A. The appropriate side to wear a name tag is on the right side. The reason is that as you extend your hand in greeting, the gaze of the person you are meeting can easily follow your extended arm back to the name tag. More important than which side is the “correct” side is that each person at an event actually makes the effort to wear the name tag. They are incredibly useful for people who are meeting many new people at once. The event organizer should do everything possible in preparing the name tags to encourage people to wear them. This means paying attention both to the way the tag is worn and to the information provided on the tag.

Tags with pins or clips can damage clothing, especially a nice sweater or silk-like blouse. Even adhesive-backed labels can leave marks on clothes. The end result is that people either don’t wear them, or clip them to waistbands, purses or briefcases where they’re not easily seen. Lanyard-style badges, while kind to clothing, can get flipped over rendering them useless. A great alternative is the magnetic clip. These clips leave no marks on or holes in clothing and have enough gripping power to adhere through sweaters and jackets as well as lighter clothing.

A. Being recognized for your performance and potential should be a reason for celebration, and I hope you took a few minutes to reflect on the success that brought you to management’s attention so that they chose to offer you a promotion. In this economic environment, these decisions are not made lightly, and I believe your organizations leaders discussed you, your work, your current role and its value to the organization, and where they saw a greater need for your skills - the new "promotion" role.

Working parents can face significant challenges in the workplace, and great employers have learned that being a family friendly organization can help retain key staff as they try to balance out family responsibilities and their commitments to the job. The challenges you face with young children, the demands of a career, and the prospect of even more career demands was enough to push you to make the decision to reject the promotion offer. Some people might try to second guess your decision or its appropriateness for you and your family, but you won't find that reaction here.

“I found it very stifling,” says Savarese.

So Savarese finds it very ironic that today she’s president of Surfaceworks, a Watertown, Mass., based residential cleaning company. And one of her customers, is guess who – her mother. “She has a few complaints once in a while, but for the most part, she likes the job we do,” says Savarese.

Surfaceworks started in 1985 when Savarese was a struggling photographer who started cleaning houses as a way to earn enough money to support her art. She spent six months cleaning houses by herself, then started getting more work than she could handle alone. Savarese – whose motto is motto, “Because it’s nice to come home to a clean house” – now employs 50 workers, cleaning an estimated 13 thousand houses a year. “It’s very satisfying to turn a dirty house into one that is tidy and meticulous,” says Savarese.

As dual-income families become increasingly pressed for time – and as the population ages – cleaning services have democratized and are not only for the wealthy or commercial businesses. The cleaning occupation is expected to grow 14 percent to 2016. “Getting the house cleaned frees you up for more pleasurable and important things,” says Savarese. “It’s one less responsibility to worry about at a time when we’re all already stretched so thin.”

A. B., Winchester, MA

Shared offices, cubical environments and open office are obvious ways for a business to save on costs. That sharing of space comes at a cost as well: People’s annoying, disturbing and sometimes even offensive actions can affect productivity and therefore profits. In your situation simple fixes like earphones or moving to another space either didn’t work or aren’t possible, and doing nothing is intolerable. Unless you’re willing to quit, it’s time to talk to your boss.

He is younger than I am by 10 years or so, and I suspect some of his actions and inability to mask his feelings about me reflect his relatively young age. Our director is aware of some tension between us (she brought it up with me after an email response of his).

I've never had to deal with this before, and I am wondering if it would be appropriate to have a conversation with him about this: "I get the sense that I might rub you the wrong way and I wonder if there might be a misunderstanding between us or if there are things I could do to make working with me easier."

I'm not certain if I could gain anything if I went this route. I don't expect to be his best friend, but I'd like more camaraderie between us. I also wonder if my desire to talk with him is more of a petty nature - that I want him to just know that I know he doesn't like me. So what's the appropriate next step?

A. Relationships at work are at least as complicated as those in your private life, and often more so because of the amount of time you spend with these people, reporting relationships, or perhaps the dependence you may have on each other to do your job well. When these relationships work, people enjoy each other, most often their work product and productivity exceed expectations, and retention is another corporate side benefit.

When the relationships don't work, they can range from annoyance to dislike to avoidance and worse. Organizations do well to make sure any kind of hostility is recognized as totally unacceptable and not allowed to escalate.

He’s a bartender. Ask him for a Manhattan, and he can make it 10 different ways: as a Louisiana (Rye and Benedictine), Red Hook (Rye, Punte E Mes), 1900s (Rye, Dolin Verouth, Boker’s Bitters) – and the list goes on.

“This kind of bartending is not beer tending,” says Toste, who started out as a busboy at Locke-Ober and is now co-owner and bartender at Deep Ellum in Allston, which he calls the city’s first combination craft-beer/classic-cocktail bar.

Like many bartenders, Toste is a musician, a background that’s an asset, he says, because entertaining and performance are a big part of both being on stage or behind a bar. He favors hip black Ray-Ban spectacles, Dickie button-down shirts, and Levis as his work uniform, a far cry from the old-fashioned black and white tuxedo he wore when first starting out as a busboy and then back waiter.

“I learned a ton about wine and service, but at first didn’t want to be stuck behind a bar, forced to listen to patrons talk about Red Sox, golf, or the Wall Street Journal. When you’re waiting tables, you can walk away.”

But a job at the Bukowski Tavern in Cambridge changed his attitude toward bartending. “I realized I could talk about music, beer, and food.

People who want to hang out do, if not, they leave,” says Toste. “I created a clientele who liked what I did and kept coming back.” Today, at Deep Ellum, he serves everyone from “mohawks to suits” and his cocktails are stirred, not shaken, with fresh twists and juices, and cool spirits. “We handpick everything; there’s no brand loyalty.”

Bartending may be the ultimate recession-proof career: bartending jobs are expected to increase 13 percent between 2006 and 2016. “People aren’t going to stop drinking when things go bad,” says Toste, who has heard his share of layoff stories recently. “In fact, they go out and drink more.”

T. K, Antioch, CA

A. The short answer would seem to be: “You fire the employee.” The issue is no longer about the behavior; it’s about the refusal to correct a behavior. As the supervisor, it’s your job to make sure each employee knows the expectations your company has for behavior, and it’s the employees’ responsibility to meet them. Otherwise, it can negatively affect morale when one employee is perceived to be exempt from having to comply with company standards.

Before doing anything so drastic as firing an employee, you need to let the employee know both verbally and, better yet, in writing what these expectations are and specifically what the employee is doing that isn’t consistent with those expectations. And that may be the crux of the matter for you: Are you, in fact, being explicit with the employee? What form have your attempts to correct the issue taken? If you haven’t really been clear the employee may not have “heard” you. If you beat around the bush, trying to be “polite,” your message could be ambiguous.

Q: What career advice do you have for younger professionals?

I think being confident and optimistic is so important. You have to be really open to continuous improvement. You have to be curious, open and empathetic. These days, in particular, you have to be really versatile.

I just think if you're willing to outwork everyone one else, it's not very hard to do, frankly. From the very beginning, I thought, "If I work one more hour a day and a couple of hours on the weekend, I'll pass people who have a 10-year head start on me."

To read the full Q&A with Kaplan, click here.

A. Time really is money, especially as employees are often running from one job to the next. Employees in many industries and positions are looking for clarity about what is paid time, and what is unpaid time. Many positions involve time that is considered "waiting time" - whether it is a truck driver waiting for a truck to be loaded, or your case where you are waiting to be cleared to leave.

But there are revolutionary health IT leaders, among them, Children’s Hospital in Boston, where clinical processes, from e-prescribing to lab reports, are all done electronically. “From the moment you walk in the door, to when you check out of the hospital, is all tracked behind the scenes,” says Brad McDonald, lead application developer, just one of the hundreds of information specialists helping to change the way healthcare is performed in the hospital. “Computers can reduce errors, eliminate variance and redundancy, but having a computer in the workplace can be a major change and forces people to conform to a certain way of providing care.”

McDonald, who started his career at a supplier of healthcare IT solutions, says that being on the technical support staff for a pediatric hospital can be “high stakes stuff. These are systems that guide people down a certain path, eventually guiding clinicians on how to provide for sick kids, so you have to be careful and cognizant of every decision you make, because patients are involved.”