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Want to know what people are really thinking about the hottest topics in the workplace? Then check out Business Week’s massive discussion of the top six topics.

The six topics are the result of voting by 8500 people; they are

• Work-Life Balance
• Staying Entrepreneurial
• Time Management
• Negotiating Bureaucracy
• Toxic Bosses
• Generational Tension

“…now we’re looking for solutions. Starting today, you can submit comments, essays, pictures, or videos chronicling the challenges you face in any of the categories—and how you’ve tried to resolve them. At the end of June, BusinessWeek writers and editors will use the material, along with the input of experts, to produce a precedent-setting multimedia package—with content and videos online beginning Aug. 14, the Special Issue in mailboxes Aug. 15, and broadcast segments appearing on BusinessWeek TV Aug. 16 and 17.”

My apologies for bringing this information to you so late, but you still have today. And I will bring you more on the discussion as it develops.

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Recently, the conversation at Slacker Manager turned to how a manager bounces back from a bad hiring. Although the five steps Barry Moltz listed are good, I commented that they didn’t include making hiring a priority and core competency, which would do much to alleviate bad hires. (Barry agreed:)

In most instances, the key to a bad hire is poor synergy between the candidate and the corporate culture. Culture is also the culprit in most screwed up M&A.

There’s actually not a lot of difference between hiring one person and acquiring/merging two companies. No matter how complementary the skills, technology and experience, cultural incompatibility usually leads to disaster.

There are dozens of examples to choose from—Alcatel-Lucent is one that’s happening right now.

Good technical synergies, but light-years apart culturally.

“But the cultures could hardly have been more different. One was hierarchical and centrally controlled, the other entrepreneurial and flexible.”

Don’t assume that the first description is Alcatel, it’s not.

[Lucent] retained a command-and-control style, and after years of restructuring, executives were so obsessed with cost-cutting that even the smallest purchase had to be logged into a central accounting system… “It was a slow-moving ship with an entitlement mentality,” says John Wright, a former Lucent vice-president…”

While it may be that the candidate is the ship, it’s just as possible that she’s a speedboat. Either way synergy is unlikely and conflict almost inevitable.

While culture may not be obvious when acquiring or hiring, due diligence/interviewing is able to identify and explore it. The problem is that managers often ignore culture, because they believe they that theirs is ‘right’ and the other will change. But it’s not a case of you/your company being right and ‘her/them’ being wrong, it’s a case of the pieces don’t fit—and 98% of the time you should see it coming.

How do you avoid incompatible hires?

What do you do when you don’t “fit in?”

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Don’t you love it when experts and powers-that-be formally study and recognize what the rest of us could have told them—namely that constant interruptions ruin productivity.

Remember years ago when that guy in the next cubicle talked too loudly on the phone, constantly got up for coffee or whatever, popped his head over the cubicle wall (or stuck his head in the office) comment/question and was generally distracting?

The interruptions are still happening, only now they’re in the form of email, instant messaging, texting, twittering and other digital annoyances.

A story in the NY Times tells us that the “biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload.”

Did you know that “A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times… on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day…”

So what’s the tab for the unnecessary interruptions? Is it really high enough to warrant the founding of a non-profit group created specifically to combat it?

I guess that depends on whether $650 billion a year gets your attention.

What’s your/your company’s share of that number?

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Check out my other ww: communications = perceptions

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Looking for a great place to work? Great Place to Work® Institute and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) just released their Best Small (50-250 employees) & Medium Companies (251-999 employees) to Work for in America. (The website also gives the results for the last four years.)

So, what makes an official “great place to work?”

“At the heart of our definition of a great place to work – a place where employees “trust the people they work for, have pride in what they do, and enjoy the people they work with” – is the idea that a great workplace is measured by the quality of the three, interconnected relationships that exist there:

• The relationship between employees and management.
• The relationship between employees and their jobs/company.
• The relationship between employees and other employees.”

And read what employees say about their companies.

What would your employees say?

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Perhaps ‘As you sow, so shall you reap’ should be rewritten, ‘As you parent, so shall you hire.’

The generations that parented the Millennials are reaping the results of confusing self-esteem with entitlement.

Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, narcissism researcher and author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable than Ever Before thinks that parents should stop ‘meaningless, baseless praise,’ which may start even before nursery school.

She’s right. The kids who sang ‘I am special/ I am special/ Look at me…’ (set to the tune of Frere Jacques) in nursery school are still thinking that way in the workforce.

If your kids are young start now by not only eliminating empty praise from your home, but also teaching them how to recognize it and why to discount it.

Praise what they accomplish and instill in them an appreciation of the real value found in the words, actions, deeds, and contributions, both large and small, that they make in the world.

With older kids—teens, twenties, thirties—help them wrap their minds around the idea that life doesn’t offer entitlements to anyone and share with them the real facts of life:

• They’re special to you, because you’re their parent and you love them.
• They’re special to themselves, because “self” is the only person they will ever truly know or actually have the ability to change.
• They’re not special to others, except as a result of their words, actions and deeds.
• Being special to you and to themselves does not entitle them to special treatment from their teachers, friends, bosses, colleagues, the guy complaining about their loud cell phone conversation at Starbucks or the cop who tickets them for speeding.
• Special isn’t related to self-esteem—self-esteem is grounded in and built from their own efforts and accomplishments.
• Self-esteem entitles them to nothing, but provides the strength to not only survive, but thrive, in today’s world—and tomorrow’s.

They may not appreciate your efforts now, but they will be forever grateful as they make their way though the world as adults.

How do you build self-esteem in your kids?

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There’s no time to post about all the interesting articles on corporate culture that I find, so I thought I’d offer several up with a few notes.

Wow! A founder who not only knows the front-line people (read: those the customers see) are the key to success, but puts his founder stock where his mouth is. No, not some high tech hot-shot in Silicon Valley, but Robbie Lee, CEO and founder of U.S. Dry Cleaning Corporation, the nation’s fastest-growing chain of dry cleaning operations.

According to Deborah Rechnitz, chief operating officer, “Robbie believes very strongly that our front-line employees are the key to our success. He also wants them to know that the company values their efforts and that they too can participate in the success of the company.”

Michigan isn’t the first place most people think of when cultural innovation is mentioned, but that’s what Rich Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor has successfully fostered.

“Inside Menlo’s offices above a coffee shop a few blocks from the University of Michigan’s central campus, there are no walls.

• No cubicles.
• Nobody working long nights.
• Nobody working weekends.
• No offshoring of work to programmers in India or other countries.
• And nobody telecommuting, sort of counterintuitive for a technology firm in the era of virtual offices.
• And if a client is a cash-starved entrepreneurial start-up — is there any other kind? — Menlo might just cut its usual rates for custom software by 50% in return for equity in the client’s business or royalties from its products.”

Casino’s are the last place you expect to find good culture, but apparently Caesars gets it right.

“It’s something you hear over and over about Caesars in its birthplace; good people, the place runs right; the staff make good money. Not the best money, like they raked in back in the good old days . But still among the best.”

Many Canadian companies also have their cultural act together, among them are…

• “When people have passion projects or interests . . . there is a culture here that they’re not shy or unwilling to come forward… It’s that kind of flexibility, out-of-the-box thinking and attention to corporate culture that truly differentiates a company from competitors” explains Chris Bedford, president of Calgary-based branding agency Karo Group.

• “Creating an open dialogue where employees truly have a voice and are listened to also makes a profound difference. “We’re constantly hiring,” he says. “Not only are we overstaffed, but we’re cherry-picking the best people and it all comes because of the reputation,” according to Bruce Rabik, chief operating officer of Rogers Insurance Ltd.”

There are great lessons to be learned from these cultures and the people who create/enable them. And if you want to implement similar ideas in your company, I’m willing to bet that every one of them would take the time to address your how-to questions.

How do you foster out-of-the-box cultural idea in your company?

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What reality do you live in?

Not your spouse’s or your kids’; not your parents’ or your friends’. You live in the reality created by your MAP.

The reason is simple—perception is reality.

We filter our mental, emotional and physical surroundings through our MAP and, like snowflakes, no two people have identical MAP, so no two people perceive identically.

Does perception influence corporate culture? Absolutely.

Look at Google, since it’s one of the most discussed corporate cultures it’s easy to compare perceptions. Outsiders usually mention the stock options, food, concierge services and in-house massages first, while insiders hottest buttons are the 20% time to work on their own ideas, how well they are heard, opportunity to make a difference, and respect shown at all levels.

Consider the CEO who describes his company’s culture as open, fair and motivated, while the workers complain of regimented work and spend their time on job sites. Aside from CEOs that don’t walk their talk, the difference is often perception, i.e., what is a tight ship to one is micromanaging to the other.

In spite of perceptions, for culture to work everyone needs to be on the same page. That requires the culture-setters/enablers at the top to listen to perceptions other than their own—even when that’s uncomfortable. And not just listen, but act.

How do you address differences in cultural perception in your company?

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Don’t miss my other WW: not for sale

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In April David Kirkpatrick, a Fortune senior editor, wrote about what it takes for adults to find value in Facebook; less than two months later comes a story about how recently hired Serena Software CEO Jeremy Burton is using Facebook to change the company’s corporate culture.

Serena isn’t a hot growth company, but a profitable 25-year-old company building mainframe software and Burton isn’t a kick-ass Millennial, but rather a 40-year-old veteran of Oracle and Veritas, who says “We’ve got to be relevant to the future. So we instituted Facebook Friday,” and dared his people to participate and learn about each other—to date all 800 of Serena’s 900 employees have accounts. But the real message was “Guys – the world is a different place and if we’re going to stay relevant we’re going to have to wake up.”

He’s also using it to evangelize the software-as-a-service business model he believes is necessary for the company to thrive in the future.

Burton says, “I think we gain rather than lose productivity this way. We have a theme, but I leave it up to them to choose what to do.”

Millennials and many Web 2.0 proponents believe that the most important thing is to incorporate the technology because it’s there, but, as Burton shows, it works better to bring it in with a specific goal in mind. He understands that people worry about, and often fear, change, so wrapping change in a palatable way works faster.

The great lesson to take away from this isn’t about Facebook; it’s a reminder that “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.”

Do you think that sugar-coating change is good or bad?

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