentist appointments) off for too long or else you risk contracting something serious that could inhibit your ability to work (at which point you’re really screwed).

I know the above doesn’t sound all that appealing. But hey–at least you’ll make more money. Say “good-bye” to that IKEA furniture and Top-Ramen and “hello” to designer clothes and a new car.

Congratulations Class of 2008!

I was sitting in a meeting today and the subject of service-level agreements came up. I’d heard about service-level agreements before. When I worked in a production department, I’d been briefed on what type of service our customers were expecting: so many days to complete a project at a certain level of quality, using certain words in any outward-facing messaging. These were contractual, legally-binding agreements that our company had agreed to fill. Sounded reasonable enough to me. When I choose overnight shipping from the postal-service, I expect to receive my package the next day, undamaged–not whenever the shipping clerk, package handlers and delivery drivers decide to deliver it, half-opened and smashed.

However, what interested me about this particular discussion of service-level agreements was that we were discussing defining and implementing service-level agreements between internal departments—essentially making a contract between each department and employee outlining what services, projects, problems a specific team covered; the process for interdepartmental communication; and to what degree each department will handle said services, projects, or problems.

What a novel idea! Make expectations clear so that everyone understands what role they play in the company.

It seems like common sense, but it amazes me at how many companies fail to set even basic boundaries and expectations for each of its employees.

This method of setting clear expectations and then training people on how to meet those expectations has been put into practice with very successful results. At Webster Elementary in San Diego, principal Jennifer White was appalled at the violence, suspensions, and absenteeism occurring at the school when she arrived in 2000. By implementing a program that actively taught students proper student behavior, principal White turned the school into a happy, thriving learning environment.

Building on Buguey’s initial efforts to improve discipline, Jennifer White and her teachers crafted the Webster Way, which teaches “scholarly behaviors” such as eye contact, cleaning up your trash, and greeting teachers by name. Such skills are usually expected but not actively taught, White said…

It sounds elementary, and hardly radical. Yet the results have been dramatic. Webster has seen suspensions plummet and test scores surge since instilling the Webster Way. Only 10 students were suspended last year. Test scores ranked Webster in the top echelon of demographically similar schools statewide.

“Schools assume that a student will come in, and just know what to do,” school psychologist Steve Franklin said. “At Webster, teaching a student how to be a student is really important. We don’t expect them to already know how to read, to do math or write. So why aren’t we teaching these things, too?”

I often hear a lot of griping about how young workers are “incompetent” and “don’t know how to do even basic things.” Frankly, I don’t know too many universities that offer classes on how to work a fax machine, operate an espresso machine, or how to make 2-sided copies collated and stapled. Companies just assume that since you’re over 18, you must know how to do those things.

I doubt that most baby boomers entered their first jobs knowing anything more than how to answer a phone and type on a typewriter. As newer technologies were introduced, they were probably given formal training by their employers on how to use that new technology since, obviously, no one had ever used it before. Now, however, faxes, copiers, and multi-line phones are staples in most offices and very few companies take the time to train new employees on how to use them.

I’m not arguing that we need better training on office technology (although most people do), but rather that by combining a clear set of job expectations (it’s Suzie’s job to make copies, Rob’s to deliver the CEO’s daily latte) and giving each person the right training and tools to do their job successfully (Suzie spends an hour reading through the copier manual, Rob is shown how to grind the coffee beans and gently stir in 1% skim milk), employees will be happier, confident, and more productive since they know exactly what is expected of them, how to accomplish it, and don’t spend wasted time and energy squabbling over who jammed the copy machine or forgot to put the coffee filter in the machine.

Ryan Healy over at Employee Evolution wrote an extremely interesting post the other day describing the 10 ways Generation Y will change the workplace. With all the media hype about the “challenges” of recruiting a new generation of workers (there are even entire companies dedicated to helping firms do a better job of attracting young workers), it was refreshing to actually see a young person lay out in clear terms what they’d like to see in today’s workplace.

While some of Ryan’s points were definitely valid, I think a few of them missed the mark. Here’s my response to each of these visions of the future:

There Will Be No Such Thing as an Unproductive Meeting

I think that to some extent, there will be a decline in meetings overall as the younger generation of workers take over–not so much because we value efficiency as Ryan claims, but because we are more comfortable using alternate methods of communication such as email or instant messenger. I’ve personally sat through countless meetings where as we all get up to leave you hear people muttering, “Why couldn’t they have just sent us an email about this?”

The older generation of workers are used to different forms of communication, often preferring meetings or phone conversations for something that a Millennial would easily deal with over email. As the workplace becomes more and more tech-savvy, I predict the number of unnecessary face-to-face interactions will decrease.

The Workday Will be Shorter

Ryan foresees that Generation Y is more productive and therefore will have to spend less time at the office to accomplish the same amount of work. Maybe advancing technology will improve productivity in the workplace, but the assumption that Millennials are more productive, is just that, an assumption. It’s been my experience that roughly half of workers at any given company spend most of their day at the office not doing any real work, while the other half works overtime to get everything done. It doesn’t matter how old you are, there will always be lazy people who like to do the minimum and there will always be ambitious people around to pick up the slack.

However, I do agree the Americans are being overworked and that we could all benefit from shorter work hours. But the key to successfully implementing flexible work hours is to create a culture of personal accountability with clear measures of results. How many businesses can say they do that today? And what if your work doesn’t lend itself to that model (like customer service or retail jobs)? It’s going to take a huge attitude shift by upper-management in order to create a model as successful as Best Buy’s or Google’s. But if we can accomplish it, we’ll all be better off for it.

Administrative Assistants Will Make a Comeback

In his book, The 4-Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferriss’ advocates hiring a personal assistant who can take care of the menial tasks so you are freer to tackle the big projects or just enjoy life fullest. However, the outsourcing model only works if there are people willing to take on menial jobs. But if everyone decided to outsource, who would be around and willing to do the work?

A more sustainable solution would be to completely automate a lot of the menial tasks such as filing or mailing. Or better yet, use technology to eliminate them altogether. Who needs paper copies of anything nowadays? Why not just keep all records online? Most companies are already doing this with things like pay stubs and bank statements. Surely, most other documents will eventually follow. Imagine—a world with no filing cabinets!

Retirement Redefined

Again borrowing from Timothy Ferriss, Ryan proposes the idea of several “mini-retirements” spread out over your lifespan instead of a huge bulk at the end. I think this is a great idea. Who wouldn’t want to take two years off to travel the world, pursue a hobby or just spend more time with their kids?

However, two things currently stand in the way of this being a corporate norm: 1) Americans propensity toward living in debt, and 2) a poor off-/on-ramping corporate culture. The mini-retirement plan is only feasible if you can afford to take a few years off from work or can negotiate extremely favorable vacation terms with your employer. As long as people make smart money decisions and budget accordingly, taking a few mini-retirements is completely possible. But, this does not account for the hostility you might face when trying to explain the gap in your resume once you return and start looking for work again. And if you think resume gaps don’t matter, ask any stay-at-home mom who has tried to re-enter the workforce after a few years at home. It can be done, but the risk of losing career momentum is definitely real.

Real Mentors Will Exist

Personally I’m not sure why everyone is so obsessed with obtaining a mentor. I was once assigned to write an essay in junior high about my role-model. While the other kids wrote about why they admired Michael Jordan or Madonna, I spent three pages explaining why I shouldn’t have to model myself after anyone and that I was happy to forge my own path, thank you very much. But hey, that’s just me.

HR Will Get the Respect it Deserves

What I think Ryan was getting at with this point is that workplaces should do more to encourage a sense of community among workers. Work can and should be a lot more than just a place you go to type on a keyboard all day. The best companies are the ones who engage their employees and make them feel like they are a part of something. No matter how much money they make or how nice the office is, people stay at companies where they have personal ties. This can be as simple as bringing homemade cookies to share each week or setting up college funds for the children of a deceased co-worker (something that actually happened at a company I worked for).

Promotions Will be Based on Emotional Intelligence

Ah, what a wonderful day it will be when all managers will be required to be nice, attentive and encouraging to their employees. While a great thing to strive for, I highly doubt that this will happen anytime soon. People are promoted for a variety of reasons, good and bad. Unless there is a way to eliminate office politics, there will always be an incompetent manager or two out there.

Besides, if we only had good managers, think of all the Dilbert cartoons we’d miss out on?

Parents Will Continue to be a Source of Valuable Information and Advice

I agree that parental advice, especially when just starting out in your career, can be very helpful. However, I’ve found that discussions about work often lead to both me and my parents discovering something useful. The relationship is no longer so much of a teacher-student relationship where I ask for help and my parents give it, but has morphed more into a colleague-to-colleague exchange where we swap stories and get new ideas on how to do things. This will always be valuable to any worker, regardless of age.

Starting Salaries Will be Higher

Ryan’s theory is that with a wealth of information on the internet combined with a decreased desire for raises or promotions will allow Millennials to command higher starting salaries. While I don’t really agree with that, I do think that starting salaries will become higher and higher just due to natural inflation and cost of living increases. With students spending more and more on a college education and finding that their dream of owning a home and supporting a family slipping further and further away, most young people will have to have higher salaries just to maintain a decent lifestyle.

Performance Reviews Will be Re-Invented

Thank goodness! This is a point I can wholly get behind. Nobody likes performance reviews–not employees, not managers, not HR. So why do them? Why not create new systems of evaluation that are actually practical? Why not train managers to give better feedback throughout the year instead of saving up a list of mistakes the employee committed over the year and then throwing it in their face during a formal meeting? There are much better ways to conduct performance reviews than what is currently happening in most American offices. Ryan, I’m rooting for you on this one!

The old adage that “people don’t leave bad companies; they leave bad managers” rings true to 55% of people surveyed in a recent poll by Yahoo! HotJobs. That means that over half of us are dealing with poor performances by our managers on a daily basis. I don’t argue with the fact that a boss can make or break a job, no matter how high-paying or engaging the work is, but I also know that working for a less than stellar performer can afford unexpected opportunities that prove valuable in the long run.

Here are some examples of bad bosses and how you can turn working for one to your advantage:

The Incompetent Boss

The incompetent boss is one who, for the most part, has absolutely no idea what to do. They contribute nothing. They do nothing. But manage to skate along on the backs of a constant stream of quality workers.

How this works to your advantage:

The incompetent boss survives on the work of others. This means that as an employee, you are often given decision-making powers and responsibility beyond your station to fill-in the gaps your boss is creating. You’ll probably get a chance to attend upper-level meetings, have a large role in projects and gain valuable management, and administrative experience without having to directly manage a team.

The Over-Demanding Boss

The over-demanding boss comes in early, stays late, and expects his/her employees to do the same. They command the latest data reports and they wanted it yesterday. The over-demanding boss boasts high profits but is plagued by high employee turnover.

How this works to your advantage:

Unless you’re an extreme Type-A personality who thrives in a 24/7 work environment, working for an over-demanding boss usually leads to burnout. However, in the interim, you will learn to function at the top of your game, putting you well ahead of the competition when searching for a new job.

The Jerk Boss

Probably one of the most unpleasant bosses to work for, the jerk boss shows no respect or empathy toward others. He/she prefers to motivate by fear using verbal abuse and shame which in turn makes employees scared enough of retribution to perform.

How this works to your advantage:

Sadly in most companies, if a boss delivers good results, they are often left in their positions in spite of poor social skills. I recommend looking for new work if you are saddled with such a boss, but in the interim the strategies you devise to deal with the day-to-day abuse will help you develop a thick skin and make any future boss seem less awful in comparison.

When I took my first job out of college a few years ago, I remember spending my first day mostly feeling overwhelmed, anxious and insecure. It felt like I was the new mid-semester transfer kid in high school who had no friends yet, didn’t know where anything was, and had to eat alone in the cafeteria (which I actually did for several months when I started at my first job). I recall being frustrated because I didn’t know when or how to set the security alarm or enter through the back door instead of walking half a block around the street to the front.

While I eventually got over all of these minor hurdles, I do remember it took several months before I felt truly comfortable with the quality of my work and my relationships with my co-workers. When I recently decided to move to a new company, I mentally prepared myself for the “new kid on the block” feeling. However, after just a few days on the job I was surprised to feel nothing but calm and assured with almost no anxiety at all.

What made starting my second job so much easier than the first?

Confidence

Even though I had completed several internships while in school, I still felt ill-prepared for the rigors of working in a corporate environment. It was my first opportunity to do “meaningful” work and, being the perfectionist that I am, I felt immense pressure to be perfect in every way.

Unfortunately for me, it’s common and expected for new employees to make lots of mistakes and their work is far from perfect. It was a hard lesson for me to learn, but I eventually accepted that I could only do my best, even if it wasn’t up to my expectations, and as I got better at doing the work, my confidence in myself and my abilities increased greatly.

I think the major difference between starting my first job and starting my second, is that this time around, I’m much more confident in my capabilities, especially now that I have a proven track record of performance to fall back on. I felt like when I was hired the first time after graduation, I was hired for my potential. The second time, and every subsequent time, I will be hired for my expertise, making me feel like I earned the job rather than having just lucked into it, which is a great boost to my self-esteem.

Transferable Skills

Lots of career literature deals with getting people to identify their “transferable skills” or basic knowledge that is applicable across a multitude of jobs and industry, things such as writing or computer skills. When I graduated from college, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of MS Office applications such as Word and Excel. But I quickly discovered that there was a whole other world of advanced functions and options that you never learn about in school.

Since MS Office and Windows are popular programs in most corporate offices, upon starting my new job I was able to change around my email settings and internet preferences on the first day of my new job with no help at all. It sounds like a little thing, but it was rather empowering to be able to do it myself without suffering the embarrassment of having to ask someone how to change my calendar color from yellow to green.

*I also want to note that I’ve seen many an interview candidate claim to know how to use Excel and Word only to have their incompetence revealed after being asked only a few simple questions. I urge everyone to take an MS Office training course even if you think you know how the program works. Listing an Office certification on your résumé will make you look impressive and you’ll be more productive in the long run because you’ll know the secrets and shortcuts that a normal user won’t.

Relationship Savvy

When I entered the workforce for the first time, I really had no idea how a business worked, who the major players were, how decisions got made, or how to execute a project. After three years of sitting through endless meetings, dealing with office politics and navigating the murky world of interdepartmental co-operation, I have obtained a basic map of any corporate structure and a strategy to integrate myself into it.

Through months of observation I learned how to relate to executives and managers, identify the “go-to” people in each department that will help me get what I need, how to deal with different types of people and more. While no business is exactly the same, most companies will have an accounting and IT department as well as upper-level and mid-level managers.

Even though the people and titles might be different, the types of people drawn to these positions are usually the same. Recognizing the various worker personalities (the micromanager, the procrastinator, the super-star, etc.) and having experience dealing with each lends me a feeling of familiarity in a new situation so I feel less like a fish-out-of-water in my new company.

The moral of this story is that each job you have, no matter how miserable or seemingly pointless, allows you to learn and grow both personally and professionally. Each job forms the building blocks that lay the foundation for the rest of your career. And I can only hope that as I move on to my third, fourth and fifth jobs that the transitions will only continue to get easier.

According to a recent analysis of U.S. census data, New York City has the lowest proportion of women in the workforce, with only 49% participating, and Minneapolis boasts the highest, with roughly 80% of the female population holding down jobs.

A detailed analysis of the data by economists finds that the most influential barrier to having more women in the workplace is not social pressures, day care costs or family unfriendly corporate policies but rather the biggest bane to all workers–high-income, middle-income, male and female alike: traffic.

Married women in New York and Minneapolis seem to be taking into account some things that are specific to their cities when deciding to work or not. Surprisingly, the economists argue, the most important specific thing seems to be traffic.

Time spent in traffic is costly, so as congestion increases there may be a certain point where married women decide to either drop out of the labor force or not join it in the first place. The data seem to back this up.

Looking back over time, “Cities in which commuting time increased most rapidly generally also experienced slower growth in female labor force participation,” write the researchers.

With transportation being as crowded and expensive as it is in New York City, can you blame a woman for choosing to opt-out of the daily grind?

And for women who do choose to work, longer commute times tend to equate to longer work hours overall:

As for the women who are employed, rising congestion seems to go in hand with working more hours. If commute times increased by one minute, the researchers found that married women spent an additional three to six hours working per year.

The same thing happens for men. If the commute time is longer by 20 minutes in one city compared to another - that’s close to the difference between Nashville and New York — then a man in NYC is likely to work an extra week each year.

With working men and women spending ever increasing hours at the office, is it any wonder that personal relationships are suffering and that divorce rates are high?

Studies have shown that ambitious women (in the case of one study, specifically women who earned advanced degrees in professional fields such as business, law, or medicine) tend to divorce at higher rates than men with advanced degrees and women with only an undergraduate degree. Conceivably, these women are more focused on their careers and spend more time outside the home.

But is this the woman’s fault? Should she feel guilty for wanting to pursue her own dreams instead of supporting those of her husband?

If cities had better public transportation or there were more jobs located in the areas in which we live, would women have more time for domestic duties and therefore create happier, more stable marriages?

Having endured a 75-minute commute for several years to be closer to a boyfriend, I can definitely attest to the impact a commute has on job as well as overall satisfaction. Not to mention the resentment and toll the long travel times placed on my relationship. The last thing I’d want to do after my 10-hour day was come home and wash dishes or do the laundry. And several studies of marriages have shown that balanced-sharing of household chores is a main factor in marital satisfaction and success.

What is so intriguing about census data analysis is that it suggests that simple urban planning changes, such as bicycle lanes, increased bus service, or strategic zoning laws stitch together the very thread of our cultural fabric. Building so-called “urban villages” that incorporate commercial services, office parks as well as residential communities in a central location could ultimately be the secret to success for the working woman, who would spend less time in a car and more time building important personal relationships at home.