No one should be asked to work in an environment that requires swallowing hate in order to belong. Nazi imagery and praise signal exclusion, intimidation and threat, especially to Jewish employees, people of color, LGBTQ+ coworkers, immigrants and anyone with a basic grasp of history. It poisons the workplace and creates a hostile work environment. Continue reading When Extremism Walks into the Workplace: 3 steps
Number six: drown in a vat of burnt office coffee, slow, bitter, company blend.
Number seven: death by paperclips, swallowed one by one.
Number eight: Lock Willy and Ken in the conference room with a malfunctioning speakerphone; feedback shrieking, brains scrambled, meeting finally useful.
Office fridge salmonella surprise. HR report: “unfortunate potluck accident.”
Continue reading 16 Ways to Kill Your Managers (Metaphorically, Mostly)
Employee roomba: everyone performs work & looks slammed: syncing, circling back, touching base, aligning priorities, and actioning next steps. The problem? None of these verbs produced anything tangible. Meetings multiplied like rabbits while projects stayed in limbo. Like bouncing in place for your smartwatch. Continue reading The Roomba School of Management: When Everyone Looks Slammed but Nothing Gets Done
Job hugging’s the workplace version of comfort food: familiar, filling, and guaranteed to leave you sluggish. Employees don’t love their jobs, but don’t see anything better on the horizon. They stay because the devil they know offers dental coverage, even though the spark that once made them excited about their jobs wheezes for oxygen. Continue reading Job Hugging Confessions: still at my desk, still in denial
One of the workplace’s most sophisticated power plays. It’s manipulation disguised as warmth, a velvet-gloved hand that carves you open so deftly end up thanking them for the incision. Weaponized niceness rarely shows its fangs. Niceness gives cover. These coworkers undermine through concern, criticize through flattery, and control through charm. Continue reading The Smiling Assassin’s Guide to Office Politics
69% of 1250 remote employees work a second job, with 37% of them holding two full-time jobs. Employee polygamists maintain two or more full-time jobs simultaneously, usually remote, often undisclosed, and occasionally heroic in their multitasking. Nearly half manage both roles remotely; the rest blend remote and in-person work. Only one-third admit to working 80 hours or more weekly. The rest? They’ve either found a wormhole in the space-time continuum—or one employer foots the bill for hours spent on another’s clock.
Continue reading Employee Polygamy: When One Job Just Isn’t Enough
You thought you landed the one. The job listing flirted with you from across the internet—flexible schedule, generous pay, team that “feels like family.” The interviewers leaned in close, nodding earnestly, promising growth and opportunity. You accepted the offer, showed up on day one, and—bam, learned you’d been catfished. Truth and trust aren’t perks—they’re essential. Without them, you’re negotiating from day one with a partner who already broke the deal. Continue reading When Your New Employer Catfishes You
Political polarization is no longer just a cable-news storyline. It’s a workplace risk. Surveys show that employees feel strained, less collaborative, and even mistreated because of partisan divides. Employers who look away aren’t staying neutral—they’re licensing incivility, division, and attrition. The solution requires leaders who model respect, and train employees to disagree without contempt—and employees willing to pause, set boundaries, and resist the gossip circuit.
In the end, workplaces don’t collapse from deadlines missed—they collapse when colleagues stop seeing each other as human.
Continue reading Polarization in the Workplace
Termination isn’t about politics. It’s about humanity. It’s about saying: in this workplace, we don’t cheer when people are killed. Period. Continue reading When Hate Crosses the Workplace Threshold
Strategic or weaponized incompetence—the fine art of underperforming so someone else picks up the slack. The calculation is simple: If I do this badly enough, they’ll stop asking and I’ll “self-promote” myself out of grunt work. I can even accuse them of wanting things done their way, making it their problem. Continue reading Weaponized Incompetence: The Fine Art of Doing It Badly So You Don’t Have to Do It Again