Corporate Idealist

photo credit: Iain Farrell

There it was. Rather, there they were. Usually every day.

I’m talking about meeting requests. They don’t flood my inbox, but they’re there. And they don’t go away unless I do something about them.

The trouble with meeting requests is that you can rarely gauge how much trouble they’re worth. You could say no to just the right contact who could have landed you on Oprah (if you know how to do this, I’d like to meet with you, actually). Or, you could say yes to meeting with someone who just wanted to sell you pet insurance. How can one navigate the muddy meeting waters?

Monica O’Brien, who writes at Twentyset, says this:

I get messages almost daily from people who read my blog and want to meet with me by phone or in-person. As a rule, though, I won’t meet with anyone unless they have interacted with me several times, or they give me a good reason (not just “let’s chat”). I realize this may make me seem snobby or elite, which isn’t my intention.

My intention is to avoid time sucks. I would love to be everyone’s friend, but it isn’t a reality for me at this time. I have work, school, a house, and a family that all need my attention too.

Go read the rest of her article. It’s really about finding the right mentor – and not just about scheduling meetings. But, she does bring to light pertinent realities when it comes to making sure you take the right meetings and ditch the bad ones.

Whether you’re meeting someone new or deciding if it’s worth running over to the other department to meet with someone, how do you decide which meetings to take? We’d love to hear how you avoid time sucks and really capitalize on face-to-face encounters.

photo credit: kainet

How would you like a three-day weekend every week? That’s the upshot of the four-day work week where each work day consists of 10 hours instead of the 8 in a 5-day work week.

We’ve talked about the Working 4 Utah initiative before, where the state has instituted this 4-day schedule across some 70% of its workforce, but now that the program has been in place for a full year, GOOD has circled back to review and is reporting several key benefits, of which our favorite, predictably enough, is this:

4: Happier, healthier workforce

Lori Wadsworth, a researcher at Brigham Young University, surveyed Utah workers who’ve transitioned to the 4 x 10 schedule and found that 82 percent prefer it. And, according to Wadsworth, “Utah employees actually show decreased health complaints, less stress, and fewer sick days.” And while absenteeism has dropped, productivity and quality of service have improved—customer complaints, for example, at state agencies like the DMV are down. Early evidence seems to quell the initial fears that 10-hour workdays would “burn out” employees.

Of course, on the entrepreneurial side of our audience, where there’s more and more push for the  four-hour work week (popularized by Timothy Ferris in his book of the same name), the idea of working four tens probably has little appeal. But if you’re in a traditional office environment, as we know many of our readers are, we’re curious to know if you’d be interested in this arrangement.

Would you prefer a schedule of four ten-hour work days each week to the standard five eight-hour days? Let us know why or why not in the comments.

photo credit: monkeyatlarge

I’ve been pretty caught up in a volunteer project lately, helping to put on a tech conference in my local area. We’ve reached that part of the process where everyone’s been working hard and we’re all starting to get a little burned out, just as we’re entering the crunch time where there’s a lot to do and a long way to go.

It’s got me thinking about how volunteering can impact, and at times improve, your life, your professional skills, your world view, and so on.

Apparently I’m not the only one thinking about this, because from the Harvard Business Review comes an article by Sylvia Ann Hewlett about increasing employee engagement by encouraging volunteering:

Simply giving employees access to charitable work through their job is an effective way to amp up engagement. More than a third of the 106,000 employees of BT (formerly British Telecom) already actively volunteer during their off-hours, according to a company internal survey. Another 30 percent would like to. That’s why in April 2009, BT introduced its first coordinated, companywide Volunteer Program.

BT’s vision is to effectively pair work teams and individual executives with productive volunteer opportunities that match their personal interests and career development needs. For example, a division that needs team building may spend a day together erasing graffiti off inner-city walls. One CEO of a BT business unit is volunteering his time mentoring the CEO of a charitable organization.

In some of the companies where I’ve worked, we’ve had organized days for working in a food bank, or perhaps for helping out with a home building project. Does your company provide opportunities for volunteerism? Do you seek out volunteer opportunities outside of work? What benefits have you gotten from volunteering?

Having been sick the past few days, I haven’t had the energy to do my weekly blog prep work that would have included writing this entry. But it occurred to me that it might be a good time to turn the microphone, as it were, over to you and ask what makes you head into the office on Monday mornings?

Aside from needing a paycheck, aside from habit, what makes the commute, or the occasional office politics, or the dress code, or the workload, worthwhile?

Leave a comment and tell us what motivates you.