Tag: WORKPLACE

We've seen plenty of people lose their jobs over things they post on Facebook. Now, the National Labor Relations Board has stepped to their defense. As the New York Times reports, the NLRB filed a complaint last week against American Medical Response of Connecticut, an ambulance service that fired an employee for posting comments about her boss. The employee, Dawnmarie Souza, allegedly posted a ...

Well, it looks like Wall Street's finally cleaning up its game. Don't misunderstand; investment bankers will still find new and unctuous ways to make money in a thin economy. But, from now on, employees at one gilded corporation will be forced to use slightly less colorful language when sending celebratory e-mails about their year-end bonuses. According to the Wall Street Journal, bigwigs at ...

Take this as yet another reason to be careful about what you say and do at work. Chances are that your IT guys are digging a little deeper than they should. A survey conducted by Cyber-Ark Software found that 41-percent of IT pros admitted to "abusing" their administrative privileges. This means using passwords to access HR records and customer databases and finding other confidential ...

In December, we told you about a group of police officers in Ontario, California, who had taken their Chief to court after discovering that he'd been reading sexually explicit text messages they had sent on pagers provided by the police department. After a lower court ruled in favor of Sergeant Jeff Quon and the three other plaintiffs (two of whom were Quon's wife and mistress, both policewomen), ...

The threat that Facebook poses to our workplace reputations is already well-documented. But a study now claims that the social networking site may compromise overall office security, not just proper office sensibilities. According to a report published yesterday by Sophos, 60-percent of surveyed corporate executives claimed that Facebook was a bigger threat to firm-wide security than any ...

Pretty much anyone not named Larry Summers would agree that female engineers and computer scientists are just as capable as their male colleagues. So why do women comprise just 22-percent of all computer science graduates? And, more worrisome, why is that figure decreasing? The answer, according to one study, lies in geek culture. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis recently ...

Ever since they started cutting costs in the face of an industry-wide slowdown a few years ago, airlines haven't exactly been Mr. Popular among traveling consumers. Long lines and delays have left most passengers dismayed and disgruntled. And now, one airline in particular faces a growing PR crisis after firing one of its employees over... defending his company? The former worker, identified ...

Large corporate offices make a habit of blocking certain Web sites -- particularly personal e-mail, video sharing, and social networking sites. But, according to a recent survey compiled by Robert Half Technology, it appears that smaller businesses are locking out employees, too. The survey of 1,400 Chief Information Officers (CIOs) from across the U.S. found that 54-percent of companies ...

We know it. You're sick. Everybody you know is sick. Hell, we're so sick, we've replaced our coffee breaks with coughing breaks. Whether the swine flu, allergies, or the mysterious 'crud,' maladies are first and foremost in the public consciousness these days, and the raging debate over health care isn't doing much to allay concerns. With that in mind, the Wall Street Journal has launched its ...

At the taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation (NSF), investigations of employees' inappropriate use of Internet pornography have skyrocketed over the past year, The Washington Times reports. According to foundation records obtained by the Times, out of 10 closed misconduct investigations last year, seven involved online pornography. The NSF, with over 1,200 employees and an endowment listed ...

It's no secret that Facebook is productivity's biggest enemy. With all those gifts to send, games to play, and friends to stalk, there's no time for work once you log in to the social networking site. While many offices and schools have caught onto this, it took one British city council a little longer than most. According to The Daily Mail, the Portsmouth City Council recently banned the staff ...

A New Zealand office worker recently learned a tough lesson: When sending an e-mail, be careful with fonts and colors. Someone could interpret that bold sentence the wrong way. According to The New Zealand Herald, Vicki Walker was fired from her position as financial controller at ProCare Health for sending "confrontational" e-mails that included words in red, bold, and worst of all, capital ...

Coffee shops, typically welcoming refuges for lonely bloggers, Web entrepreneurs, and monetarily-challenged job hunters, are turning away laptop users and implementing restrictions on computer time during prime business hours. According to the Wall Street Journal, an increasing number of New York coffee shops are covering their electrical outlets, requiring customers to actually eat something or ...

It's 2009, and surfing the Web during work is pretty much an accepted activity, but take heed -- when you're on company time and dime, you may still want to stick to the straight and narrow. According to the 2009 Electronic Business Communication Policies & Procedures Survey, 26-percent of bosses have fired workers for e-mail violations and 52-percent have fired workers over inappropriate ...

With so much pain and humiliation caused by Facebook around the world, we were less than shocked to hear that the cycle of embarrassment had traveled south of the Equator. According to an AFP article, hosted on Google, a South African man was recently terminated from his job after calling his boss a "serial masturbator" on Facebook. What did he think was going to happen? Did he expect a cookie ...