The Trip Hangover - The tired and exhausted state that you find yourself in after a long and or busy trip. Be it for business or pleasure, we’ve all been there before. You don’t feel like working or even watching television, you just don’t feel like doing anything. Unfortunately, this doesn’t stop you from having responsibilities when you get back. This is why I suggest using the following three tips to get over your hangover as quickly and painlessly as possible:

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Remember in school, when one kid would get sick and then infect everyone else? Remember how much that sucked? Well, unfortunately, the same thing applies to many of today’s workplaces. In fact, this actually happened to me at the end of last week (prompting this article). One of my co-workers who I work with on a daily basis came into work sick (and contagious), and proceeded to get me sick. The end result was that I had to take Friday off, which was not as fun as it sounds. This happens more than you might think, and I think there are a number of reasons for it.

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I came across this interesting article from EzineArticles today about how to retain Generation X employees for longer periods of time. His analysis is pretty good, I especially agree with his thoughts on Generation X’s need for constant job movement as a form of career security. He also makes some excellent suggestions as to how you can go about preventing this exodus from happening. They aren’t anything new, but more companies would be wise to implement them.

I’m really interested to see what other people think of this situation, drop me a line in the comments if you would like to discuss.

Without further ado, here’s the article:

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To preface, I look at the review process one goes through when analyzing anything as working on a bell curve. For those not familiar with it, a bell curve has a single high point where maximum efficiency is reached. Before that high point, your efficiency in whatever you are doing is increasing. After that high point, your efficiency is decreasing. With this in mind, we can move on to the purpose of this article.

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Out of all the things that could happen when you’re walking home from work, what do you think is the LEAST likely out of this list:

1. Dog attack
2. Splashed by a car
3. Bird crapping on your head

Oh wait, is one of those choices HIGHLIGHTED? Yes, that’s right, highlighted. Why? Because it is so improbable that it is the obvious choice. Do you see where I’m going with this? Let me spell it out for those who missed it:

Walking home from work today, a bird crapped on my head

I’ll set the scene: I’m walking home from work, enjoying the nice day outside. It’s about a 15 minute walk from my work to my apartment, so it’s not too bad. I’d also like to point out that I usually snag a ride from my fiancé to and from work (feel free to boo me at this point, but it’s on her way =) ).

Anyways, I’m strolling along like a sucker, about five minutes into my walk, when IT happens. Now, it’s important to realize that when you get crapped on by a bird, you may not realize it immediately. It can almost feel like a drop of water hit you. The last thing you think just happen is that you got crapped on. What are the chances I ask you?

Back to the story, I get this feeling and the first thing I do is reach my hand up and see what’s going on. To my horror, it comes back wet and slimy. Oh yes, wet and slimy. Stunned, I keep walking. It slowly dawns on me what actually happened. If this has never happened to you, it’s pretty hard to describe how disgusting it feels. You’ll just have to take my word for it. Here’s the worst part: I work right outside of Washington DC, in a busy little town called Arlington. What does this mean? It means there were more than enough people to witness this happen. Even better, I still had a good 10 minute walk ahead of me.

When something like this happens, it feels like everybody is looking at you, even if they aren’t. Old ladies, babies, cab drivers, it felt like everybody knew of my misfortune. Waiting at a crosswalk became unbearable. I’m pretty sure that I’ve never made it home faster than I did today. Needless to say, I washed myself as quickly as possible.

Do you want to know what the worst part is (nope, haven’t gotten to it yet)? The worst part is that this is not the first time I’ve had this happen to me. When I was about 12, I was helping my dad work a sidewalk sale at our store and as I’m ringing up a satisfied customer, the same thing happened. Here’s my theory: I think that the birds decided to lay low for a while, just to throw me off my guard. Then, when I least expect it, they strike with the quickness. What’s the solution? Obviously, I’m not going to divulge it on the Internet, as the sly bastards have spies everywhere. However, I will give you one hint: It involves a hat.

Ah summer, one of my favorite times of the year. The weather is usually nice (unless you live in one of those extreme places, but I digress) and everybody’s thoughts turn to vacation. However, before you take a vacation, you need to let your work know. Not only do you have to let them know, you have to let them know WELL in advance.

Does this sound simple? I think you would be surprised at how many people suddenly come into work one day and say “Oh yeah, I’m going on vacation next week, is that ok?”. Obviously, this is not enough heads up time for your job. What is enough time? If I can, I like to give at least a month notice. It may seem like a lot, but I’m of the opinion that you can never give too much notice, only too little.

One last note, make sure you send your notification in writing as opposed to just word of mouth, just in case you are questioned about it later. Also, a few weeks before your time off is to occur, make sure to drop your boss a reminder note about which days you will be gone.

As you climb higher and higher on that precarious corporate ladder, you’ll eventually get to the point where you are depending on other people to get work done for a deadline you are responsible for. An example of this would be if you are leading a team doing software design, and you are responsible of having all of the designs done by a certain date. You are responsible for the end result (all of the designs done), but you need your team to actually write the designs for this to happen. What happens if your team doesn’t make the deadline? Who gets the blame? This is a simple answer: You.

With this idea firmly in mind, how do you prevent missing a deadline? This is another simple answer, and yet many people don’t follow it: Be proactive. What does this mean? Well, I find that a good amount of the time a deadline is missed because the team lead does not check to see if their team is on track until the last minute. Finding out that three designs aren’t going to be done the day before the deadline is due is not going to do you any good, as it is too late to do anything about it. However, if in this same situation you were to check a week or two before the deadline was due, the outcome might be different. This is being proactive. For our purposes, we can define it as taking action with enough time before your deadline is due to correct any problems.

The following are three things that you can do to be proactive on your projects as a team lead:

• Have regular meetings - Not just every once and awhile on the fly, but scheduled meetings. This means that your team knows that you have a meeting at a certain time on a certain day every week. For instance, you could have a 10:00 AM meeting every Monday to kick off the week and make sure everybody knows what they should be working on. Also, you could have a meeting at 3:00 PM on Friday to wrap up the week. You don’t have to go overboard and have a meeting everyday (unless you’re in really deep trouble), but I’ve found once or twice a week to be effective. Make sure that you have a structure to the meeting as well, and it’s not just everybody standing around randomly talking. You need to conduct it and have a clear agenda when you go in for what you want to get out of it.

• Keep a tracking spreadsheet - This is another important organization tool: The tracking spreadsheet. Yes, it is a pain to maintain. However, it will save you from a lot of problems in the future. With this spreadsheet, you can see your team’s progress at a glance. This makes it easy to go into a meeting with them and ask questions about who is slipping or who is going to be ahead of schedule and why. This can save your deadlines by allowing people who are ahead of schedule to help pick up the slack of those who are falling behind. Also, this is good for meetings with your boss so that you can give them an easy to understand overview of how your team is progressing. The key point to remember here is to make sure your tracking spreadsheet is up to date. It does you no good if you have one, and yet nobody has updated it for a week. If your team is responsible for updating, remind them to update at the end of everyday (or whatever works for you, I just find the end of the day to be effective). If you are responsible for updating it, make sure you set aside a certain amount of time to do it everyday.

• Check in individually - Even if you have regular meetings, you should have informal progress checks with each of your team members. This doesn’t mean that you have a schedule a specific time for this, this can be as simple as stopping by their cube and asking them how they are doing. This way you don’t have to find out about a problem that happened on Tuesday at your regular Friday meeting. By performing these progress checks, you relay a message to your team that you are right there with them in the trenches, and that you are there to help if they have any questions. Also, as stated above, this allows you to take action immediately on a problem instead of having someone waste their time working on it for days at a time. Linking to the point above, if you find a change in someone’s progress as you talk to them, update the tracking spreadsheet immediately after you get back to your desk. This way you can see how that change is going to impact the rest of the team and your final deadline.

These are just three ways I’ve found that help me to be Proactive. There are probably lots of other ways specific to your work situation that can also help you out. A good way to think about your deadline situation is this: Whoever is holding you responsible for your deadline probably looks at your project as something of a black box. They don’t want to know the fine details, they just know what they want to see come out of it. With this in mind, you want to deal with any problems that arise inside that box, rather than outside of it, so that when your finished product comes out the end result is what this person is looking for.

Raise your hand if you use your Out Of Office assistant when you go on vacation (I hope your hand is raised). Now, keep it raised if you also check your email while you’re on vacation (probably a good majority of you still have your hand raised). Here’s the big question: Keep your hand raised if you respond to email while on vacation. Hand still raised? Half raised? This is a dilemma that many people face when on vacation: Should you respond to your email? There’s no simple answer for this, but there are many things to consider when making this decision.

To start, sometimes you don’t have a choice. If it’s something urgent, and you don’t see anybody else taking the lead on it, you may have to send out an email. Hopefully, you’ve left a contact person who is competent enough to take care of this for you. However, if a decision needs to be made and you’re the only one to do it, even the most competent person in the world won’t be able to make it for you. On the flip side, if you don’t have access to your email, then obviously you won’t be responding to anything.

Most of the time, you won’t run into either of the above situations. You should have a choice whether to answer it or not. In my opinion, if you take the time to leave a good person as your contact person, you shouldn’t have to answer it. This is my preferred path when on vacation for the following main reason: Everybody knows you’re out of the office (hopefully you’ve communicated this to all your clients as well), so they should not be expecting back an answer from you. By answering, you open yourself up to the possibility of having to work for the rest of your vacation as people know you are checking your email. Obviously, this defeats the purpose of your vacation.

The most important piece of advice I can give here is to leave someone competent in your place. This will solve the problem 95% of the time. For that last 5%, you are probably going to have to do something about the situation. However, one way to mitigate the impact of your vacation is to funnel your answers through your contact people. Call them up and explain what needs to be done. If they can handle it, then all you might have to do is monitor the situation instead of having to get directly involved. Another way to lessen the impact could be to suck it up and solve the problem immediately. Call whoever needs to be called, spend all the time to solve the problem in one shot instead of stringing it along. This way, maybe only one day is devoted to work instead of everyday.

Overall, try to enjoy your vacations as much as possible. If you have to put any work in, try to do it in such a way that the amount of time you need to spend working is minimized. Also, the better qualified your contact person is, the less likely it is that you will have to step in and solve a problem.

As they say, better late than never. See below for the updates:

• Take the advice from today’s Tip of the Day and go that extra mile at work.
• Check out the latest article about Microsoft Excel on using the AVERAGE function.

I will probably expound upon this more in an article, but for right now I’ll just provide a quick explanation. In general, you should try to get someone else to read through documents before you send them out either internally or externally. A good example of this is meeting minutes. If you can, you should have someone else who was at the meeting and works with you take a look to see if you missed anything.

While you may feel that you have been pretty comprehensive in your notes, more often than not you’ve missed something. Even if your reviewer only catches one or two mistakes, it’s well worth it to have them take a look. I guarantee this will save you time answering questions in the long run.