Could An Attitude Adjustment Save Your Job?
February 3, 2009 by blackgirlgrown
Filed under black women, work
Business Week’s Cathy Arnst blogs about new performance measures put in place by the Chicago Tribune: Should attitude matter when you are on the job? I suppose its important to be cheerful at a time of crisis around our kids, and even our spouse, but what about our colleagues? According to the Chicago Tribune, yes.
The 162-year-old newspaper has gone through four rounds of layoffs since 2005, cutting the staff from 670 to 480 employees. In December its parent, Tribune Co, which went private only a year ago, filed for bankruptcy—the first major newspaper owner to seek Chapter 11 protection since 1933. Staffers must be feeling lower than low. So, in a Jan. 19 memo from associate editor Joycelyn Winnecke on performance review standards, the paper added a new category for judging employees: Attitude.
“We believe positive attitude is crucial to our changing culture and all that must be accomplished for our company to be successful,” writes Winnecke.
Arnst continues: Plenty of us are in the same boat as the Tribune staffers, I imagine—toiling away in layoff-plagued industries, assailed daily by news of a sinking economy, furious at the bonuses reaped by the bankers behind the mess. Most of us are probably ratcheting up our work efforts as a result, both to compensate for the loss of our colleagues and to save our own paychecks. Must we be happy too?
