Sunday, July 26, 2020

Learn to say 'no' if you'd really prefer not to

More than one reader has commented on how one aspect of working remotely during the coronavirus pandemic that they were actually looking forward to was fewer meetings at the office and more opportunities to be far more productive while working from home. Without office neighbors wanting to catch up or grab coffee or compare notes on one thing or another, surely they'd be able to focus more on tasks that needed completing. Without the plethora of meetings to eat up large portions of the day, surely they'd be able to put that time to more productive use.

As remote work settled in, many readers found, however, that colleagues lost none of their desire to chat and the number of Zoom meetings seemed to propagate seemingly at the rate of the Fibonacci sequence.

"We're being asked to go to more tutorials on how to use the technology than ever," writes G.L., a reader who has had his fill of such tutorials. Likening these tutorials - whether they are real-time, asynchronous video, or pdfs of best practices, to meetings about meetings - G.L., and I'm confident, others are a tad overwhelmed.

One challenge, G.L. writes, is that he recognizes that he's fortunate to have kept his job when he knows that unemployment levels have skyrocketed due to shutdowns and layoffs related to the pandemic. While not every meeting nor every tutorial is required by his company and he's certainly not obligated to respond to chatty emails or texts from coworkers, G.L. doesn't want to appear to be disengaged or as he puts it, "not a team player."

"Is it wrong for me to simply say no to some of these meetings or requests for time?" he asks.

G.L. raises a solid concern. Because so many companies shifted to remote work where possible during the pandemic, there seems to have been a strong desire to keep workers feeling connected to both their co-workers and their company. Occasionally, however, such efforts have gone beyond what the company or some employees need. Virtual yoga sessions on Tuesday afternoons seem to fall into the category of distinctly optional.

As clever as it might seem to read on a piece of imprinted wearables, it would spark joy in few of us to have a colleague like Herman Melville's Bartleby character who, when asked to do anything around the office responds with, "I would prefer not to" and instead spends the day staring out the office window at a brick wall. Don't strive to be a Bartleby, G.L.

But G.L. should recognize that if it isn't essential for him to attend every tutorial or respond to every gossipy email to get his work done and he really would prefer not to, the right thing is to simply say "no."

Doing your work as good as possible, being responsive to others so they can get their work done, and learning to focus on what matters and letting go of what doesn't might prove to be an upside to G.L. and other workers during a time when a lot of us are discovering how to work best as we go along.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School.

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.

(c) 2020 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Sunday, July 19, 2020

Can we complain if we didn't vote?

"If you don't vote, don't complain," is a slogan seen on bumper stickers plastered on cars, laptops, bulletin boards, and anywhere else the public might get the message. The message is clear: "If you don't vote, you forfeited your right to complain about how government is being run."

But is it fair to shut down others' opinions because they chose not to vote in an election? Millions of eligible Americans simply don't show up to vote.

More Americans typically show up to vote in presidential elections and the midterm elections two years later than they do in local elections. But even in these elections, the turnout barely reaches the halfway mark of all eligible voters. For the 2016 presidential election in the United States, 55.7% of eligible voters cast a ballot. For the 2018 midterm elections, more than 49% of eligible voters cast a ballot - a percentage widely heralded as being epic and not seen since the midterm elections of the mid-1960s.

Compare these percentages to Australia where in their 2019 federal election, 96.8% of eligible Australians registered to vote and 91.9% of those voted. Of course, in Australia, according to the Western Australian Electoral Commission's website, "Voting at State general elections, by-elections and referenda is compulsory." That's right. You get fined for not voting in Australia. For a first offense the fine is $20 Australian ($13.89 U.S.). It rises to $50 Australian ($34.73 U.S.) for subsequent violations.

It's hardly likely that the United States will join Australia and a handful of other countries that have compulsory voting. In the run-up to the U.S. presidential election in 2020, there will be an effort to get voters registered and out to vote by Tuesday, November 3, at the latest.

I regularly encourage students and friends to register to vote and then to vote, often offering a stamp to anyone who needs to mail in an absentee ballot because they are away from home. I've written before about my #oldguywithstamps Tweets and my belief that while we are not obligated to vote in the United States, it's the right thing to do.

Nevertheless, when I see the "If you don't vote, don't complain" bumper stickers, the message may be well-intended as a nudge to get eligible voters to actually show up to vote, but ultimately it sits wrong.

No matter how strongly I may believe that voting is the right thing to do, you have the right to choose not to vote. Exercising that right does not silence you as a citizen with the same Constitutional rights as those of us who do vote in each local, state, and federal election.

Sure, if you want any hope of effecting change, you give up a fundamental means of doing so when you choose not to vote. But you never lose your right to complain or to express an opinion about an issue or a policy. That's your right.

There are fancy social science equations for calculating the value of your vote if you want to change the outcome of an election. But it doesn't take an equation to make clear that if you don't vote you lose a chance to have a voice in the outcome, no matter how much you complain afterward.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School.

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.

(c) 2020 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Sunday, July 12, 2020

Tell the truth

On June 23rd, Robert Levey died. Many, perhaps most of you didn't know Bob. For 30 years starting in 1962, he wrote for The Boston Globe. For a couple of decades he was a reporter who covered issues of race and education, often covering challenging stories at a time when few others dared to cover them in a city that was facing equity issues in its schools and neighborhoods.

He later became an editor for the Globe's Sunday magazine and finished up his career as the restaurant critic for the newspaper. It was in this last role where I met Bob. I was a tagalong on a visit to a restaurant he was reviewing in Chinatown. Bob was careful not to let his identity be discovered by any restaurant's staff. He also wanted to sample as many meals as possible, so it was not unusual for him to invite others to join him for a meal so he could sample from what they ordered. A mutual good friend arranged for me to join them.

Our meal had to have occurred more than 30 years ago and I have no memory of what we ate. I do remember meeting a person who loved his work, loved the company of other people even if he had just met them, and loved to tell a good story. We did not become close friends, but years later, after he had already retired, Bob introduced me to the Globe's then editor for a potential project.

In Bob's obituary, writer Bryan Marquard ends with a story about Bob's daughter asking him to tell his granddaughter, also a writer, who was heading to college "what's the most important thing about being a good writer."

Bob's health was failing at the time, but he responded "clear as a bell" that the most important thing about being a good writer is: "Tell the truth."

Students who take writing courses with me regularly tease me about cajoling them to "always be writing." I continue to tell them that the best way I know to become a good and better writer is to be insatiably curious and to write constantly. And I do regularly end any conversation with them with the question, "Are you writing?" I also stress the importance of getting their facts right and making sure they are fair in whatever they write even as they are tackling challenging topics.

My students are attending graduate school to study public policy. Few will go on to become journalists or full-time writers, although many continue to write and publish op-eds or articles after graduation that relate to the policy issues on which they are working. But in their work as in their writing, they are committed to telling the truth.

While I stand by my advice to them to always be writing, to be tenaciously curious, and to double-check their facts, those three words from Bob to his granddaughter stick with me as the best advice any good writer should follow: Tell the truth.

Telling the truth is the right thing for any writer. It's also sound and wise advice for everyone else as well.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School.

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.

(c) 2020 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Sunday, July 05, 2020

Internet service providers should up their customer support game

I am among the number of fortunate adults who did not lose his job during the pandemic because of my ability to work from home. I am also fortunate to have access to broadband services that enable me to connect to the internet and any number of videoconferencing services designed for virtual meetings. I can connect to online services to order books or food or a video monitor and have them delivered to my door.

Being able to stay connected without interruption has been a blessing over these past three months. It's when that connection got interrupted that I realized how dependent upon it I've truly become.

Given how many of us are working online, is it wrong to expect our internet service providers (ISPs) to be prepared to respond to customers who are having difficulty with their connections?

I've grown accustomed to avoiding calling customer support for any technology issues. The amount of time it takes to route through an automated telephone response only to end up on hold for "longer-than-average wait times" conditioned me to try to solve the problem myself. Typically, this works in less time than it takes to get a live person for a quick technical support question.

Earlier this month when I found it impossible to connect to the Internet and I couldn't find a solution, I spent more than two hours on the phone. Some of it was spent navigating the automated message to get to the right department. Some of it was spent waiting for a promised call back only to have that call back route me through the same automated response options. When I did eventually reach a live person in technical support, I was told that the ISP had upgraded the router/modem which apparently had caused a conflict with a signal booster I'd been using for years to enable more coverage in the house. After unplugging the booster, everything worked fine. The fix took five minutes.

Should I have guessed to unplug the booster? Sure. Should it have taken two hours to get to a person who could take five minutes to give me the information I needed to figure out what was wrong? No.

The tech support person (the live one, not the automated one) was great - direct and helpful. When I mentioned I'd had to cancel a couple of online business meetings as a result of being offline, she credited my monthly bill for a "courtesy" $25. Very thoughtful.

My ISP is the only option where I was working, so its incentive to provide better, quicker service isn't all that great. But I suspect the motivation wasn't to stiff customers as much as it was to streamline support by automating as much as possible.

Customers should be able to decide whether they want to choose automated support or live support. This is true whether we are in the midst of a pandemic where more people are working at home or not. Providing good service when so many customers have become dependent on connectivity for their livelihood is not only a good business practice it is the right thing to do. And so is repeating how knowledgeable and patient that Georgina, my tech support person, was to get me back online.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice," is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School.

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.

(c) 2020 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.