On the Job: Holiday parties and bonuses yes, raises no

Plenty of employers will spread holiday cheer among their workers this year by throwing parties, handing out bonuses and offering gifts, but far fewer will offer Christmas raises, a new survey found.

As the holidays approach, 43 percent of surveyed small business owners will tuck bonuses into paychecks, while 33 percent will offer gifts, OPEN Small Business Network reported last week.

Unfortunately, only 18 percent of surveyed employers plan to give the gifts that keep on giving: raises.

On a sobering note, few owners, 3 percent, are braced for bad behavior at their annual holiday parties, said the network, a unit of American Express.

Far more owners, 22 percent, are fretting about ensuring their employees have a good time.

What happened to the good old days, when illicit photocopying and romantic mistakes marked the end of a good office bash?

AT THE OFFICE

Drying out the office party: If you are worried that alcohol could ruin your holiday party you might want to change your approach, according to Mark Busto, a lawyer at the Bellevue-based law firm of Sebris Busto James.

Busto offers this advice:

Instead of throwing a traditional party with an open bar, sponsor a feast at a cooking school, Busto says.
Serve booze at the beginning of the party, but offer less as the festivities continue.
Discuss the tone of the party before the bar opens, perhaps at a meeting the day before the event or in an internal memo.
Establish a system to detect inebriated partygoers, aspiring underage drinkers, and potential drunken drivers.
Offer free rides.

Spam-induced headaches: The debate over junk e-mail continued last week with this dispatch in the Toledo Blade:

Linda Fayerweather, a business coach in Ohio, left her home office for three hours one recent morning. "When I got back I had 41 e-mails, and only two that I wanted," she said.

"I'm thinking the average employee spends half an hour to an hour a day getting through e-mail .... And if someone goes away for several days, it's not uncommon to find 600 to 700 e-mails waiting when they get back."

Fayerweather, owner of Changing Lanes LLC, said the glut of unwanted commercial e-mails -- also known as "spam" or junk e-mail -- is causing a problem for small businesses like hers.

She sends 1,000 e-mailed newsletters every Monday to clients and potential clients, but she's finding that more and more of them are shutting down their e-mail altogether, simply to avoid the never-ending torrent of e-mails offering mortgage refinancing, weight-loss programs, dating services, work-at-home schemes, drugs over the Internet, credit repair, penis-enlargement devices and get-rich-quick scams from Nigeria, Liberia, Senegal and the Philippines.

Small companies can't afford the sorts of sophisticated spam filters and message scrubbers used by large corporations.

Estimates of the scope and cost of the problem vary widely, but experts generally say about half of all e-mails are spam. A recent study by the Radicati Group Inc., a research firm in Palo Alto, Calif., found that spam accounts for 14.5 billion messages a day and costs businesses globally $20.5 billion a year in lost productivity and technology expenses.

The future is even bleaker, according to the firm: It predicts that 58 billion junk e-mails will be sent every day within four years, costing businesses $198 billion annually.

Radicati estimates that spam will cost businesses an average of $49 per mailbox this year but forecasts that could rise to $257 per year by 2007 if nothing is done to curtail the proliferation of junk messages.

SAVE THE DATE

Tuesday: Cruise Ship Recruiting: NCL America will be looking for people to work Hawaiian cruises. 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., WorkSource Renton, 919 S.W. Grady Way, Renton. Contact: 206-205-3500.
Dec. 11: Longer Lunches' "No Company" Company Holiday Party, a gathering for independent consultants, free-lancers and other autonomous workers. 8 p.m. to ... Last Supper Club, 124 S. Washington St., Pioneer Square. Contact: www.longerlunches.org
Dec. 10: The Job Market and Effective Job Search: An ongoing series at WorkSource North Seattle on researching the labor market, networking, informational interviews and related matters. 8:30-11:30 a.m. 12550 Aurora Ave. N., Seattle. Contact: 206-440-2500.
Jan. 28: Fourth Annual Apprenticeship Fair, 4-7 p.m., 151 N.E. Hampe Way, Chehalis. Contact: Brenda O'Connor at 360-740-6861.

P-I reporter Paul Nyhan, who covers labor and the economy, compiles "On the Job." He can be reached at 206-448-8145 or paulnyhan@seattlepi.com. This report includes information from the Toledo Blade, The Associated Press and other P-I news services.

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