Expanding horizons, resumes

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed at work these days, but one reader writes in with a different dilemma: What if your job isn’t challenging enough –

and your boss is too inept to be much help?

Dave Murphy San Francisco Chronicle

"Approach your boss about increasing your responsibilities," suggests Harvey Mackay, chief executive officer of Mackay Envelope Corp. and author of best-selling workplace books such as "Pushing the Envelope" and "Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive." "Volunteer to take on various projects to widen the scope of your responsibilities."

Mackay says many companies, including his, have an open-door policy, letting workers tell executives their concerns and suggestions without fear of reprisals. So if the boss is no help, try to find an ally up the ladder.

My two cents: Have specific suggestions for what you can do. What isn’t getting done in your department? Which of your skills are not being used as well as they could be? How could you enhance the job from the company’s standpoint while also improving your career prospects?

If you simply go to the boss and ask for more work, you’re liable to be assigned tasks that are even more tedious than what you’re doing now. But if you go in saying, "I think I would help the company if I could do . . ." you lessen the chances of getting assigned something so boring that it saps your will to live.

You might also use the slow time to make yourself more efficient, such as learning computer skills and shortcuts, observing how other people do their jobs and figuring out the best ways to manage your time. That way, when you do get more work – or land another job – you’ll be more productive.

No matter what, though, don’t just sit there and let the years go by, tempting though it may be. Bored employees are likely targets for layoffs, and it’s hard to land a job if you’ve spent the past three years fogging a mirror.

SURVEY THIS: If you want to improve morale, survey your employees, right? Not necessarily – especially in a large company.

In a Gallup poll of Fortune 500 companies, 60 percent of the companies that surveyed employee attitudes reported that the surveys did more harm than good.

That doesn’t surprise Gallup’s Curt Coffman, co-author of "First, Break All the Rules" and the newly released "Follow This Path," which I wrote about in last week’s column. Coffman says most of the surveys have more than 100 questions, which makes the employers appear to be out of touch with what’s important to rank-and-filers.

He said such surveys cover the workplace with broad strokes, missing day-to- day issues that employees care about. Middle managers often ignore the results,

figuring that they don’t apply to their individual workplaces or that the corporate bigwigs will mandate whatever the next steps are.

Coffman said the most important part of any survey is discussing the results individually with employees so they know their concerns are being addressed. Broad surveys don’t do that.

On the Fringe runs Saturdays. E-mail Dave Murphy at [email protected].

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/11/02/BU20632.DTL&type=business