Top 25 Companies for Work-Life Balance

Glassdoor.com recently published its list of the Top 25 Companies for Work-Life Balance, as rated by reviewers on its site, people who have worked at the companies themselves.

Cited most often at the highest-rated companies: flexible work hours and generous time off. In other words, the things that let employees be human beings instead of cogs in a corporate wheel.

The winning companies run the gamut as far as industries and job types: manufacturing, airlines, consulting, pharmaceuticals, and services. It goes to show that work-life balance isn't about what type of job you have -- it's about who's running the place and what their values are.

In my book, this is yet another win for the internet. Previously, only journalists and magazines like FastCompany and BusinessWeek created "top places to work" lists. Now you can get the ratings straight from the (work)horse's mouth.

I've discussed Glassdoor.com in the past. I'm glad to see that the site is thriving and getting its name out there.

Glassdoor also publishes a Top 50 Best Places to Work list. Not surprisingly, it includes most of the companies that got named in the Top 25 Companies for Work-Life Balance list.

When Science Is Art

Can you love science – maybe even be a scientist yourself – and still be awed, even spiritually moved, by natural wonders?

No one answers that question better than my friend and colleague Sue Baugh. Her new book Echoes of Earth, which comes out this fall, is filled to the brim with photos of ancient mineral sites. These colorful, dramatic rock formations are a geologist’s dream. But the book deals equally with what these sites mean to us as living beings, and their potential to inspire us.

The Book

Echoes of Earth has been Sue’s passion and labor of love for several years. She and her co-author traveled to far corners of the earth (including Greenland, Australia, the Northwest Territories) to take these stunning photographs. Check them out (and order the book) at their website, www.wildstonearts.com.

I wish I could share what it is like to watch Sue present. Last weekend, to an audience at Fritz Pastry in Chicago, she showed slides of her photographs and her journey around the world, and shared the lessons she’s taken from that journey. Her sense of wonder and appreciation of these natural phenomena is contagious.

And, I confess, the decorator in me is salivating over the textiles being created as companion products. If those hoodies get finished anytime soon, Sue, my birthday is in September!

Can Science Be Spiritual?

I’ve always loved science. It’s why I majored in biology. I love knowing how things work, and how we can create medicine using natural processes and plants.

Science – and nature itself – can often seem dry, cold, clinical, and dispassionate (which is one reason I left the lab to pursue more creative lines of work). Yet nothing on this earth is more spiritual to me than standing in the middle of a vast forest, or on the side of a mountain. Nowhere on earth do I feel more inspired, more humbled, more imaginative, or more at peace. I’ve never been able to explain that. I just know it’s true.

I think Sue gets that. Her book covers the science: how minerals create colors and patterns in stone; how continental drift created similar geological sites on opposite ends of the planet; how colossal shifts in the earth’s crust can turn million-ton slabs of rock onto their sides so that horizontal deposits now point at the sky. But ultimately it’s about what happens to you when you witness these phenomena. It’s about how taking yourself into nature itself creates an experience that is incomparable with anything man-made.

I encourage you to check it out. I think you’ll like it.

Your Favorite Books, Ultra Condensed

If editors had contests, one of them might be, "How concise can you make this sentence/paragraph/novel?" In other words, how few words can you boil a concept down into while still retaining its essential meaning? Seventeen? How about twelve? FOUR! We have a winner!

OK, so it's not THAT exciting. You won't be seeing an Extreme Editing reality TV competition anytime soon.

But I have to give props to Better Book Titles for making it fun (and with picture goodness). In their own words:

This blog is for people who do not have thousands of hours to read book reviews or blurbs or first sentences. I will cut through all the cryptic crap, and give you the meat of the story in one condensed image. Now you can read the greatest literary works of all time in mere seconds!

For example, the classic Charlotte's Web was condensed to: "Spiders Make Great Publicists." Love it.

Outsourcing Children's Textbooks

When you were a kid, did you ever wonder who wrote the articles, study guides, and quizzes that were in your school textbooks?

Probably not. If you gave it any thought at all, you likely thought it was all written by a teacher even more boring than your own.

But now that we're adults, we should think about it. Why? Because today, much of the content of school textbooks gets outsourced to foreign countries.

It's true. A large amount of textbook content is written by non-native English speakers because American publishing houses don't want to pay higher wages to American writers.

I will be covering this subject again soon. It's too long for just one post. But for now, I'll share a blurb from a website of one particular offshore company (thanks to one of my colleagues for passing it along). This company says it provides "end-to-end content management" for schools and other clients. And yet its own website is a compelling advertisement for why you shouldn't hire them for such work. For the record, this blurb contains:

• Singular/plural errors: 2
  
• Comma misuse/omission: 4
  
• Hyphen misuse/omission: 3
  
• Erroneous capitalization: 7
• Incorrect word choice (e.g. "Corporates" instead of "Corporations"): 3
  
• Run-on sentences: 2

Would you want this company teaching your kid how to read and write?

About Us

I------ is one of the leading pre-publishing services companies, in the world, providing end-to-end content management and content transformation services including high quality Digital Typesetting, e-Publishing (SGML, XML), Data Conversion and related services for Books and Journals, for various Publishers, Presses and Corporates, around the world.

Founded in 1994, I------ today services many of the top 20 global publishers with highly specialized offerings across segments such as STM, Academic, Higher Education, School, Trade etc. With presence across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific it is currently positioned amongst the top 6 publishing services companies in India. I------ has a strong team of 1200+ highly qualified professionals with diverse skill sets delivering top notch quality to their customer which is only reflective in its long standing relationships with many of its customers.

Headquartered in Pondicherry, India, I------ has its Global Service Delivery Centers at India (Pondicherry and Chennai) and the US (Chicago and New York) services its customers through wholly owned subsidiaries in the UK and USA.

Working from Home

Do you have a job that lets you work from home? If so, do you work from home part-time, or full-time? Do you permit your staff to work from home?

Why I Ask

Editing, writing, and design can easily be done at home. All you need is a computer with the right software, plus an internet connection to send and receive files.

These jobs also make it easy for employers to track employees' work. Work-from-home employees can be told, "Edit/write/lay out X number of documents per day," and then either they produce the work or they don't.

Being a writer/editor/designer, I've had several jobs where I could have performed my work from home easily, saving myself the significant time, expense, and hassle of commuting. I've also had jobs where I could have allowed my direct reports to perform their work at home and saved THEM the hassle of commuting. Yet my employer said no.

What Holds Companies Back?

It's not uncommon for an employee's work-from-home request to be denied. Employers give a variety of reasons for saying no. I will discuss some of those reasons here.

1. Technology and/or security. An employer might say that the infrastructure does not exist for an employee to be able to access company files from home without compromising data security.
   
   News flash: The technology DOES exist. In fact, it has existed for so long that it's not even very expensive anymore. If a company tells you that the technology does not exist, that's code for either, "We don't want to pay for it," or, "Technology/security is not the real issue, but that's our story and we're sticking to it."
   
   
2. Tracking/logistics. With some jobs, performance can be evaluated on a quota-type system: employees are responsible for completing X number of tasks per day. Other jobs do not lend themselves to quotas, making them much more difficult for a boss to evaluate what work-from-home employees do or how productive they are.
   
   Some jobs simply cannot be performed at home because they require an employee to be on site (for example, in-person tech support). Fair enough.
   
   
3. Trust. This is the biggest issue for most companies, I think. Many bosses believe that employees inevitably goof off more and work less when they don't have a supervisor literally breathing down their necks.
   
   In my opinion, if you're hiring employees that you don't trust, you have bigger problems than your employees' physical location, and you'd be better off addressing the real problems instead.
   
   
4. Rank/seniority. At some companies, working from home is a privilege reserved only for the elite. Some companies confer this privilege on senior staff or C-level staff only.
   
   At one company, I was told that the technology did not exist to allow us to access the company's database from home. Later, I learned that the technology DID exist. In fact full-time staff worked from home all the time. But I was a contractor, and the privilege of working from home was not extended to contractors.
   

It Goes Beyond Saving Gas Money

Commuting is expensive, no doubt about it. Car payments, repairs, and insurance are expensive. Gasoline costs a fortune (upwards of $4.50 a gallon in the Chicago area this week). Even riding public transportation gets costlier all the time.

Working from home also saves time, which is invaluable. It also eases many of life's daily stresses (for example, being able to sign for a UPS package or let the cable guy in).

What Employees Hear

I wonder if employers realize how it sounds to employees when they are told, "You may not work from home, even though your job could be done from home very easily."

Employees hear one or all of the following:

• We don't trust you.
• Your time is not valuable to us.
  
• We have no problems wasting your money.
  
• We are deliberately denying something that could make your life better (sometimes for no good reason).
  

Employers, I'm not going to screw around here. Your employees are not stupid, especially in this increasingly tech-savvy age. If you deny employees' requests to work from home and you provide no logical reason, you can expect to lose valuable and talented staff to companies that do allow it. When the pendulum swings back and it becomes an employee's market again, it would behoove you to either revisit your policies or budget for turnover.

Happy Earth Day and Good Friday

Good morning!

Today is a great day to state my new goal for this blog: MORE PICTURES!

I mean, really. Text is great and all, but pictures make it livelier. Even the newspapers figured that one out decades ago.

Sure, it may be difficult to illustrate the topics that I write about (editing, writing, etc.). But that's part of the challenge now isn't it? And I love a good challenge.

So, have a happy Easter Weekend, everyone! May you gorge yourselves on chocolate, enjoy time with family and friends, and don't step on any of those rotten Easter eggs that nobody found from last year.

Spotlight on Science Writing

My first "real job" out of college was as a science writer. I would go to the Harvard Medical Library, photocopy studies of interest, bring them back to the office, and write about them for a nonscientist audience at an 8th grade reading level.

It was some of the most challenging and interesting work I've ever done. I majored in Biology during college, and even though I decided that writing/editing was my true calling, I'm always interested in the latest scientific research and discoveries.

So I had to share this excellent article called "Do Cellphones Cause Brain Cancer?" To me this is an example of truly excellent science writing. It presents scientific findings in an interesting and relatable way, and explores all sides of the issue with journalistic integrity.