When to comes to the Big, Bad Recession and when things might improve, consider me a pessimist. It’s not that I don’t want thing to get better (Who doesn’t?), but that I just believe that it is as delusional to think that things are suddenly going to get better as it was to deny the existence of the downturn to begin with.    

Yes, there are still a lot of those delusional, happy-talk types out there—and here’s a good example of what I’m talking about—but these head-in-the-sand observers are grasping at straws and overreacting to what is, at best, data that indicate a very, very slight and moderate economic uptick.

My view is formed more by what I’m reading in places like The New York Times, where a story just today said, “The nation’s fiscal outlook is even bleaker than the government forecast earlier this year because the recession turned out to be deeper than widely expected, the budget offices of the White House and Congress agreed in separate updates.”

And, it looks like I’m not alone in my pessimistic view. A new survey just released by the Workforce Institute at Kronos Inc. and conducted by Harris Interactive suggests that a lot of employees may not be feeling particularly optimistic and workplace productivity has been a casualty of the Big, Bad Recession.

Here are some of the survey highlights:

• Some 38 percent of respondents employed full or part time said there had been layoffs in the past year at their primary place of employment.

• Of those respondents who said that productivity had been negatively affected by layoffs:

—66 percent said that morale has suffered and that workers are less motivated;

—64 percent said that there is just too much work and not enough people left to do it;

—37 percent said the wrong people or departments were laid off, leaving inefficient systems and workflows; and

—36 percent said they are concerned that as the economy picks up, they won’t have the right resources to meet demand.

One surprising finding that jumped out at me: Despite the general feeling of being overworked, a majority of respondents—53 percent—said they felt the right number of people were laid off at their organization (32 percent said they felt too many were laid off, while 7 percent said not enough were let go).

“In the midst of a downturn like the one we are experiencing, the time is right for employers to re-examine existing [workforce] practices: from how work is distributed among the organization; to whether or not new hires need to be made; to what kinds of technology might enable the workforce to become more productive,” said Joyce Maroney, the director of the Workforce Institute at Kronos, in a press release about the study. “In this survey, we hear loud and clear from employees that these issues need to be addressed now, so that businesses are positioned for success when the economy kicks back into high gear.”

She makes a good point; organizations should be making changes now that will help them and their workforces rapidly recover whenever the economy starts to show some sustained improvement—even if that improvement still seems a long ways away.

But this survey also points out something else, especially from those who say that productivity has been negatively affected by so many recession-fueled layoffs: Workers everywhere are feeling disgruntled, down and maybe even depressed by all that has been going on around them. It has affected their productivity as well as their outlook on life and work, and organizations need to do something about it and do it now.

In other words, American workers have lost their mojo, as Austin Powers would say, and businesses everywhere need to be thinking about how they are going to get it back.

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