NEW YORK (Reuters) - NEVER mind the recession. Workers can still find ways to do less and get away with it, says the author of a tongue-in-cheek look at the workplace, How to Relax Without Getting the Axe.

The secret is learning and adapting the tricks of powerful, successful people, said Stanley Bing, whose book, subtitled A Survival Guide to the New Workplace, comes out on Nov 17.

The new book is an updated version of Bing's earlier book Executricks, or How to Retire While You're Still Working, tailored to meet today's hard economic times, he said.

'It's a perilous workplace environment but, that said, it should be possible to learn from the way that successful people manage their time and manage their careers,' he told Reuters in an interview.

Bing is actually a pseudonym for Gil Schwartz, who is executive vice-president of corporate communications for CBS Corp. He began using the name Stanley Bing several years ago when he was writing a column for Esquire magazine.

Tips for relaxing on the job

• Learn tricks of successful, powerful people.
• Being absent builds status, which is made easier with e-mail, cellphones. It also create the sense of being too important to be around and available.
• Learn to delegate.
• For a 'virtual' door, turn the computer screen away from other people.
• Personalise the work space to make it uncongenial to visitors and cultivate 'patterns of unfriendliness'.
• Have an assistant or failing that, appropriate someone else's assistant. 'You use other people. This is what successful people do in all business, in all walks of life,' Bing said.

--REUTERS

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