Work force diversity programs are designed to protect the company's return on investment by bringing to the surface the subtle discomforts, fears, and biases most people experience when they find themselves working with people who are different from themselves. (Author)

Employers must ensure that all employees can interact comfortably and productively with people who have disabilities. Trainers can use experiential exercises to break down fears and prejudices that nondisabled workers might have toward those with disabilities. (Author/JOW)

Developing sexual harassment training involves these steps: survey employees, establish policy and reporting procedures, get management commitment, and use programs both to educate about the issues and eliminate unacceptable behavior. (SK)

Else-Marie Osmundsen, manager of an International Labour Office project, "Workers' Education and the Environment," discusses the importance of union participation in environmental programs. She describes the implementation of the project in the Caribbean. (JOW)

Argues that, unless information technology managers pay attention to how people share information, advanced technological systems cannot achieve their full potential. Outlines how organizations can rebuild their information cultures, integrating human flexibility and disorder into information systems and changing employee behavior. (JOW)

The ability to learn is the basis for all other skills and distinguishes effective employees from those that are not so effective. Trainers must teach employees to turn common events into learning opportunities and to create their own learning systems. (JOW)

Reviews individual and institutional effects of critical-incident stress on health care delivery and use of stress education, defusings, and debriefings as effective interventions with health care personnel. Presents successful efforts of social work department using these techniques in major university hospital system as model for replication in…

Recounts a dinner conversation between 2 high school English teachers: a 30-year veteran, and a former protege planning to enter college teaching after 5 disappointing years pursuing a vision of classroom integrity. Both seem disillusioned by incessant daily interruptions and distractions beyond their control. Sadly the teacher attrition rate…

Only a leadership team that includes masculine and feminine strengths is strong and flexible enough to compete in today's marketplace. To meet current and economic challenges and to prepare for the next century, organizations should promote diversity on their leadership teams and allow women's personal leadership styles to flower. (JOW)

People will be productively employed in more democratic organizations to the extent they can keep learning, overcome the anxiety inherent in change, continuously deepen their knowledge, and develop a battery of flexible skills for collaboration over diverse and widening systems. (Author)

Organizations can benefit from using bias audits to examine their human resource systems to identify barriers related to culture, gender, age, and other differences. (Author)

In the last decade, technology has rendered a lot of face-to-face interaction unnecessary. However, human contact is still essential to true communication. (JOW)

Interviews with 96 participants indicated that employees, managers, and human-resource-development staff use different strategies to organize work-related learning networks. Choice of strategy (extended training, directed reflection, reflective innovation) was partially related to type of work (machine-bureaucratic, entrepreneurial, professional).…

A new measure of work time correlates well with the standard self-reported workweek method. However, a closer look reveals that reference periods (last week versus last year) have an impact on some workers in the distribution. (Author)

A survey of 62 business-communication students compared the attitudes of men and women about (1) the value of technology in making users more productive; (2) the impact of computers on people and their work environment; and (3) the relative comfort of men and women when using computers. Results indicated that women were more positive on all three…