Word: ghosting
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Workplace experts are only beginning to grasp the phenomenon. "In the information age, knowledge is critical to business--and it's the employee who owns it," says Hamilton Beazley, 58, chairman of the Strategic Leadership Group, a consultancy in Arlington, Va. Beazley coined the term ghost work--now catching on around the country--to describe the additional workload taken on by surviving employees, usually without their former colleagues' trove of knowledge. "It's as if they're suddenly asked to start speaking Greek," says Beazley. "It can be totally demoralizing and can cripple the individual as well as the organization...
...surprisingly, any increased productivity gleaned from the sweat of a layoff-decimated work force results in plenty of grousing. Manufacturing workers call ghost work "speed-up" (because the remaining employees have to hustle harder) or "stretch-out" (because of the longer hours). "They call it productivity," says Lane Windham, an AFL-CIO spokesman, referring to management...
Discouragement and stress are serious issues for ghost workers. "Already we're coping with 9/11 and the possibility of war with Iraq," says Michael Faenza, a social worker and head of the National Mental Health Association. "On top of that, the larger workload and stress on productivity leave workers less able to focus on the work at hand. It can lead to depression, anxiety, substance abuse...
Some companies look to kill costs and ghost-work stress with a single stone: unpaid vacations. Since BellSouth offered unpaid leave to its 80,000 remaining employees in July, almost half have grabbed it--saving the Atlanta-based telephone company $14 million in payroll costs. Some firms, though, have made unpaid vacations mandatory. Last year Dell demanded that workers take one-week vacations without pay. "That had a lot of people grumbling," says an employee...
Pinker synthesizes research in language, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology to produce a theory of human nature that repudiates long-standing doctrines such as the “blank slate,” “the noble savage” and “the ghost in the machine...