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Lisa
Taylor Huff - In The Media
THE JUNGLE:
I'm Busy, Really -- Very, Very Busy
By KEMBA DUNHAM, Staff
Reporter of
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, July 23, 2002
How do you
stay busy when there's little work to do at your office?
Many people
find themselves in this situation as the economy continues to sputter and some
companies struggle to stay afloat. But if management sees you as a slacker, you
could be at risk of being laid off.
Ruby Hershberger, a 40-year-old
implementation engineer, saw her work tempo slow down last year while working
at the Denver office of telecommunications company Global Crossing Ltd. It
became harder to attract new customers amid an industry slowdown. Her employer
began to announce layoffs.
But Ms. Hershberger didn't sit on her hands.
She says she searched the company's Intranet looking for descriptions of other
interesting jobs in her department. Then, she made a list of skills she felt
she had mastered and highlighted ones she needed to learn in order to qualify
for a different position.
Ms. Hershberger also volunteered to design
training procedures and schedules. Managers always seemed pleased with her
initiative, she recalls. "For some people, when it's dead, it's dead. But I
like to have my arms around the world," Ms. Hershberger says. "You have to
always look for ways to learn, especially in this environment."
The
engineer's efforts ultimately failed to save her job, however. She got laid off
in November -- before she finished acquiring additional skills. Global Crossing
filed for bankruptcy protection two months later.
Nevertheless, experts
endorse Ms. Hershberger's attempted job-switch strategy. It's a good idea to
look around your company, pick a job you would like to have and develop the
skills required to reach that goal, advises Lisa Taylor Huff, a career
coach in Mendham, N.J.
But any employees doing this should immediately
let their managers know they are spending time on other things that will
benefit the company in the long run, Ms. Huff adds.
In general,
individuals with little work to do should remain creative self-starters. A
struggling company especially needs "employees who are committed to its
success," says one manager at a Palo Alto, Calif., telecommunications firm. He
is in the process of laying off 200 employees, or 20% of his staff. "Make a
conscious decision to be part of the solution, not part of the problem," he
adds.
Other career counselors say it's important to focus on your
employer's revenue stream -- and how you might contribute to it. Harris Ravine,
a turnaround expert in Boulder, Colo., took that approach when he tried to
re-energize the 60-person work force at a small New York technology company
late last year. The struggling concern was in the middle of changing business
strategies.
Because most staffers weren't revenue generators, Mr.
Ravine advised them to devise ways to increase the level of customer
satisfaction.
"I've seen a lot of cases where internal folks don't even
know who the customer or client is," the turnaround specialist explains. "I've
never found a situation where there was nothing more to do."
A number
of employees came up with ideas that helped stabilize the company and gave them
productive additional tasks, Mr. Ravine reports.
Linda Dominguez, a
career coach in Westlake Village, Calif., stresses the need for employees to
also improve their internal visibility during slow times. You might write
articles for the company newsletter, help others get noticed by the top brass
or simply observe and imitate colleagues' visibility strategies. The idea is
that co-workers "know who you are before you need anything from them," Ms.
Dominguez says.
Copyright ©2002. The Wall Street
Journal.  More Media
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