By LAUREN WEBER and LESLIE KWOH Employers are mixing it up. Jobs, that is. Some U.S. businesses are giving employees the chance to complete a stint in a different department or temporarily swap places with a colleague overseas. Companies have long provided job rotations for higher level executives to give them a sense of how [...]

Tax season is accountant Gail Rosen’s busiest time of year. She has been working seven days a week, with some 14-hour days, filling out returns for her customers in Martinsville, N.J. She is missing outings with friends and a wine-tasting trip to California with her husband Jay. Ms. Rosen is lucky this year. It’s a [...]

By LESLIE KWOH Could your Facebook profile be a predictor of job performance? A new study from Northern Illinois University, the University of Evansville and Auburn University suggests it can. In an experiment, three “raters”—comprising one university professor and two students—were presented with the Facebook profiles of 56 college students with jobs. After spending roughly [...]

 

By ALAN ZIBEL and JEFF BATER The number of workers filing new applications for unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest level in nearly four years, one of a series of reports offering mostly positive signs about the U.S. economy. Initial unemployment claims dropped by 13,000 to 348,000 in the week ended Feb. 11, [...]

 

By SIOBHAN HUGHES WASHINGTON—Congress quickly passed a deal to extend the payroll-tax-cut through year-end, continue unemployment benefits and avoid a steep cut in Medicare doctors’ fees, moving on from a fight that tied up legislators for months. By 293-132, the House voted to pass the measure. The Senate quickly followed with a 60-36 vote. The [...]

By LESLIE KWOH Add investment banking to the list of things that could be dangerous to your health. A University of Southern California researcher found insomnia, alcoholism, heart palpitations, eating disorders and an explosive temper in some of the roughly two dozen entry-level investment bankers she shadowed fresh out of business school. Every individual she [...]

By MELANIE TROTTMAN Federal regulators are trying to bolster workplace-discrimination protections for pregnant women and people caring for relatives, in response to complaints by workers who say they have been fired or mistreated because of their status. The number of pregnancy-discrimination lawsuits filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rose to 20 in fiscal 2011, [...]

Applicants Are Fewer, And Many Are Lacking Companies are seeing fewer applicants per job opening, but recruiters say they are still seeing too many unqualified candidates. The average number of applications submitted per job opening fell to 118 in the fourth quarter, from 187 during the same period in 2010, according to new research from [...]

 

By RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN What do chief executives do all day? It really is what it seems: They spend about a third of their work time in meetings. That is one of the central findings of a team of scholars from London School of Economics and Harvard Business School, who have burrowed into the day-to-day [...]

 

Antonio de Sousa, a doorman at the Hyatt Regency in Tampa, Fla., hasn’t missed a day of work since 1985. When Antonio de Sousa’s car broke down on the way to work, calling a tow truck didn’t enter his mind. Instead, he left the car beside the highway and ran five miles through downtown Tampa, [...]

 

By RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN What do chief executives do all day? It really is what it seems: They spend about a third of their work time in meetings. That is one of the central findings of a team of scholars from London School of Economics and Harvard Business School, who have burrowed into the day-to-day [...]

 

To succeed in upper management, consider walking in the shoes of your lower-level workers. Scott Moorehead, Carolyn Kibler and Don Fertman did exactly that at different stages of their careers. They gleaned potent insights that made them more effective leaders and authentic communicators. Such lessons could hasten your advancement, too. Facing increased turnover during the [...]

 

Robert Murphy, an online marketing representative in San Francisco, was invited to a business meeting with his boss and six colleagues a few weeks ago. He had attended previous meetings on the subject, and he prepared with additional research. He brought a thick sheaf of notes and contracts with him to the conference room. So [...]

 

Workplace Cultures Come in Four Kinds What kind of company do you work for? LeadershipIQ, a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm, identified four distinct workplace cultures, defined as the way an organization functions internally, in everything from communication to decision-making to how it handles promotions: “Hierarchical” companies are built on tradition and rely on clearly defined [...]

By SERENA NG Warren Buffett spends one weekend a year meeting with thousands of shareholders at the annual meeting of his company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. But several Fridays a year, Mr. Buffett entertains business students from all over the country who descend on Omaha, Neb., to pick the billionaire investor’s brain. At these visits, students [...]