Remember when you were a kid and stayed home from school because you were sick?  Remember how weird it was to watch all those daytime TV talk shows and think, “so this is how the other half lives.”  Remember how it was even stranger when you accompanied your mother on a brief errand or visited the doctor’s office and saw people out and ...

The HR Capitalist has a great post about the distrust of those working from home.  Are they really working, asks writer Kris Dunn, or are they simply squeezing 3 hours of work into an 8-hour day? More importantly, can a remote worker/telecommuter even go to lunch without having that ''gotcha'' feeling?  A recent Business Week online ...

My fellow Huffington Post columnist Alvaro Fernandez writes about the recent news emphasis on brain fitness and ''brain training,” which reflects a growing interest in natural, non-drug-based interventions to keep our brains sharp. Fernandez says that this interest is very timely, given the aging population, increasing Alzheimer's rates, and ...

Leaving the business world to start one’s own gig is a hot topic these days.  I read blog posts about it every day, and my friend Pam Slim just sold a new book about it.  Over lunch a few weeks ago, I asked my good friend Keith Alperin if he’d be willing to tell WCW readers how he launched his new business, Helium Foot Software, and what ...

According to a new national survey by Harris Interactive for The Marlin Company, 10% of U.S employees say their company has used e-mail to fire or lay off employees.  And 17% indicated their boss used e-mails to avoid other difficult face-to-face conversations.   “E-mail has become the new shield of today’s business. Companies hide ...

Thanks to Steven Rothberg at CollegeRecruiter.com for sharing news of the innovative, first-ever Deloitte & Touche Film Festival. The festival invited employees in the accounting and consulting firm’s US operations to make short videos that answered the question ''What's your Deloitte?''. Teams comprised of one to seven people submitted films ...

Now that I’m a manager, I’ve found that it’s partly up to me to ensure that my reports have good work/life balance. I’ve seen other supervisors ignore this issue, expecting that work should be the only thing that matters to employees, and the department is a revolving door.  Here are some of the methods I’ve used or seen used ...

  Will Schwalbe, a guest blogger at Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist, is senior vice president, editor in chief of Hyperion Books, and has just published a cool new book called Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home.  I’ve yet to receive my copy of the book from Amazon, but I have been following Will’s tips on the ...

When I saw this post about out-of-the-office auto-replies on the BNET Business Hacks blog, I couldn’t resist chiming in.  It all started with a scathing critique of the technology by PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak.  Said Dvorak: What's most annoying about AutoReply is that it amounts to spam, since the person is often looking at ...