Purely for my own amusement, and hopefully for yours, I have decided to have an occasional series here in HorroR Stories about how when you work in HR long enough it starts to affect how you view everything in life. Keep sending questions though! I will resume the usual Q&A next time. Now that the NFL season is in full swing, my husband has pretty much tuned all the televisions in the house to ESPN and thrown away the remotes. I can’t help but get drawn in by all the story lines surrounding football. Also, because I’m in HR, hearing all these story lines makes me think about HR and the lessons companies and mangers can learn from the NFL. Here are some of the lessons I think we can learn from the NFL regarding the workforce today: No one should ever think they are indispensable, until they are indispensable The referee strike has revealed all sorts of harsh realities of the modern workforce. I’m going to give you some thoughts without talking about unions. I don’t fuck with unions. Here are my few non-union thoughts: Turnover is costly. Replacing a good employee costs more than the ad you posted on Monster.com. When you lose a good employee, or even worse a good employee with a lot of experience, the lag time in having the position open and then getting the new person up to speed is costly. And, worse, you may have to replace that star worker with someone who’s been working in the lingerie league because all the other good refs have jobs in the NCAA. Companies tend to shine the spotlight on their revenue generators: their sales reps and business development types at the expense of the A/P clerks and admin...

The point of Labor Day weekend has always flummoxed me. Why do we need a holiday weekend at the end of August? Presumably we’ve been taking our vacations sometime over this period, and enjoying those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. Yet apparently we need a break after all of that, a break that completely robs the week we now find ourselves in of any momentum. In school, we’d often start classes the week before Labor Day, only to immediately go into a 3-day weekend, completely throwing off class schedules right when they should be getting started. I’m not against holidays, and certainly not against the labor movement that this most recent holiday commemorates (unions helped put food on my table throughout my childhood). But there does seem to be a prevailing notion in our society that encourages us to take breaks more often than we need them. Advertising constantly encourages give ourselves a break, or have a treat. Self-help books and novels encourage us to find ourselves on vacations—to escape from the stress of our busy days. But how busy are our days, really? Certainly there are those out there who work 60 hours and more a week, who struggle through multiple jobs to support family or maintain a decent quality of living. But those people probably aren’t taking breaks—they can’t afford to. For the rest of us who work closer to 40 hours (or less) we probably tend to give ourselves too many breaks. Ok, I give myself too many breaks. I’ve never found it difficult to stop working and take it easy. It’s getting going again that is the real difficulty. There is nothing I have found that is more addictive than complacency—it’s really the root of all continuing bad habits....