President’s Message:
Stress or a Sense of Accomplishment?

by Debbie Kerr, President

Although technically “’tis the season to be jolly,” I don’t think the word has truly gotten around. Financially, it might be year-end for your company, so it can be stressful at work if management is pushing you to get a product out the door. Since I work at an insurance company, we don’t want anything going out the door, like money for claims. It’s a whole other reason I want you to drive safely this holiday season. I want to see you all next year, but I don’t want you to be incurring any claims, especially if you are insured with us.

Performance Appraisals

Where I work, we do formal performance appraisals, so we end up giving and getting feedback at this time of year. Depending on whether you are getting positive or “developmental” feedback can determine whether you get into the holiday spirit. It might also be where the saying came from, “It is better to give than to receive.” In some cases I asked for feedback, and the people didn’t respond to my e-mail. I don’t know if that was feedback in itself or if it just meant that they were busy meeting their own year-end, because we actually do have something to get out the door for the end of the year. They also may have given the feedback directly to the person who will be performing my performance appraisal. Either way, I am so excited, I can hardly stand it. For those of you don’t know me, please insert sarcasm here.

For the managers that I work with, my resource manager will ask them directly for feedback, so I will get to hear their comments when I meet with my resource manager. My performance appraisal is on December 4, so its timing will be close to when you are reading this article. Reading my performance appraisal may be almost as exciting as reading this newsletter, but then again, it won’t have the animation that I assume this issue will have. Really, nothing compares to one of Margie’s issues. Somehow I think the humour may be missing from my performance appraisal that you may find in the newsletter. I certainly hope it doesn’t make me laugh, although it would be better than making me cry. What, me nervous?

STC Head Office

Work is not the only place that has its deadlines. By the time you read this, I will have submitted the form for the Distinguished Chapter Service Award. We are hoping to have Director, Cindy Currie, present the award this year at our annual Wine and Cheese. She is trying to co-ordinate a trip across Ontario, and since she will be at the Eastern Ontario Chapter on March 28, I am trying to see if she will be able to visit us the same week. We are working out the details now.

The end of the calendar year also marks the deadline for judging the chapter-level competitions for the online communication and technical publications and then submitting the Distinguished award winners to Head Office. December 1 was the deadline for applying to judge those entries at the international level. This also marked the end of a successful competition for our chapter. Thank you to those involved in this event from those running it to those who entered it. You can’t have one without the other.

The Gift of Stress

While I have already pointed out stressful items, they have nothing to do with the holidays. They are all year-end events. Holiday stress has more to do with trips to the stores, parties, and weight gain. It’s not that I am bitter. Well, maybe I am. I just tell it like it is. After all, that’s what I get paid to do, but not here in the newsletter. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression and think that only the president gets paid to write articles. Soon everyone would want to be president and would write long articles in a bid to get paid by the word. But I digress.

When you are trying to meet so many other deadlines, running around to buy gifts, and make them thoughtful ones, seems a “tad” challenging. Although, if it was easy, where would the fun be in that? Maybe if I had bought the presents before the feedback, there would have been no stress issues now about the performance appraisal, because bribery would have worked, and my gift buying would have been ahead of schedule. I will put that on my “To Do” list for next year.

The Positive Side

While I have said a lot of negative things about this time of the year, there are many positives. For example, with pressure and deadlines like this, you certainly have the opportunity to experience a great sense of accomplishment. Whether you meet your deadline at work or get your shopping done, you can certainly say that got something done. It’s not like those dog days of summer where you ask yourself where the time went and what you have to show for it. At this time of year, the evidence is pretty obvious.

You get to see family and friends. While some of you may find this problematic, this is generally a good thing. Whether you are attending parties or family gatherings, you get to see people you may not have seen in a while. Even as council members, we get together in December, and, for some of us, this is the first time that we have seen each other for a while. While we each perform our duties, we are not always able to attend all the council meetings. In December, we meet in a restaurant, and get to talk socially. It’s a nice change from just asking someone’s opinion on something each month.

It’s a time to reflect on what we have. While Thanksgiving is past, it is never the wrong time to be thankful for the people we have in our lives and to give them positive feedback about how they have impacted our lives. While formal feedback can be stressful, we often take the people around us for granted, and a well-written letter would be just as good a present as purchased one.

Take care of yourselves. We have some surprises planned for next year. This STC year is like no other year, and we are trying new things. To see what is coming, check out the article about learning. We are still working out the details, so we can only give you hints, but 2007 holds a lot of promise and possibilities for you.

Think of the STC as the gift that keeps on giving, because we promise to keep giving you more and more value throughout next year.

Be safe. Have a great holiday season. I look forward to seeing you (or at least hearing from you) soon.

About Debbie Kerr

In the 20 years that Debbie has been writing documentation, she has worked in a variety of industries: government, retail, software, and insurance. She is currently employed at The Economical Insurance Group in Waterloo, where she has stepped out of her traditional role of writing user guides and help files, and now writes a variety of specifications.

Debbie has been a member of the STC since 1994 and has been a council member for many years. For the second year in a row, Debbie has bravely taken on the role of Chapter President.