Few events have sparked so much conversation in this country on workplace issues like the bizarre story of Steven Slater and his strange meltdown at work. He’s now a celebrity with legions of Facebook fans and constant coverage on cable news, but his story does raise serious questions about workplace conditions, stress on the job and losing control under pressure.

The Seattle Times has a story about how flight attendants get most of the brunt of customer anger over things like baggage fees and other stresses of flying.

Forbes discusses how to avoid have a Steven Slater incident in your own organization.

Ohio.com has a story explaining how to resist the urge to have a Steven Slater moment.

Yes, the whole incident has been a circus, but we’re seeing some thoughtful analysis and advice coming out of what is becoming a teachable moment.

Interpersonal skills are often very important for success at work. Think about this for your own career, and if you’re hiring people.

By aggregating new research from various fields—since no specific discipline addresses the phenomenon— we endeavored upon a project to find what actually happens when two people click. More importantly, we wanted to discover if and how these moments shape our lives. While researching this topic, we initially discovered two big surprises. First, some people are more naturally inclined to form clicking relationships. Second, these people are much more likely to succeed in the workplace. Clicking at work can mean a promotion, a raise, or a position at the center of the company’s social network. Take someone like Moseley. “I do an accountant’s job, which is really administrative,” she reflected. “Because of my relationship with Kelly, I now get invited to events, meetings, and conferences that I’d have no business going to as an accountant.” Professionally, the relationship was mutually beneficial. “Knowing Heather,” McVicker says, “I find out what’s on people’s minds. As a supervisor this is crucial information.”

Moseley wasn’t strategically kissing up to a superior. Rather, she possesses a trait that University of Minnesota psychologist Mark Snyder has dubbed “high self-monitoring.” By interviewing subjects about their ability to imitate the behavior of others and to become the center of attention, Snyder developed a scale of self-monitoring. High self-monitors, he discovered, are social chameleons. Without even realizing it, they adapt their personalities, behavior, and attitudes to fit the people around them. They pick up subtle social cues and tailor their responses to the situation.

Adaptability – that’s the key. It’s not being fake, just understanding that context is everything, and work is no exception.

This is a great trend. With easy high-speed Internet access and improved technology, more people can work anywhere they like, and many of them are choosing to work at the beach.

While you’re Dilberting away in your cubicle, there are people taking conference calls in board shorts and flip-flops. While you’re saving your two weeks of vacation to hit the sand, they’re getting paid to be there. There are people—even respectable people—who have somehow turned a folding chair into a place of work.

Aided by technology, pioneers are now converting the beach into a fully functional office. People who work from the beach in non-hotel, non-burger-stand, non-pot-dealer capacities are still rare enough that no agency tracks the phenomenon. Brooks Brothers does not yet make a three-piece bathing suit; Herman Miller doesn’t sell an Aeron chaise.

It’s not like these beach workers are slackers; they just don’t like being controlled. It’s the same reason why we TiVo shows or e-mail and text more than call. When you can work from wherever you want to be—especially if it’s the place where everyone wants to be—work isn’t so bad.

It helps to be self-employed.

Yes, it definitely helps to be self-employed. It’s frankly one of the best reasons to take control of your career and start your own business from home . . . or the beach.

That said, this option is open to everyone who is willing to take more control of their career. Sure, you may not be able to do it all the time, but you’d be surprised how often you can escape the office if you begin to train your boss.

This is one of the arguments popularized by Tim Ferris. Check out his site at 4-Hour Workweek for ways to do this. In a nutshell, they key is showing your boss over time that you can spend days away from the office and still be just as productive. Once you establish this, it won’t matter whether you do this from your home or from an exotic beach. He doesn’t have to know and he shouldn’t care if he does.

Whether you’re looking for a new job or you’re in a company with an HR department, knowing about the HR operations can give you a big edge. A recent article on Yahoo! Finance explains some of the current dynamics in the HR world. One issue is that HR departments are shrinking, so they also have fewer resources and rely on outside help.

One issue involves catching their attention at a time when HR departments are getting flooded with resumes. Your cover letter and your resume need to be targeted to the desired position.

With unemployment hovering around 10 percent, HR managers are inundated with responses for every job posting. In fact, some companies are hiring outside firms to post jobs and sort through resumes, presenting only a dozen or so qualified candidates for consideration. How to make the cut? Be sure your resume and cover letter highlight the skills asked for in the job posting; HR tosses applications that don’t meet all the basic criteria. And ask yourself what in your background fits the company’s needs, says Mike Wright, senior vice president of outsourcing sales with Hewitt Associates.

Another angle: Approach an in-house recruiter or hiring manager before they post a position. Try using business-oriented social-media sites like LinkedIn.com to meet contacts, says O’Donnell. Judi Perkins, founder of FindThePerfectJob.com, says she found most of her clients jobs this way. When you score an interview with HR reps, take it seriously — you never know how much say they have in the process. And ask them what qualities they look for in employees. “You really need to sell them on your abilities,” says O’Donnell.

There’s also all sorts of privacy issues in the workplace today as well. Just assume that HR is watching you, and that your actions in and out of the workplace can impact your career.

Photo from fOTOGLIF

Fidelity Investments has fired some employees for playing fantasy football. We don’t know all the facts of course, but this raises some serious questions about Fidelity. Unless the employees were wasting serious time at work on the fantasy football league, this seems like a ridiculous punishment. Couldn’t the employees have received a warning?

Fidelity apparently has cited their anti-gambling policies, but fantasy football is NOT gambling as pointed out by Yahoo! Sports.

Is this how Fidelity treats their employees? Do they treat their customers any better?

As technology becomes cheaper and more powerful, an entrepreneur can have a very profitable business without having any employees. This has always been true for many professionals, but now it applies to many more people. For example, many lawyers had to rely upon secretaries in the past. Yet now you can learn how to use a powerful word processing program and there’s no need for staff. With today’s tough economic conditions, it’s likely this trend is accelerating, as many people are finding ways to pay the bills by offering up their services on an independent contractor basis in lieu of finding a new job.

As pointed out in Forbes, this new trend is making it more difficult to get accurate employment statistics.

Steinberg works 30 to 40 hours a week. But along with millions of other contractors, she may not show up on the radar of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles unemployment statistics by surveying households and counting pay stubs. No one knows how many freelancers, part-timers and consultants there are–the Government Accountability Office took a stab in 2006, guesstimating that the group made up 30% of all workers–much less how many escape the notice of the BLS. “It’s difficult to track, and is often misclassified or not accounted for by the Department of Labor,” says Sarah Horowitz, director of the Freelancers Union in Brooklyn, N.Y. One thing is certain: The shape of the so-called informal economy is changing.

For some, this obviously involves unreported income, yet I suspect that’s not true for most of the new entrepreneurs. Many of them want to work at home, do something they love or want the freedom of being their own boss. In many cases they are selling goods and services that aren’t purchased on a cash basis, so hiding income really isn’t an option. Also, many people want to have a legitimate business that they can grow, and worrying about hiding income from the IRS is not part of the plan.

Some like Scott Shane are concerned by this trend.

Myth: The total number of businesses created is what matters, not the types of businesses that are being created.

Reality: I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in what entrepreneurship in America is becoming. Over the past decade, we have been creating more non-employer businesses and fewer employer businesses per capita. (Employer businesses are companies that the Census Bureau reports have at least one employee; non-employer businesses have no employees.) As a result, the employer business share of the total businesses has slipped four percentage points since 1997, from 26.4% of the total in 1997 to 22.4% in 2007 (see figure to the right). Moreover, there is nothing in the data to suggest that this trend is going to reverse itself anytime soon.

Why am I concerned about this trend? Non-employer businesses aren’t the source of job or wealth creation that employer businesses are, which means the U.S. economy doesn’t benefit as much from them. By definition, non-employer businesses don’t create any jobs, and their sales and profits are quite low. So low, in fact, that the Census Bureau’s 2002 Survey of Business Owners indicated that only 44% of non-employer businesses were the primary source of income for their owners.

To boot, non-employer businesses’ are becoming less substantial over time. According to Census data, the average revenues at these firms have declined about 12% in real terms since 2000, when they were less than $50,000 per year to begin with.

Of course you’d rather have businesses that hire plenty of employees, but that doesn’t mean one-person operations don’t have a net positive effect on the economy. First, it provides a lucrative and appealing option for many people. It offers them a lifestyle that they might not be able to achieve working for a company, and it allows many to do something they love as well. That’s a good thing. Also, these small business offer services that other companies value. In many instances they can offer better services for a better price as they don’t have overhead and can be very efficient with today’s technology. Again, more efficiency helps the overall economy and lowers prices for everyone.

Small operations also unleash creativity, as people working for themselves are very motivated and aren’t constrained by the bureaucracy of a larger organization. Imagine where the Internet would be today without these types of entrepreneurs.

Finally, some of these one-person operations will grow and perhaps lead to larger companies with employees, or at least relationships with other service providers.

We should focus on measuring this trend better, but in many ways this can be a net plus for the growth of a modern, dynamic economy.

This is the first of what will probably be many posts on the subject of multitasking. It must be stopped. I’ve read numerous books about improving performance, particularly job performance, and eliminating multitasking is the single best idea I’ve heard so far.

Here’s a humorous and helpful article from A.J. Jacobs and his experiment called Operation Focus.

Hence, I’ve decided to begin a little project I call Operation Focus. I pledge to go cold turkey from multitasking for a month in a quest to regain my brain and sanity. I’ll unitask―that is, perform one activity at a time. And just as important, I’ll stick with each thing for more than my average 30 seconds. I’ll be the most focused man in the world.

It’s worth a read.

Email is the perfect example. How many times a day do you check it? When you get bored or stuck on something, do you check it just to give yourself something else to do? Where does that lead you? I suspect you often end up wasting time on something completely unrelated to the task at hand.

The goal with work is not to be busy. The goal is to get things done. There’s a huge different.

As I said, we’ll be addressing this again, but try to work on tasks or projects in 90 minute spurts. Sit and your desk and focus on that task or project, and don’t do things like check your email or have the TV on in the background. You’ll be amazed at how much you accomplish.

With unemployment soaring in the current recession, many Americans are taking jobs they would not have considered in the past.

Some of the dirtiest, smelliest, most dangerous jobs are suddenly looking a lot more appealing in this economy. People who have been out of work for months are lining up for jobs at places they once considered unthinkable: slaughterhouses, sewage plants, prisons.

“I have to just shut my mouth because I can’t do anything about it,” said Nichole McRoberts of Sedalia, Mo., who pictured more for herself at age 30 than working in a poultry plant, cutting diseased or damaged flesh off chicken carcasses.

Recessions and tight job markets always force some people to take less-desirable or lower-paying work than they are used to. But this recession has been the most punishing job destroyer in at least 60 years, slashing a net total of 6.7 million jobs.

All told, 14.5 million people were out of work last month, with a jobless rate of 9.4 percent. The result is that many people have had to seek jobs they would not have considered in the past.

Take Kristen Thompson. Before the recession, she worked at an upscale Los Angeles-area gym arranging pricey one-on-one personal training sessions. Now she’s a guard at a women’s prison in rural Wyoming.

Nobody wants to end up in this situation. Obviously, if you’re out of work, you have to start expanding your options. Hopefully we’ll start to see a rebound so this won’t be necessary, but many will have to deal with these realities for some time.

Looking forward, however, you should be making plans that will minimize the chances that you’ll be facing these tough decisions in the future.

The recent article in the Washington Post is quite fascinating, particularly for someone like myself who started a virtual business ten years ago with home computers and an organizational meeting at Panera’s.

Frank Gruber’s workstation at AOL in Dulles could be in any cubicle farm from here to Bangalore — push-pin board for reminders, computer on Formica desk, stifling fluorescent lighting. It’s so drab there’s nothing more to say about it, which is why the odds of finding Gruber there are slim.

Instead, Gruber often works at Tryst in Adams Morgan, at Liberty Tavern in Clarendon, at a Starbucks, in hotel lobbies, at the Library of Congress, on the Bolt Bus to New York or, as he did last week, beside the rooftop pool of the Hilton on Embassy Row. Gruber and Web entrepreneur Jen Consalvo turned up late one morning, opened their Mac laptops, connected to WiFi and began working. A few feet away, the pool’s water shimmered like hand-blown glass.

“I like the breeze,” Consalvo said, working all the while.

Gruber and Consalvo are digital nomads. They work — clad in shorts, T-shirts and sandals — wherever they find a wireless Web connection to reach their colleagues via instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook, e-mail and occasionally by voice on their iPhones or Skype. As digital nomads, experts say, they represent a natural evolution in teleworking. The Internet let millions of wired people work from home; now, with widespread WiFi, many have cut the wires and left home (or the dreary office) to work where they please — and especially around other people, even total strangers.

For nomads, the benefits are both primitive and practical.

Primitive: Tom Folkes, an artificial intelligence programmer, worked last week at the Java Shack in Arlington County because he’s “an extrovert working on introvert tasks. If I’m working at home by myself, I am really hating life. I need people.” He has a coffee shop rotation. “I spread my business around.”

Practical: Marilyn Moysey, an Ezenia employee who sells virtual collaboration software, often works at Panera Bread near her home in Alexandria even though she has an office in the “boondocks.” Why? “Because there is no hope for the road system around here,” she said. Asked where her co-workers were, Moysey said, “I don’t know, because it doesn’t matter anymore.”

Nomad life is already evolving. Nomads who want the feel of working with officemates have begun co-working in public places or at the homes of strangers. They work laptop-by-laptop in living rooms and coffee shops, exchanging both idle chitchat and business advice with people who all work for different companies. The gatherings are called jellies, after a bowl of jelly beans the creators were eating when they came up with the name.

All of this makes sense, including the last part regarding co-working with others. The freedom of working from home, or from any spot you select for that matter, is very rewarding. It’s liberating to break free from the arbitrary work schedule imposed on you by your employer. On the other hand, you learn quickly that some level of self-discipline is critical.

Depending on your personality, however, one can begin to miss the daily interactions with other people. particularly friends at the office. So it’s not too surprising to hear how some decide to congregate and work side-by-side.

This brings up another topic critical for many who decide to work from home when starting a new business. Networking is critical to success, but it can also be important simply from a lifestyle and job satisfaction point of view. Many of us need to get out there, and sometimes it’s too easy to spend day after day at home. It’s not a recipe for success.

Finally, if any of this intrigues you, please check out the 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. I’ll have much more to say about this in later posts, but Tim is a pioneer in lifestyle management. Check it out if you want to break away from your daily routine of going into an office.

Get travel information at Sundance Vacation.

We’re launching this career and jobs blog at a time when our nation is experiencing very difficult economic times. We may have averted a depression, but unemployment just hit a 26-year high of 9.7%. The economy appears to be turning, but job growth seems to be far off.

Hopefully, we can help some of you who are looking for work as we discuss career and job issues and tips. We’ll also provide information for people who want to plan their careers or possibly change careers, and for those of you who want to start a business or do a better job of managing your business or department.

This site will be about maximizing the enjoyment and rewards you get out of the career you choose, or the career or job you deem necessary under your current circumstances.

We always welcome feedback, so please let us know your thoughts.