They say that time is the most precious gift you can give. And if that time is paid time off – and the recipient is truly in need – it is beyond precious.

This deeply meaningful gift is being given not by friends, not by family… but by co-workers. I’m talking about a trend in generosity that should be quite interesting to HR professionals: employees donating their Paid Time Off (PTO) to colleagues who need it to treat an illness or care for a family member who is chronically ill, or for employees who have gone through a major disaster.

I’ve known about catastrophic leave-sharing programs for some time, but I’ve come to appreciate this trend from reading a site called GivesMeHope which focuses on “life’s beautiful moments.” It’s a simple, text-based site, filled with short anecdotes submitted by users. Each story ends with a statement of what “gives me hope,” or, as they put it, “GMH.” Check out this story:

When my mom was dying of cancer, my dad had to keep working to keep his health insurance. His midsize company has a program by which employees can transfer paid time off to one another. A person in HR sent out an email explaining his situation. Within 3 hours, my father had 12 weeks of paid vacation. Strangers’ sacrifices GMH.

And this one:

A woman my mom works with has cancer and has been out of work for a long time. She recently found out she has to be out for longer but doesn’t have enough sick days left to cover it. Every nurse on my mom’s floor at the hospital is donating at least one of their paid sick days to her so she can finish her treatment – and get paid for it. GMH.

And finally, this one:

My girlfriend got the swine flu and was out of work for two weeks. Her paid time off wasn’t enough to cover the absence. When she got her first paycheck after returning, she found one of her coworkers had donated 8 hours of paid time off to her. Anonymously. She’s only been there 6 months. GMH.

If these stories warm your heart, consider starting a leave-sharing program for your employees. Most examples of leave-sharing come from universities – most notably the University of California system – but state and local governments also offer it, as well as some labor unions, non-profits, and private corporations. It may come with a bit of red tape, but leave-sharing programs are a low-cost, high-impact way to show thoughtful, flexible support to employees who fall upon tragic times. The show of altruism is wonderful for morale and can really bond a team.

Of course, transferring PTO between employees requires a solid policy – to describe what circumstances and family members qualify, and to determine how the program will be administered. It is best to address all this before a potentially emotional situation arises. Each situation must be researched carefully. There may be tax consequences, or state rules concerning what kind of hours can be donated (sick leave, holiday leave, or compensatory time may be treated differently.)

To explore this in more detail, we recommend An Employer’s Guide to Employee Leave-Sharing Programs as a start.

We’ve collected some examples of leave-sharing policies to get you started exploring the topic:

• Catastrophic Leave Sharing  Program from the University of California at Davis
• Catastrophic Leave Sharing Program for the City of Salem, Oregon
• Advocate Health Care PTO Sharing / Donation
• Catastrophic Leave Sharing Bank for Coast Federation of Classified Employees

Do these stories give you hope? Do you have a story of altruistic leave-sharing that you would like to share with our readers?

I usually write to you from an HR perspective, but today’s blog is from my perspective as a job-seeker. I just finished an 80-minute task that was deeply demoralizing: I applied for a job using some of the industry’s “best” employee screening software. What I experienced was excruciating.

I thought the process would be short-ish, perhaps 15 minutes at the most, because the hiring company used a well-known screening software that I had used before. I even remembered my username and password! However, this did not seem to mean that the system remembered me, as once I was “welcomed back,” we began with my name, address, email, and other depressingly basic information.

I had hoped that the system would have retained my resume (isn’t that why I have an account and a password?), but no such luck. But if I uploaded one, the site promised, it would “read” my resume and extract the relevant information. I knew better than to upload my “fancy” PDF, and chose the simplest Word document I had. Even so, all the software could extract were my dates of employment. As I began the tedious task of filling in company names, titles, duties, and more, I recalled performing the exact same task with this same software just a few months ago. Why could it not remember me or save any information to my account?

Then things got… deep. Before I could actually submit my application, I had to provide:

• the names, titles, and contact info for not one, not two, but three professional references
• starting and ending salaries for every position I have ever held
• the reason I left each and every job, and whether it was voluntary or involuntary
• consent for a background check and a credit check
• a pledge to submit to a drug test within 72 hours of an offer of employment
• a written explanation of any gaps in my employment lasting 30 days or more

At this point, I started to feel that I was just giving the company reasons to reject me. After all, this job and I are not even at the courtship stage yet! Is it really necessary to compile such an exhaustive list on a candidate that you haven’t even spoken to – and may never speak to? Of course, I support the right of HR people to get the information they need to do their jobs, and I do understand the role of screening software, but this process left zero room for any magic, any spark, any feeling of “this is the right job for her” or “she’s the right person for this job.”

Imagine for a moment that this software was used for pre-screening romantic partners instead of potential employees. Who would put up with answering this depth and breadth of questions simply to see if there is mutual interest in a coffee date? (And who could tolerate the intense scrutiny?) I doubt that most of us would have met our current love interest if the date had been preceded by a questionnaire that demanded you list each former relationship, your levels of satisfaction with it, whether your separation was voluntary or involuntary, and phone numbers and email addresses of your former sweethearts for a “romance reference check.”

The automation of this system, and its extremely detailed nature, left me feeling more “dissected” than “discovered.” I knew perfectly well that I was typing away to a database, not a human, and that the database was designed to weed me out, not “discover talent” or help the employer and I connect. I don’t have anything to hide about my past, but this process was SO exacting that I felt I was not able to make my best qualities, skills, and experiences shine. Worse still, I was forced to tip my hand on the matter of compensation. If this employer ever decides to contact me, I’ve already lost the salary negotiation, unless I was devious enough to lie, which is a prohibited activity that I agreed not to do elsewhere in the application.

I probably wouldn’t go so far as to use the word “suck” to describe this kind of software, but other bloggers certainly do:

• Hey Employer, Your Online Application Sucks!
• Online job application systems suck
• Job Applications Suck

I’m interested in hearing solutions from the job-seeking side to the time-consuming process of screening. I know that using a portable resume format from a service like ResumePal is a good start in saving time on redundant application info. Many people say, “Dodge the software altogether and guerrilla-approach the HR department.” While this may be effective, the very fact that so many people advise doing an end-run around the software reinforces to me that it is more of a barrier than a doorway.

Is there a better way? Let us know in the comments.

The months of November and December are traditionally spent preparing for, and enjoying, holidays such as Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Year’s. People who work in offices are often overloaded as they try to combine personal goals such as shopping, traveling, and hosting family with work goals such as finishing all of their projects before their holiday break. It’s a well-documented fact that stress and depression levels soar at this time of year.

At the same time, it’s a crucial period for businesses trying to achieve certain goals by year’s end. The clash of these important issues can be enough to bring even the best performer down.

We recommend that HR managers recognize that employees are likely to be distracted, stressed, and unfocused around the holidays, and take pro-active steps to minimize their stress and help keep their eyes on the prize at this challenging time of year.

Keeping work-related focus during the holidays is a issue that comes up annually, so we turned to the very best articles on the subject, written over the past few years, to glean the best ideas in the business. Some are Santa-like, and some have a touch of Scrooge about them, but all of them have been recommended by bloggers we know and respect.

• Set a good example as a manager. If “focus” is something you are asking of employees, don’t cheat by shopping online during working hours, and don’t skate out of the office early just because the in-laws are town. Take the high road, every time.
• Watch out for signs of the “winter blues.” As a manager, be on the lookout for signs among your people of “Seasonal Affective Disorder,” abbreviated SAD, a condition whereby a lack of sunlight causes depression. The short days of the winter months, combined with work anxiety and the stress of the holidays, can quickly add up to a serious medical problem. Fortunately, if diagnosed, SAD can easily be treated with light therapy and/or antidepressants.
• Celebrate together. It’s good for morale to acknowledge that it is a special season. Your celebration can be as simple as coffee and cake in the break room, or as elaborate as a holiday party in an upscale restaurant. Many workplaces enjoy a small gift exchange among employees, and employers who have had a good year often give out gift certificates or small tokens of appreciation.
• If you give year-end bonuses, tie them to performance. Oftentimes, these bonuses are taken for granted. Work around this false perception by setting up a clear expectation that bonuses are tied to performance to keep people focused until they actually get the check.
• Give the gift of time. Sometimes, a little free time in a busy season is even more precious than cash. Consider flexible scheduling at this time of year, or simply give everyone a certain afternoon off to do their cooking, cleaning, shopping, wrapping, and other holiday tasks. What it may cost you in a few hours’ wages is more than made up for by the goodwill it brings back.
• Engage people’s giving spirit – outside the organization. People tend to forget any petty concerns and stress when they focus on something bigger and outside of themselves. Build on their holiday spirit and willingness to give back with an employer-sponsored toy drive, charity partnership, or volunteer time spent at a soup kitchen. It will do good, and bring your team together. Together, you can do much more than any of you could do alone.

• 8 Simple Steps for Maintaining Employee Efficiency during the Holiday Season
• How to Stay Focused During the Holiday Season
• Holidaze: Beating the Holiday Blues and Stress
• Holiday Stress Hotspots: Manage Holiday Stress with Knowledge

There are just 45 days left in 2009, and for many managers, it’s time for employee reviews. (Searching for “performance reviews” on Twitter at this time of year leads you to countless people who are either busy writing them, or nervously waiting to receive one.) It may have crossed your mind to skip or postpone performance reviews this year – as the business landscape keeps changing, the goals you made 12 months ago may seem unrealistic, or perhaps your organization has a freeze on salary increases. But no matter how bad the economy is, you cannot afford to miss giving feedback to your people.

Here are five compelling reasons why.

1. Simple legalities. You expect your employees to live by the handbook? Then so should management. If you have a written policy committing to an annual review, then provide the review. Skipping it means risking your reputation in court against a dismissed worker, who may portray the skipped review as a sign of poor management or bad communication.
2. Retain top talent. In tough times, you need your best people more than ever. Instead of avoiding their review because of economic turmoil, make a point of meeting with them and letting them know how much you appreciate them, even if the salary and bonus situation is not what it once was.
3. Put underperformers on warning. You can’t afford to have poor performers on board, so use the review as a chance to help them grow into a productive member of the team, or set the stage for their departure.
4. Re-align employees with the big-picture goals. Reviews aren’t just for the employees; they’re also a great time to revisit the company’s larger goals and make certain that the work being done reflects them.
5. Prepare for future difficulty or change. If the time should come in the future for a sale of the business, or a mass layoff, having recent, reliable documentation on hand will streamline the process. Same goes if new leadership is brought aboard.

No matter how rocky the economic outlook, your employees deserve to have a formal check-in on their progress. Plus, many aspects of the performance review directly benefit management (it’s not just handing out raises!). So don’t even consider skipping this important step, no matter how much you may be dreading performance review time in a bad economy. Evaluations can actually help you with your goals for the organization!

For more information:

• You can’t afford to skip reviews A well-argued case from Entrepreneur magazine.
• Should We Skip Performance Appraisals This Year? From 2008, but still very relevant to the issues we’re facing one year later.
• Don’t skip mid-year performance reviews Written about mid-year reviews, but this Wall St. Journal piece applies to year-end reviews equally well.
  

It seems counter-intuitive. Even as the unemployment rate soars and nearly 16 million Americans find themselves out of work, many HR professionals are having a hard time filling their open positions. It’s not a quantity issue –- any ad HR posts is sure to result in hundreds, if not thousands, of resumes — or even a quality issue. It’s a qualifications issue.

In times of change, industries morph more quickly than people do, resulting in a mismatch between available jobs and job candidates. We look to the Dow Jones Newswire for some analysis:

Economists say the main problem is a mismatch between available work and people qualified to do it. Millions of jobs with attractive pay and benefits that once drew legions of workers to the auto industry, construction, Wall Street and other sectors are gone, probably for good. And those who lost those jobs generally lack the right experience for new positions popping up in health care, energy and engineering. Many of these specialized jobs were hard to fill even before the recession. But during downturns, recruiters tend to become even choosier, less willing to take financial risks on untested workers.

The problem is definitely more pronounced in emerging industries:

With job openings largely concentrated in specialized industries like health care, green technology and energy, some employers say the problem is finding qualified workers, which are in short supply. Meanwhile, they are inundated with eager candidates from other industries who lack the skills and experience that the job requires.

In the above article, “Great job openings, no candidates: Hiring managers struggle to find employees, even as millions of jobs seekers are desperate for work,” CNN interviewed a Director of Human Resources who is in charge of hiring Registered Nurses and Home Health Aides. The positions pay between $30,000 and $45,000, but despite a  glut of applicants, many have been open for six months or more.

“We get tons of resumes,” says the HR Director. The problem, she says, is that they are bombarded by applications that lack the two years’ experience required. The result is that the positions stay unfilled, even as HR employees spend insupportable amounts of time searching through resumes to find appropriate candidates.

The problem is serious for people on both sides of the hiring desk, and it is not likely to go away anytime soon. New data just released by the Labor Department shows that as of September 2009, there were 6.1 unemployed persons competing for each job opening. At the beginning of the economic slowdown, not even two years ago, there were only 1.7 workers competing for each job opening. That means competition for jobs more than tripled since December 2007!

The article goes on to remind us that during the last three major recessions (in 1982, 1991 and 2001), it took more than a year for the unemployment rate to peak after the downturns officially ended. This is partially a reaction to economic forces, and partly because it takes time to transition laid-off workers to the industries that need them. Check out the Associated Press story “Even as layoffs persist, some good jobs go begging“:

It can take a year or more for a laid-off worker to gain the training and education to switch industries. That means health care jobs are going unfilled even as laid-off workers in the auto, construction or financial services industries seek work. “So we have this army of the unemployed,” without the necessary skills, [said the expert interviewed].

We are looking at a society-wide problem that is only going to be corrected with the passage of time and with resources devoted to re-training displaced workers. In the meantime, Human Resources is facing massive drains on its own resources.

How is your department handling screening large amounts of applicants? Is your organization offering any training, or working with any re-training agencies? Is it difficult to explain to co-workers outside of HR why it may be taking extra time to find the right match? We’re interested in hearing your strategies and your success stories.

Last week, we saw the Department of Labor reveal the worst unemployment statistics the U.S. has faced since 1983, with a total of 15.7 million Americans officially out of work and looking. The new national average of 10.2% is an important psychological threshold — but what’s even more shocking to think about is that it is an average. Many locations and demographics are experiencing much scarier numbers. Who is most and least affected by this plague of joblessness? What is the demographic makeup of the unemployment line?

The numbers vary from state to state, of course. For instance, RiseSmart’s home state of California has experienced 12.2% unemployment recently. Michigan, Nevada, and Rhode Island are also suffering. However, states such as the Dakotas, Utah, Iowa, and Nebraska are all doing comparatively well.

But regional differences are to be expected as local economies go through boom and bust times. It’s the demographic numbers that will really make you look twice. The New York Times has published a thought-provoking interactive chart that graphs out unemployment rates for different groups of Americans, called “The Jobless Rate for People Like You.” You can adjust the chart for race, gender, age, and education levels and get 12-month averages for that demographic, current as of September 2009 (they don’t reflect our latest awful reality of 10+%, but still show a sobering truth).

The variations are shocking. Truly, not all groups have felt the recession equally. Make up an imaginary unemployed person; give them an age, a gender, a race, and an education. See what their chances are; then change an element or two.

Take away that college degree, or change the race, and you’ll quickly find that some groups have unemployment rates much higher than the 10% we’re all worrying over. The highest unemployment rate –- a staggering 48.5% –- is suffered by black males under age 24 without a high school diploma. Their female counterparts (same race, age, and education) also faced discouraging odds at 36.8%, but the change of gender alone makes a difference of 11.7%.

Education helps, because these same groups, had they finished high school, would be facing just 25.8% unemployment. Before you pin it all on dropping out of school, though, consider a schoolmate of theirs: a white male of the same age who didn’t complete high school. The white dropout, statistically, faces just 25.6% unemployment (virtually the same as the black male who completes his diploma). If the white student finishes high school, it drops to 15.5%.

There are many more dismaying inequities to be found by experimenting with the chart. The unemployment line of America, according to these numbers, contains more men than women; more youth than elders; a vastly unequal representation of races; and an inordinate amount of the less-educated. In fact, education is the factor that affects these rates the most. There are definitely trends based on age, race, and gender, but possession of a high school or college degree seems to do the most, across the board, to increase one’s chances of getting and keeping a job.

For more unemployment statistics, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Unemployment Statistics is an excellent place to start. You can examine national, state, and local statistics through the lens of various demographics, and research mass layoffs, too. If you are interested in how the unemployment crisis is affecting older workers, the Urban Institute has produced comprehensive “Unemployment Statistics on Older Americans.”

Whether you are a job-seeker or a Human Resource professional (or both –- it’s known to happen from time to time), it is important to know the real face of joblessness. Our country is facing the worst unemployment crisis in decades: probably the worst any of us will see in our careers. We owe it to ourselves and to the people we meet and consider working with to understand what is really going on in our offices, our unemployment system, and our society.

We’ve seen the value of microblogging sites such as Twitter for sharing short ideas, links, and personal updates, but that kind of website is wayyy too public for business collaboration. (Think about all the secret projects, private sales figures, and other sensitive matters that you’d prefer everyone keep in nice, secure, private, trackable emails.) Nonetheless, there is a need for a new way to talk to colleagues — something informal, real-time, attention-based, and inclusive…. something a lot like, well, Twitter.

In all honesty, your people may already be using services such as Twitter, Facebook, and instant messages for intraoffice messaging to boost productivity and circumvent email, which is a crushing weight on most workers. (It’s also a closed system, where someone who might benefit from the information often gets left out.) While we’re confident that email will stick around, we support finding a way for workers to securely share more information under a broadcast model, and we support top management, HR, and IT in finding a way to facilitate this in a secure and controlled manner.

In a nutshell, microblogging services are the next big thing in employee communications. Think of it as “Twitter for the workplace.” Imagine a system with all the benefits of Twitter, but designed in a secure fashion with business clients in mind. It might be free, it might be paid for, or it might be open source. Some software runs behind a firewall, and some is hosted outside, depending on your needs. Some microblogging applications have even been designed to work with Lotus and Microsoft SharePoint enterprise software!

There are many services vying to become the de facto “enterprise microblogging” application. Here are the great qualities they all have in common.

• Unlike Facebook, there is no “reciprocal friending” awkwardness… with microblogging, you lend your attention, not your friendship
• It’s broadcast-oriented communication, so you can follow someone in the organization you haven’t met
• Employees can search by keywords for projects that interest or affect them, much like Twitter’s hashtags
• It’s reply-optional, so is perfect for “FYI info”
• Microblogging clears the inbox by diverting informal communications out of email
• It allows people a way to collaborate rapidly, in real time
• It creates an archived knowledge base for new employees to read, unlike emails, which are designed to be private

Seems pretty fascinating all of a sudden, doesn’t it? If you are interested in learning a little bit more about what microblogging could add to your team’s collaboration, we have some great sites to share with you. These are some of the front-runners in the field.

Yammer — Yammer’s motto is “connect and share with your coworkers,” and users constantly answer the prompt “What are you working on?” It’s for people who share the same company domain name, and no one else. It comes in flavors for the desktop, BlackBerry, iPhone, IM, email and SMS, so it will fit seamlessly in with different employees’ favorite devices. Yammer is free when used informally, but there is a small licensing fee once the IT department gets involved.

Present.ly – Present.ly is a microblogging platform that is used by employees of CNET and The New York Times. For a small team, it is free, and web-hosted; if you wish to add more users, or use it behind a firewall, upgrade to a paid version. Present.ly has a Twitter-compatible API, so Twitter tools can be used on the system with just small modifications.

Communote – Secure microblogging for enterprise with hashtags, usernames, mobile access, and more. Communote is delivered as software-as-a-service. It has a limited free trial, and a paid business version.

SocialText’s Signal – Signal is available as part of the larger SocialText collaboration platform, but also as a stand-alone microblogging appliance. It can be hosted, or behind a firewall. Up to 50 users is free, and more will cost a small fee. Signal is interesting because it offers a server appliance that runs the software locally, meaning that you can run your own back-ups.

Are any of you RiseSmart blog readers involved in enterprise microblogging? We’re interested in hearing who is using this software: who loves it, and who hates it? Talk to us in the comments!

The scenario: You’ve been called in to interview with a company that you know virtually nothing about — and the interview’s tomorrow. While you’re excited that they want to recruit you, you’re sweating bullets at the thought of giving meaningful answers about this mysterious organization.

The answer is quick, simple, and painless. Just turn to your computer. Research nowadays is easy, and often free. There are a wealth of great sites and services that specialize in getting you up to speed on an organization.

Here’s the RiseSmart guide to making the most of the 24 hours before your interview.

1) Start with your basic homework.

• Read the company’s website, paying special attention to the annual report and press releases.
• Hoover’s has free look-ups of businesses with in-depth reports about them. Input the company name, and read away.
• Do a search for news stories about the company, written by an objective journalist. Try Reuters and this compilation of business trade articles.
• Review what you’ve learned. You’re going to want knowledge of products and services, market positioning, company leaders and organization, culture, and compensation.

2) Then get a little more advanced.

• Look up the company’s leaders, and the person interviewing you, by name on ZoomInfo. Don’t tell them that you did this, but use every morsel you find.
• I like this easy pathfinder for company research from the Los Angeles Public Library.
• If it’s a publicly held company, they must file with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
• WetFeet is a fantastic resource. Check out their list of major employers.
• Google the organization on the “wonder wheel” setting to show you related searches you might not have thought of (and the company might not WANT you to think of).

3) Check out what current and former employees say.

• GlassDoor has anonymous reviews of company culture and insider salary info.
• Look through your contacts on LinkedIn, and see if anyone in your greater circle works there, or has worked there. Ask for an informational interview, perhaps a 10-minute phone call.
• Run searches on the company name plus positive and negative terms such as “great place to work” or “sucks.” You might be surprised what you can find.
• Search on Twitter for the company’s name as a hashtag.
• Utilize Google’s Blog Search function to find out what regular people are writing about the company.

4) Don’t forget about researching the entire industry and the top competition…

• Hoover’s has more than 600 fantastic free “industry overviews”  to place your hiring company in a wider context.
• Capital IQ, Lexis-Nexis, and OneSource can all help with this, but usually require a license to use.
• WetFeet has a free directory of industry guides to check out.
• Do a search on the company’s name plus the term “poach.”

With a small amount of intelligent, targeted research, you can be ready for a surprise interview with just 2-3 hours of research conducted the night before.

Tips compiled from my own experience, and from the excellent job research articles at:

• Quint Careers’ “Guide to Researching Companies, Industries, Countries”
• Gotta Mentor’s “Researching the COMPANY”
• The Job Hunter’s Bible “Web Sites for Job Hunting Research
• Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management “Company Research FAQ”

Instant communication is a fact of business life these days: emails, Twitters, texts and more pour in through our computers, phones and Blackberries as quickly as we can process them. It’s enabled unprecedented productivity and global teamwork in our time, but there is a growing backlash against this breakneck pace — and the imperative of email.

The “quest for the empty inbox,” some experts say, is hijacking our productivity and hampering our ability to concentrate on longer-term strategic goals.

The confusion starts at the very top. In a recent Variety article, “Execs are Inundated and Twitterpated,” Editorial Director Peter Bart shares,

I was with a group of top executives who admitted they had no idea how to cope with the chaos of email. One CEO said he simply ignored his email. Another said he assigned an assistant to sort through it, and then ignored it. A third said he had taken to sending petulant emails to associates who sent unnecessary email.

If our leaders can’t handle their own communications, how can anyone hope to?

Email demands an unsustainable amount of effort from everyone involved. What is being sacrificed is our ability to actually do our work. “Communication may be the bedrock of business systems today, but it has also become an albatross around our necks and is draining us of our productivity,” says Brent McConnell in “The Mythical 40 Hour Workweek.” “As organizations have flattened over the last two decades and command-and-control hierarchies have been replaced with matrix-style organizations, communication between an ever increasing number of interested parties has sapped nearly all productivity from today’s corporations.”

McConnell is expanding upon the ideas of the book The Mythical Man Month, which famously demonstrated that adding resources to a project did not necessarily speed up the project, because the need for all parties involved to communicate added tremendous overhead.

The problem goes beyond mere deadlines, and into the much more serious territory of goals:

Not only has excessive email communication become the norm in business, it’s also how we are defining success in our workdays.  In times gone by we defined our success by how we contributed towards the company’s objectives and whether or not we influenced the bottom line.  Today we define success by whether or not we’ve processed all our incoming email and at least looked like we handled all the day’s “hot” issues. How many times have you gotten nothing productive done during the day, but felt successful just because your INBOX was empty?  We’ve become a slave to our communications systems and reacting to them rather than intelligently planning and using email and IM as tools for thoughtful articulation of messages.

There’s a new book out this fall that deals with the pace of email and one’s quality of life: The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox by John Freeman. I’ve read his much talked about manifesto on “slow communication” that was published in The New York Times, and listened to a National Public Radio interview with Freeman just yesterday. “The computer and e-mail were sold to us as tools of liberation,” writes Freeman, “but they have actually inhibited our ability to conduct our lives mindfully, with the deliberation and consideration that are the hallmark of true agency.”

The author decries the “frantic” pace of modern communication and questions if it is really working for us. He advocates a work-life balance that will probably sound alarming to anyone really dependent on their email. Set your email to check a pre-determined number of times per day, and don’t check it extraneously, he advised on the radio. Switch over to the telephone if an email exchange turns into a staccato back-and-forth negotiation of one-liners. Set your colleagues’ expectations that you do not respond instantly. Focus on your real goals.

All good thoughts, but many employees deal with extreme pressure from peers and managers to be constantly available; refusing to participate in the email frenzy signals laziness or insubordination. One of the NPR callers stated that her employer actually required employees to send emails, to prevent them from “unproductively” visiting one another at their desks. This really seems short-sighted to me, as there is a lot of communication best done face-to-face. Yet, I sympathize with a company’s desire to offer some kind of guidelines as to how its employees communicate.

And so I look to our readers.

• Has anyone been asked to author a policy concerning responsiveness to email?
• Have you been instructed (or instructed your staff) as to when to use IM versus email versus the telephone?
• Does anyone work in an environment where a return to “slower” communication (such as checking email six times a day) might be acceptable?