Wuddidja say?

This is not an uncommon question to hear, especially if you talking to someone in Texas. Here are some other things you might hear:

"He's a snake in th' grass and he's pokin' a hole under the tent."

"That dog won't hunt."

"Flat as a fritter."

"Dance with who brung you."

"Smaller than a gnat's eyelid."

"Slicker than snot on a door knob."


More specific to central Texas:

"hook'em"

"gig'em"

"I saw Leslie today."

Employee Reviews: Preparing Yourself

Remember back when you interviewed for this job? Didn’t you prepare for it as if you were selling yourself?

The employee review, assuming that you have them, is your invitation to remind them what they bought. A lot has happened since your interview, including subsequent interviews of other job candidates and people hired after you. No matter how close you think you are to your manager, they don’t remember all the things you do like you do.

Some firms have an evaluation form they want you to fill out and submit prior to the review. Commit to spending quality time with yourself so that you can do a thorough analysis of your performance. Whether these things come up during an employee review or not is not as important as you might think. Going into an employee review with humble confidence can be your greatest asset.

Begin by writing down what tasks you have done and for each one answer these three questions:
1. Who initiated this task? Did someone direct you to do it or is it something you thought up yourself. Both answers speak positively about you. The former being that you followed directions and the latter being that you took initiative.

2. Before you started doing this task, what was it like before? Have there been positive changes because you are the one doing the task instead of someone else? Was there a procedure for it already in place or did you have to create the process yourself? Or are you just plain old good at completing the assignment.

3. What are the results? Did it make other people’s jobs easier? Can they find things now that they couldn’t find before? Can your manager focus on their specialized tasks better because they trust you to take care of it? Even if you haven't thought of it that way before, certainly others are benefitting somehow even if it's just that it's one less thing for them to do.


Consider your review your chance to make a positive impression on the ones you are meeting with. Don't get too hung up on listing goals and figuring out your strengths and weaknesses. Just prepare well and have confidence in yourself!

Admin Support vs The Boss (Why can't we all just get along?)

Administrative Personnel in Design Firms

Office workers who provide administrative support to the professional design staff are in a precarious position.

One of the unfortunate traps many fall into is the slowly creeping transition from being supportive to being indignant. Why does this transformation happen and can it be avoided?

For this we must look at each of the opposing views.

Here’s what the boss is thinking about the Admin Staff:

1. Don’t give me that hurt-puppy look when I point out an error you have made. You said you wanted feedback and now that I’m giving it to you, you can’t take it.

2. Spare me the heavy sighs and the body language that screams indignation when I ask you to run more copies. I have a job to do and so do you, so just do it.

3. You know I have a meeting every Tuesday morning. Why do I have to ask you every week to reserve a conference room and make some coffee for us?

4. If you spent more time filing/typing/copying and less time on the phone/internet/email/text messaging, you’d get a lot more work done.

5. Where were you? I needed you and couldn’t find you anywhere. What? A trip to Starbucks???



Here’s what the Admin Staff is thinking about the boss:

1. Don’t refer to me as “overhead”. Instead of uniting us, it puts us at odds with each other. If you want me to be on your team, call me your co-worker.

2. Be careful with the banter and the “kidding”. After a while, it feels like you are making fun of me and the work I do for you. It doesn’t make me want to be more helpful.

3. Don’t limit my work to just grunt work and take all the glory work for yourself. It limits me on what I can learn plus the other managers in the firm never find out what kind of work I do. When you take those jobs for yourself and present them in a way where you get all the credit and I get none, I feel betrayed.

4. Clearly define what you expect from me. I’m not a mind reader. If I know you have organized a meeting for 60 people but you never tell me you need help with the prep work, don’t expect the chairs, projector, coffee and whiteboard to magically appear.

5. Don’t take credit for my work. I’m the one who stayed late when you had to leave for your soccer game. I’m the one who covered for you when you arrived late. I’m the one that anticipated what you needed. And even if all I did was the typing and formatting for the report, I did that work too and I want credit for it.

6. Stop reminding me that it's cheaper for the company for me to do the work than it is for you to do the work. I realize you are in a higher position of authority and have specialized skills. I actually do understand the profit side and why it makes sense for me to do the copying for you. I don't need the constant reminder that you make more money than me. I'm reminded of that every time I see your vehicle in the parking lot.


Notice what is missing from both sides? Respect. It may have been there in the beginning but it’s gone now. This situation can be resolved but it will take at least three things:

1. cooperation from both sides
2. both individuals must be able to listen to and accept criticism from the other
3. both individuals must recognize their areas of weakness and take responsibility for their actions

This resolution can be initiated by either party. The first step is to tell the other one how you feel and that you want things to change.

Take Back Control of Your Meetings

In an office of college educated design professionals the managers should know and be able to follow the basic rules of meeting etiquette. Surprisingly, many of them do not and it sets a bad example to the rest of the staff. Poorly run meetings can be tiring, demeaning and exhausting.

Our design office typically has 70 to 90 active projects, 40 staff, and 15 project managers. As the scheduling coordinator, it is my job to solicit staffing requests from the project managers, consolidate it into one document, and review it weekly with all the managers. And the principals. And the finance department. This is a high-dollar meeting. We meet every Friday morning to make sure we have assigned the appropriate staff to each project. As leader of the meeting, I continue to be astounded at their lack of skills in the area of meeting etiquette.

Rule Breakers
1. Arriving more than 5 minutes late and announcing to all that they have to leave in 20 minutes
2. Using the meeting as a work-session instead of a reporting session
3. Looking at other papers (contracts, meeting minutes, letters, etc.) that are unrelated to the meeting.
4. Checking their email and sending text messages from their hand held
5. Striking up side bar discussions with the person next to them or worse, with the person sitting across the table from them. And worse than worse is when their cross-conversation is between the leader and the rest of the participants.
6. Heaving a deep sigh when they thought the meeting should be over and asking “Are we done yet?”

All my emails telling them to come prepared, to get there on time and to stay engaged in the meeting were not effective. Some of the people did change their ways but the ones who didn’t want to be told what to do continued to do it their way. And, since they are generally one of my bosses, it was a tricky situation indeed.

These meetings would often drag on for an hour or longer.

The difficulty I had in leading these meetings is that I wasn’t leading the meeting – it was leading me.

When I finally had enough and I didn’t care if I hurt their feelings or interfered with their power plays, I decided to enact some changes. This is what I did and it has been successful ever since.

1. Notify them in advance
I sent out an email the afternoon before the meeting to advise them to expect some changes to our meeting format. It included an agenda based on a 45 minute meeting. The beginning section, 5 minutes long, was for general announcements specific to the upcoming meeting. The middle section, 30 minutes long, was to take care of the bulk of the meeting. The wrap-up section, 10 minutes long, was to make sure that as a group, we had taken care of all projects and all staff.

2. Mentally prepare for the challenge
I visualized what might transpire at the meeting and prepared some phrases that I would use to get the meeting back on track. Being ready to say “that sounds like a topic for further discussion at another time” or “is [your side bar conversation] relevant to the rest of the meeting?” was instrumental in my success.

3. Begin the meeting on time and announce the expectations
Not everyone read my email and even if they did, they might not have taken it seriously. I told them that I would be trying to keep these meetings on track, to start and end on time, and to keep everyone engaged for the duration. I told them that these are the initial guidelines but if they thought we should add to them, to let me know.

4. Keep an eye on the clock
There’s no point in setting this type of agenda if you don’t follow the clock. On the other hand, you don’t want to sacrifice discussions or contributions just to beat the clock.

5. Squelch the sidebar conversations
This had become so routine in our meetings that I felt this would be one of my hardest challenges in regaining control. As soon as I started to hear or see people talking with each other, I started my mental 10-second clock and if they were still talking after 10 seconds, I stopped the main conversation and said, “Just a minute, Joe, there’s another discussion going on at the other end of the table and I want to find out if we need to include their input in what we’re going over with you.” Then, I turned to those two people and asked if what they were talking about was relevant to our other conversation. Most of the time, the answer was no, but there were a few times when it turned out that their side bar really needed to be heard by the rest of the group. This method was very effective, because it let everyone know that we were going to have one meeting at a time and if you tried to have a sub-meeting, I was going to call you on it.

6. Announce the end of the meeting
In the first meeting where I used this stronger approach, we finished right on time. The following week, we finished in a record 25 minutes. By the third week, they were getting more accustomed to the format and came prepared. It is now acceptable for any of them to say, “Can we move this along?” and it not be a personal attack.

Results
Shorter meeting = appreciative co-workers
It’s a win-win for everyone. Even those who used this meeting as a platform for proselytizing their point of view have had to find another venue to find a captive audience.

Beach Web Cams

PACIFIC OCEAN
Choshi, Chiba, Japan
http://www.grandhotel-isoya.co.jp/main/livecam/javaview.html
From this hotel, 50 miles east of Tokyo, you can watch the sunrise. Although it's a clear image during the day, pre-dawn images are more difficult to see because of the reflection in the glass. Even if you don't understand the language, try clinking on some of the links because some of them have photos of the hotel and the beach. Sunrise in Japan is about 3pm Central Daylight Time.


Santa Cruz, California, USA
http://www.ci.santa-cruz.ca.us/pr/wharf/index.html
This is a streaming beach web cam aimed at an area known by the local surfers as "Steamer Lane". Although you really don't get to see the beach with this web cam, you are getting the view you would see if you were on Main Beach in Santa Cruz. Way past this is an incredibly deep trench called "Monterey Canyon". I'm thinking they don't have a beach web cam for that.

Tauranga Harbor, New Zealand
http://www.citynews.co.nz/webcams/yacht/


GULF OF MEXICO
Port Aransas, Texas, USA
http://www.thedunescondos.com/cam.cfm
With this beach web cam you can really see how the waves are continuosly rolling up on the beaches in Texas. The web cam is mounted at the top of one of the many condos on the beach. I wish this beach web cam would let you see more of the sand so you could see the vehicles driving on the beach.


ATLANTIC OCEAN
Cape Cod Canal, Massachusetts, USA
http://www.maritime.edu/l2.cfm?page=88
Technically not the Atlantic Ocean, this is the canal that allows ships a shorter passage from the Boston area to New York and further south. So it's not really a beach web cam because you can't see any beaches from this web cam. But, the area around the canal is full of beaches and when I find a good beach web cam of a Cape Cod beach I like, I'll add that link too.

Eastham, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA
http://www.morebeach.com/Cape_Cod_Beach_Cam.html
This is a really nice beach web cam because you can see the beach, the dunes, and the walkway. Their website also has a very nice map of the cape with all the towns labeled. Wood's Hole is where you take the ferry to Martha's Vineyard. Craigsville Beach is a nice public beach and the water is warmer than at East Sandwich beach. You would think the shallow waters of Cape Cod Bay would allow the water to warm up, but actually it's the Gulf Stream that helps warm the waters along the southern part of the cape.

Chatham, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA
http://www.telecamsystems.com/outermost/index.htm
One thing I like about this beach cam is that they have saved the last photo taken during daylight and you can zoom in, pan left, or pan right. It's really a harbor cam, not a beach web cam, but I bet if you watched it long enough, you would see the high and low tides.

Carolina Beach, North Carolina, USA
http://www.hotwaxsurfshop.com/mall/atlanticsurf.asp
If you're looking for beach web cams, a great place to start is with surfer's websites. They have their beach web cams pointed at the surf so you can get a feel for the wind strength and cloud conditions. If I remember, I'll come back to this beach web cam next time they have a hurricane warning because this area gets hit alot.

Boston, Massachusetts, USA
http://www.hazecam.net/boston.html
This web cam gives a beautiful look at Boston Harbor.


Sun Cam
http://www.space.com/spacewatch/sun_cam.html
Finally...a web cam that works no matter what time zone you're in!

Not a web cam, but helpful when you want to find out if the sun is out at the web cam you're looking at!
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html

Traffic Cam
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
http://www.masspike.com/traffic_cameras/trafficcams.html