At one time, and really not that long ago, job stability was something that we could look forward to as we headed to the job market. I remember when getting a job at the GM factory in Oshawa (Canada) was the ticket to having all the good things in life and not having to worry if tomorrow would see you having to find another job.

Today that sense of job security no longer exists and the reality is that job instability has become the new normal in our lives. For much of the last ten years or so there has been a growing shift away from being assured that there would always be a job waiting around the corner and more a sense of being lucky to be able to find a job of any kind.

This left many people wondering what their futures were going to be like and constantly worrying about even being able to have any sense of security – job or otherwise.

However according to a new survey from Adecco where they polled 1.014 American for its annual Workplace Insights report there has been a shift in attitudes from workers when it comes to career instability, and especially when it comes to temporary and contract jobs.

• Temporary jobs are more favorably viewed today than in the past. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of Americans say they view temporary jobs more positively than they did last year. That might be a result of a huge majority (86 percent) of Americans believing a temporary job is a good career option for people looking to gain valuable work experience.
• Americans are also more likely to work in different fields than they were in 2011. Sixty-eight percent of Americans would be more willing to take a job in a field outside of their degree or study today than they would have been last year.
• Women may be more flexible when it comes to finding a job than men. Seventy-two percent of women would be more willing today to take a job outside of their field of study compared to 64 percent of men.

Of course this doesn’t mean that people are giving up on the idea of having a long term job but rather it is evidence that workers aren’t letting this job instability totally consume them and in most cases are appearing to be coming to terms with it, and the changing workplace.

via GigaOM

Job instability the new normal and Americans are getting used to it is a post from: The Inquisitr

Monday.

Back in the office.

Another week stuck in your cubicle.

Another week of having to deal with that moron two cubicles over and wishing it was legal to bring your favorite AK-47 to work.

Well John Austin has put together the perfect book for you cubicle warriors called Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction – Build Implements of Spitball Warfare. What more can you ask for as you start your plans to take over the second floor of the cubicle farm called work.

Here’s a few examples of the goodies you’ll find within the covers that you can use to liberate yourself.

Just in time for Monday – cubicle weapons of destruction is a post from: The Inquisitr

I’ve known some pretty strong perfumes that have made me want to run in the opposite direction but I have yet to suffer as the employees at the Fort Worth branch of the Bank of America when two employees reported feeling sick and dizzy.

Thinking that maybe there had been a carbon monoxide leak the bank called emergency crews and then evacuated the bank. A total of 12 people were taken to hospital while 22 others made their own way there for treatment and a 110 were treated on scene. The only thing was there was no leak but instead it turns out that the original two employees were standing too close to someone else as they squirted themselves with perfume.

Lt Kent Worley of Fort Worth Fire Department said: "Two employees reported some dizziness in close association with someone spraying on some perfume."

He said that when the two reported being dizzy to a supervisor, "an announcement was made over the building’s PA system saying that anyone feeling these symptoms should exit the building to an outside location."

Subsequently, he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, many people left the building, but many others continued working "with no ill effect."

"We called a [hazardous materials] unit to the scene but they didn’t detect anything on their air monitoring unit," he said.

"That air monitoring unit can detect carbon monoxide and several other chemicals and products that can be in the air. But they found nothing that would have caused people to get sick."

Lt Worley suggested the situation escalated because of ‘psychosomatic behaviour’, or what medical experts often refer to as ‘contagious fear’.

Source: SkyNews :: Eau No! Perfume Spray Sparks Panic At Bank

So you know what to do the next time you want the afternoon off work, right?

picture courtesy of Kelly Chin, Star-Telegram

Unknown perfume empties bank and hospitalizes 34 is a post from: The Inquisitr

The environment and our impact on it as we make our way though our day is something that we are taking more of an interest in. The one area of our daily work life that can have the biggest impact both environmentally and our own physical wellbeing is that daily commute to and from our workplace. In the areas of the worlds that can be considered to have fairly stable seasons is the west coast, the lower parts of the 48 states and portions of the east coast.

It is in those areas that where possible biking to and from work can make a lot of sense. Besides saving you a lot of money on things like gas and vehicle upkeep it is also a great way to keep physically, and to some degree mentally, fit. Until recently though while the idea of riding your bike to and from work may have seemed like a great idea there was also the worry about what could happen to that bike while you are actually working.

In this regard there are many things that companies can do in order to make your two wheel trip to work a more encouraging trend to be a part of. To that end Baltimore Spokes has a great post with a list of things that companies can do to encourage employees to ride their bikes to work.

Be Accessible

Promote the fact that your company is close to either bicycle friendly roads or actual bike paths

Being Clean

By its very nature bicycling can be a sweaty affair so consider having somewhere where employees can have a quick fresh me up shower.

Safe Parking

People can spend many hundred’s of dollars, or more, on their bicycles so making sure that the company has a safe place for people to lock up their bikes while working. Some companies have even gone to the point of building secure bike rooms for their employees.

Creating a Company biking Community

A single biker is a lone duck. Two bikers are just the weirdoes in the company. Anymore that three and you have a chance to build a corporate biking community. It could be as simple has having special company t-shirts made for those who bike to work; or it could grow to be a community that takes part as a company team in larger biking events.

Cash incentives never hurt

Some companies help by covering the cost of bike safety courses while others offer things like Bike for Bucks which sees the miles they bike turned into credits at local bike shops. There are some companies that have gone as far as offering to reimburse employees for bike purchases.

All in all this trend of leaving the car in the driveway and biking to work instead provides a lot of benefits to both employee and employer.

Biking to work. A little encouragement goes a long way is a post from: The Inquisitr

When I was growing up hard work was the accepted norm. From the age of eleven I have been working with by first experience of hard work being that of working on a dairy farm every summer and much of the winter on the weekends. Slugging bales of hay that could weigh more than I did at the time was hard work. Cleaning out calf pens in the spring from a winter of them being in a 10×10 pen was hard work.

As I got older my work history was one of delivering furniture, managing warehouses and hot tar roofing. That was hard work and much of my generation believed the same as I did – you got ahead in life by working hard. That was our ethos that we were raised with. It was the same with our parents and their parents. Working hard got you the good things in life and was something to be proud of.

Even the early days of the computerized workspace was built around hard work. We didn’t have the advantage of mass produced software products with much of what we used the machines for we had to program into them. The paperless office ended up being nothing more than a pipedream as we struggled to come to terms with how our work was changing.

The fact is that as the information age has become the driving force of our world our ideas of what hard work is has changed. Whether the change is for the better or not is open to debate but the fact is that the hard work ethic of even my generation is disappearing. In its place we are finding ourselves dealing more and more with having to manage our distractions. As Mike Elgan wrote a couple of days ago at IT Management

Distractions mask the toll they take on productivity. Everyone finishes up their work days exhausted, but how much of that exhaustion is from real work, how much from the mental effort of fighting off distractions and how much from the indulgence of distractions?

Pundits like me are constantly talking about Facebook, Twitter, blogs and humor sites, not to mention old standbys like e-mail and IM. One gets the impression that we should be "following" these things all day long, and many do. So when does the work get done? When do entrepreneurs start and manage their businesses? When do writers write that novel? When to IT professionals keep the trains running on time? When does anyone do anything?

The need for "attention," rather than "hard work," as the centerpiece of the new work ethic has arisen along with the rise of distractions carried on the wings of Internet protocol. In one generation, we’ve gone from a total separation of "work" from "non-work" to one in which both work and play are always sitting right in front of us.

I know from my experience as a blogger writing about this new age of distraction that it is all around us.It is also getting worse with each day that goes by and more people become sucked into the black vortex of being a part of the cool web. From Twitter to Facebook and every social media service in between it is all about being a part of some ever growing conversation. Where once we may only have had to deal with the distractions of things like email and instant messaging we are faced with a deluge of never ending messages. Some are important and others are just the nattering of a 1,000 monkeys used to fill up every nanosecond of our attention.

In some ways I’m pretty lucky in that being a blogger much of these distractions are an integral part of my work but I’ve never stopped wondering as I have seen tweets go by and links posted on FriendFeed – when are people getting any actual work done. It doesn’t matter what social media service you look at there are always people talking.

I’ve also noticed this change of work ethic among the newer generations – especially in the tech sector.For this generation it is all about managing distractions and the expectation that everything will come to them as long as they are a part of the conversation. No more is it about hard work as it is as much about making your presence known everywhere possible. sure a lot will say that they put in long hours of working but long hours doesn’t always equate to hard work – especially in this day and age of distractions.

Has hard work gone the way of the Dodo bird? is a post from: The Inquisitr