The fact is, my perspective is colored by the many different hats I wear in my daily life, including being the editor of a publication and Web site that focuses on how to better manage a workforce.
That’s also why I’m probably more attuned than most to drums I hear beating in the workforce jungle, and the message they seem to be signaling to me. And, here’s what I am hearing:
• The first message is that the long and unrelenting recession has pounded into workers a pervasive sense that their jobs, their livelihoods, and perhaps even their lives and well-being are at great risk every day. People everywhere are down, depressed, and many are close to giving up hope, if they haven’t reached that point already.
“Bob Watson feels lucky to have a job,” the story begins. “Lindy Cosme has a job, but not one she went to college for. Ronnie Woodfork has been looking for a job every day and still doesn’t have one. Three Hoosiers with different situations, and all three remain worried about the economy.”
The story says: “Faced with increasing job losses, worries about having enough money for retirement and continued difficulty in paying for basic items such as food, those ages 45 to 64 are one worried group,” according to a survey released this week by AARP. “… The survey, called ‘A Closer Look,’ was last done about eight months ago. The recession’s full effect is now being felt, new findings show.”
“A recent spate of suicides at France Télécom has revealed a paradox at the heart of French society: Even with robust labor protection, workers here see themselves as profoundly insecure, with many complaining about being pushed beyond their limits by the pace of economic change.” The newspaper adds, “What has caught the attention of the French media, public and government is that many of the suicides and more than a dozen failed attempts have been attributed to work-related problems by some experts and labor officials.”
It makes me wonder: If workers are so depressed and tormented that they are kicking up the suicide rate in highly unionized France, what does that mean for us across the pond in America, where we toil in a largely at-will, you-can-be-terminated-tomorrow work environment?
What is this going to take? As I said in my “Last Word” column, I think it’s simpler than most managers think: “More communication from the top would help. So would some sense of when the pay freezes and furloughs might end—even if that’s not right around the corner. And a greater recognition (and appreciation) of the sacrifices everyone is making would help build a sense that ‘We’re all going to get through this together.’ ”
That’s my formula for getting America’s workforce out of the funk it’s in. It’s not particularly complicated, but it begs the question: Where are the business leaders who have the courage to be trailblazers and take the first step? I pray it won’t take too long, because I’m still listening for those drums and that message.
It was the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes who described the life of mankind when in his natural state as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and it’s an apt description of the mood of many American workers as we approach Labor Day 2009.
Here’s some research that bears this out: It’s Adecco Group North America’s latest American Workplace Insights Survey that was conducted for Adecco by Harris Interactive. It shows that as Labor Day rolls around, a majority of workers are dissatisfied with their employers, particularly in these three areas—compensation, career growth and retention efforts.
The numbers break down like this:
• Two-thirds (66 percent) of American workers are not currently satisfied with their compensation.
• Additionally, 78 percent are not satisfied with their company’s overall retention efforts, while 76 percent are not satisfied about future career growth opportunities at their company.
• Working relationships are also strained, with almost half (48 percent) of workers saying that they are not satisfied with the relationship they have with their boss and 59 percent saying they are not satisfied with the level of support they receive from their colleagues.
• Workers are also critical of their organization’s brain trust, with 77 percent saying that they are not satisfied with the strategy and vision of their company and its leadership.
• In addition, some 68 percent of workers say they aren’t satisfied with their company’s contribution to their retirement plans.
“What workers are telling us,” says Bernadette Kenny, chief career officer at Adecco Group North America, “is that even during a recession, just having a job does not equate to job satisfaction. Employers need to be conscious of the concerns their staff is managing through on a daily basis and proactively come up with the appropriate solutions to improve retention and reduce the current and future high cost of turnover.”
I think Bernadette Kenny is on to something. Yes, everyone who has managed to avoid becoming another unemployment statistic should be happy that they’re still working, but that’s not exactly a rallying cry that’s going to get your workforce fired up and more engaged. Smart managers, as Kenny correctly points out, need to be actively plugged in to what their staffs are going through and looking for solutions to help them get through it.
The Adecco survey has a few suggestions for how managers can help to reward and retain workers even when dollars are tight, and for the most part, I think the suggestions are useful.
However, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Businesses everywhere need to actively engage and help workers get past the depression and bad feelings that so many have about their work and the organizations they work for. In other words, leaders need to step forward and help their workforce get their mojo back.
This latest research by Adecco is just another in a long line of surveys that show how workers are feeling. With a possible economic recovery on the horizon, it is clearly time for America’s business leaders to step up and start helping America’s workforce out of its economic funk.
A long time ago, in a workplace, far, far away, I worked for a guy who was fixated on the latest management trends. He wanted to be seen as cool, hip and cutting edge even if the organizational changes he was pushing didn’t always make much sense.
This was a guy who always came up with nonsensical new job titles and pretentious buzzwords for workforce practices, stuff that you see all too often in today’s workplace. I give him credit for being ahead of the times with that kind of nonsense, but there was something else he was ahead of the curve with too—making current employees reapply for their jobs.
Back in the early 1990s, he pushed a reorganization of the newspaper newsroom where I worked—a “newsroom without walls,” he called it—that basically meant eliminating all the reporting beats and most of the newsroom jobs. Instead, he came up with a new list of beats and jobs and forced everyone to reapply for their job even if it was a job that wasn’t changing.
There was certainly some logic to eliminating some positions and creating new ones, but the process of making everyone reapply sent the anxiety level among all of those having to reapply (basically, the entire newsroom staff) off the charts. It caused a huge amount of worry, grief and lost sleep among many who weren’t sure what this process of reapplying for work REALLY meant. I can’t recall anyone actually losing their job in the process, but it was not a good way to run a railroad, so to speak. It unduly tortured a lot of good people who didn’t deserve someone on high to be cavalierly fiddling with their life and livelihood.
I was thinking about this all again today when I ran across a story in The New York Times that described how a similar process was going on at a newspaper called The Journal News in Westchester County, New York. According to the Times story, “The suburban newspaper is at the vanguard of the industry: reporters at The Journal News don’t work in a newsroom, they are part of an ‘Information Center’; they don’t cover beats, they cover ‘topics’; and in a new wrinkle to an old story, the staff was not being laid off, but becoming part of a ‘comprehensive restructuring plan.’ Specifically, the 288 news and advertising employees at The Journal News were told that jobs were being redefined and that they all would need to reapply for the new positions and that by the time the re-org music stopped, 70 of them would be without jobs. What fresh hell is this?”
The Journal News is a Gannett newspaper (Gannett is the largest newspaper publisher in the country), and in the name of full disclosure, I should tell you that I worked for Gannett newspapers in Montana and Hawaii for five years in the ’90s. Gannett is known for its tough (some might say heavy-handed) way of dealing with employees, but making workers go through this surpasses anything I ever saw happen during my time working for the company.
I think the New York Times story really captured the essence of how surreal this must have been for the workers involved.
“For the last three weeks, employees at The Journal News have lived in a netherworld in which they were asked to justify their existence in a changing, shrinking world,” the Times story said. “After filling out an application on … a corporate Web site, that asked them about their new-media skills, among other things, and then being interviewed by corporate human resources executives pulled in by Gannett, they were called up to the third floor of the offices in Westchester last Thursday and given an offer letter in a thin white envelope—‘Thank you for your participation in the restructuring of the Information Center department at The Journal News. I am pleased to extend you an offer. … ’—or a much thicker manila envelope explaining their departure and severance.”
The story has to be read to be believed, but it makes me wonder: Who in their right mind chooses to torture their workforce this way? Layoffs are bad enough, but to put people through this process where they have to pitch themselves for a job they have been doing—a job that someone upstairs has probably already made a decision about anyway—qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment.
Making workers reapply for their jobs? It’s unimaginatively bad in this environment, but unfortunately, merely a sign of times and more evidence that as bad as things have been for workers, we may still not have hit bottom just yet.
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.
No, my experience hasn’t found any of that, but it has shown me that reasonable people like reasonable rules and polices that help guide them in their everyday duties. Employees want to have some structure to their jobs and some help in dealing with difficult situations, and that’s why smart and well-thought-through policies can make for a better business.
But there is another side to workforce rules and regulations: They can be used as a hammer to pound workers into submission and limit flexibility and thoughtfulness. In my world, you want to cultivate smart employees who use their brain and exercise some discretion, when appropriate, to deal with the many shades of gray that we deal with in life.
The problem is that discretion is hard to manage. Tough, inflexible rules are much easier to hold employees to, especially when such rules are put in the hands of small-minded and unbending supervisors in an organization’s management food chain.
And, that’s why what happened at Best Buy, the large “multinational retailer of technology and entertainment products” (as the company describes itself), is a lesson for executives everywhere.
According to the Denver Post, “Two employees who tried to stop a knife-wielding shoplifter at the Best Buy store … in Broomfield [Colorado] were fired for violating corporate policy. Jared Bergstreser tackled a man who allegedly stole two cell phones from the store August 1. Colin Trapp came to his aid. Both men were fired [August 16] at the request of corporate officials because they ignored company rules against following shoplifters out the door, Bergstreser said.”
According to a Wall Street Journal account of the incident, “Bergstreser said he gave chase when a man burst out of the Best Buy store … with an armload of electronics he hadn’t paid for. Bergstreser, a 20-year-old former high school football player, said he wrestled the man to the ground. Trapp, 23, said he also rushed out of the store and pinned the suspect.”
The tussle got messy when “the alleged shoplifter was able to grab a pocket knife and cut a store manager who also had run outside,” according to the Journal. “The suspect and a male accomplice then fled, jumping into a getaway car, a gray Pontiac with a female driver, local police said. No one has been arrested.”
This falls into the category of “no good deed goes unpunished,” because what many feel is heroic conduct is actually a violation of Best Buy’s corporate policy.
Spokeswoman Kelly Groehler told the Denver Post that the company has clear policies regarding shoplifters, basically that they are supposed to let them go. “Employees who work in our stores are aware, and trained, on the standard operating procedures for dealing with shoplifting or theft,” she said. “These procedures are in place first and foremost for the safety of our employees.”
Although Best Buy’s policies are apparently common in the retail world, that hasn’t stopped people in Colorado from feeling that these two Best Buy employees got a raw deal.
The Journal notes that “scores of comments, most expressing admiration, have been posted on Trapp’s Facebook page and other Web sites. ‘Punished for not being cowards,’ one commentator wrote. … Several posters pledged to boycott the chain.”
I understand the Best Buy policy on shoplifters, and I agree with the need to have such a policy, but I wonder: Did Best Buy really need to terminate the employment of two very engaged members of their workforce? Was there not another option? And is this not a case of following the rules over the cliff?
On Wednesday, the Denver Post published an editorial protesting Best Buy’s decision to fire the young men. “Shouldn’t heroism be rewarded?” the paper asked. I agree completely. There’s a way to deal with this incident and reward the heroic effort without having these guys lose their job.
Best Buy needs to inject a little common sense into this argument and not be so focused on rules and procedures that they can’t see the bigger picture. If I were the Big Boss at Best Buy, I would have my HR people give these two a formal written reprimand for violating policy, but also a bonus and public commendation for their effort—above and beyond the call of duty—to help the company.
Heroes in the workplace should be recognized and rewarded, whether they help subdue shoplifters or land the damaged airplane they’re piloting safely in the Hudson River. Common sense and good management practice should tell us that this is the right thing to do. Letting corporate rules and policies dictate otherwise is no way to run a railroad—or to build a highly engaged workforce.
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