Now let us face our work station. Heaps of papers. More heaps of everything. Pictures, faded postcards, coffee-stained computer guides, life-stained memos, mail read, mail unread, a hot dog store cap, even a prayer rug. A melange of truly odd tchotchkes.
Hardly military-inspection-level clean, nor what the office’s neat police crave. Nor what you would expect if your office has converted to handing out desks on an “as need” basis.
But that may be OK, and what passes today for clean desk orthodoxy may not be OK.
We are assured of this by researchers at Haworth Inc., an office-furniture manufacturing firm in Holland, Mich. They say a lot of businesses that are overly obsessed with cleanliness and money-pinching cramped office spaces may be carrying out “environmental lobotomies.”
Much to the neatniks’ dismay, there appears to be a link between how many items someone has on her desk and her job satisfaction, explains Jay Brand, an experimental psychologist with Haworth. How many items is not clear. But the simple presence of such cultural artifacts is a cerebral morale booster.
And those heaps of paper that look like refuse bins to others may be carefully arranged piles to their creator, Brand adds.
The critical factor here, he says, is giving workers control over their workplace environment. That can come from allowing them to put up a mural of their kids’ scribblings, or control over the nearby light and heating.
Victims of full-degree environmental lobotomies are workers stuffed into tiny cubicles in banks, travel agencies, catalog sales and telemarketing operations, workplaces where “the pressure is to squeeze more bodies into the space,” says Brand.
Such cramping may cut costs in the short-term, but down the road there may be a hidden price in disgruntled workers who put their loyalties and efforts elsewhere.
Hostile borders: Our end-of-the-century award for an unfriendly Midwest interstate dealing that complicates thousands of workers’ tax returns and provides new work for accountants goes to Illinois and Indiana. Hands down.
As of Jan. 1, the two states dropped their 27-year-old reciprocity agreement, which allowed workers employed in either state to pay their income taxes in their home states. It will mean a 13 percent tax increase for Illinois residents employed in Indiana, since the state’s income rate is 3.4 percent. The state income rate is 3 percent in Illinois.
Workers now have to file tax forms in the state where they work and seek a tax credit in their home state. But since Indiana has a higher rate, Illinois residents are out. “It is going to be a tremendous nightmare for a lot of people,” says Jeff Hackney, a tax partner with Crowe Chizek & Co. in Oak Brook.
For businesses, it means less paperwork, since they do not have to make withholding tax payments for workers who live across their state’s borders. The changes will not take effect for taxpayers until they file returns in April 1999.
The agreement came to an end because Illinois officials said the state was being shortchanged, since far more Indiana residents come to work in Illinois than vice versa. The two states could not agree on how much money Indiana should return to Illinois.
Illinois raised the same issue with Wisconsin and officials in Madison agreed to return $5.5 million to Illinois this year, $8.25 million next year and to make a full reimbursement, based upon a study, for the year 2000, according to Illinois officials. Illinois also has reciprocal agreements with Michigan, Iowa and Kentucky.
Tune in tomorrow: The Teamsters union’s melodrama seemed fated to be a short-term production. Now it appears that the union’s corruption scandal has the lasting power of an afternoon soap opera: Was reform-minded union president Ron Carey really corrupt? Will James P. Hoffa take over the union and redeem his dad’s mantle?
Michael Cherkasky, the government-appointed union election monitor, this week asked federal officials for an open-ended amount of time to probe allegations that Hoffa committed campaign fund violations in 1996 when he was narrowly beaten by Carey. He also asked Judge David Edelstein of U.S. District Court, who has been overseeing union actions since 1989, to indefinitely put off the re-run election. Carey, who was disqualified by Edelstein last week from the re-run, seems intent on keeping up his court battle. He faces a Jan. 20 hearing in Washington before the union’s internal monitors on charges stemming from his alleged wrongdoing during his election effort.
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E-mail Stephen Franklin at Istifan@aol.com
