There are certain things that employers can control during an economic downturn, and some  things they cannot. In her book One Foot Out the Door, Judith Bardwick discusses them both.

On the one hand, I’m not sure that companies can really do a lot about reforming our country’s health care or Social Security systems, which Bardwick writes about in Chapter 12. While the chapter’s discussion about the need for a national safety net for workers is interesting on a philosophical level, it doesn’t give employers anything practical to work with.

But the main premise of the book deals with an issue that all employers, and particularly their HR executives, can and should address—and that is what she calls “the psychological recession” that is plaguing our country’s workforce.

Bardwick, a management consultant and a former clinical professor of psychiatry, defines a psychological recession as “an emotional state in which people feel extremely vulnerable and afraid for their futures.”

Americans today feel this way for a number of reasons, according to Bardwick. First of all, the media is constantly playing a gloom-and-doom scenario, which is hard to ignore. Also, after the last market dip in 2001, many very bright, educated and experienced workers found themselves out of work and unable to find a new job. This phenomenon is particularly significant because in the U.S. there is the widely held idea that education leads to job security.

“After the 1990s bust, many of our best educated and highly skilled people could not find jobs for as long as five years,” Bardwick notes.

As a result, today’s workers are not only burdened with concerns about job security, but they’re also not particularly motivated to work hard. They no longer believe that if they are good at what they do, they will be guaranteed job security. At the same time, corporate leaders are taking fewer risks because of the economic downturn. These two factors result in U.S. companies becoming less competitive than their counterparts around the globe, Bardwick says.

“Mostly I worry because psychological insecurity has replaced psychological security for too many people,” she writes. “The American Dream, that uniquely American source of optimism, is in jeopardy.”

To address this deteriorating condition of the country’s workforce, employers need to step up their efforts to engage employees. Rather than just offering cookie-cutter menus of benefits to employees, Bardwick suggests that companies really get to know the people who work for them and ask them what their priorities are.

Bardwick provides readers with a list of priorities that organizations can provide employees to choose from, such as assignments that develop interpersonal skills, advanced professional education and access to career counselors.

Similarly, she suggests that companies figure out what kinds of rewards and recognitions their employees appreciate and make sure they comply when appropriate.

One of the most crucial ways that companies can make sure their employees are engaged and committed, however, is by hiring the right people, Bardwick says.

And to do this, companies need to look beyond candidates’ skills and experience, she says. “Regardless of education nor experience, ultimately it’s personality, values and attitudes that will determine whether or not someone will succeed,” she writes.

By focusing more on who the candidate is and not on what a candidate can do, Bardwick believes companies can make better hires who ultimately will be more committed workers.

While I agree with Bardwick that today’s workers in general don’t have the same level of trust that employees may have had 50 years ago, I am not sure that they’re so demoralized that they are jeopardizing the performance of their companies. While I am all in favor of yet one more argument to create a workplace that engages employees, I’m just not sure the situation is as dire as Bardwick contends.

Still, Bardwick’s statistics and research do indicate that companies with more engaged workers perform better than others. The problem is that anyone picking up this book probably is already in favor of that notion. It’s those executives who have little interest in the psychological state of their employees who need to read One Foot Out the Door.

In his new book, Talent on Demand, Peter Cappelli attempts to address an issue that I would hope all companies are thinking about today: how to manage the unpredictable demand for talent.

Unlike other books on talent management, this book uses terms and examples that CEOs and CFOs can understand. Instead of just talking about turnover, productivity and other HR metrics, Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, talks in terms of making money: “And making money requires that you understand the costs as well as the benefits associated with your talent management choices,” he says.

The gist of Cappelli’s book is that most companies are relying on outdated and ineffective strategies to develop their internal talent, while being way too dependent on outside hiring.

For example, many companies still use a development model for employees that assumes they will be with them for their entire careers. Under what Cappelli calls the “Organization Man” model, companies train employees to learn the skills that are specific to their business needs, with the understanding that those employees will grow with the company.

But the reality today is that companies can’t predict what their talent needs are going to be 10 years from now, and even if they could, it’s not likely that their employees will stay with them for that long.

Most employers have realized that and thus have become overly dependent on outside hiring, which has its own set of challenges.

Cappelli argues that employers should instead adopt “on-demand talent management,” which means developing employees according to competencies that could be valuable no matter where the business is in 10 years.

He advocates on-the-job training, but cautions companies against rotational assignments, because too often good talent ends up waiting on the sidelines for their rotation to come up, and nothing is more frustrating to an employee than waiting. Other ways that companies can get the most bang from their buck in on-demand training are:

• Peer training, where employees can volunteer to mentor others.
• Outside training, where organizations lend employees to outside charities or even to clients (as consulting company Mercer does) to learn from those experiences.
• Cost-shared training, where employees are asked to foot some of the bill for their outside training. One way to do this is through training wages, where employers pay employees less while they are in a training program. Another way is through tuition assistance programs, or having them go through training before they take on a job.

All of Cappelli’s points are pretty interesting, and companies should take many of them seriously.

But the real problem today with companies is that they too often give lip service to employee development, but fail to follow through. I can’t count how many times a week I hear companies say how much they value their people, that they’re the No. 1 asset, etc. But when the going gets tough, those same people are the first to get the boot.

Since we seem to be heading into a recession, I wonder whether companies will embrace Cappelli’s ideas on developing talent, or will just resort to the old ways of mass layoffs, with the hope that they will be able to find the talent again when the market picks up. What do you think?

There is a trend in business publishing of couching business lessons in parables and stories, and while it may have started with the saga of Sniff and Scurry in Who Moved My Cheese?, it certainly hasn’t stopped there.

I understand why authors use fables featuring mice, horses and even Santa Claus. Books about work can be, well, work, and anything that makes the experience more engaging, interesting or at least palatable is likely to garner more readers.

Call me a grump, but I’ll take my business books straight up, without the cutesy literary devices. If the book has real-life drama that imparts a business message, I’ll gladly read that. You may disagree with some of its conclusions, but Moneyball was a great read about talent acquisition. Likewise, you could learn a lot about ethics—or their absence—from Conspiracy of Fools.

Occasionally, novels have something to say to readers about business culture, and workforce issues specifically. Two recent examples are Company by Max Barry, and Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. Then We Came to the End will be released in paperback next month. Both books deal with highly dysfunctional organizations, and employees’ efforts to figure out how to survive in them.

The company in Company seems to sell training packages. But like the main character in the book, a newly minted MBA who is about to take a trip down the corporate rabbit hole, you’d never know that from its mission statement:

“Zephyr Holdings aims to build and consolidate leadership positions in its chosen markets, forging profitable growth opportunities by developing strong relationships between internal and external business units and coordinating a strategic, consolidated approach to achieve maximum returns for its stakeholders.”

What is really going on at Zephyr is something much more comically diabolical than that corporate doublespeak would let on. If you ever thought your employer was messing with your head as some kind of experiment, you’ll appreciate what’s afoot at Zephyr. The company’s human resources operation occupies the third floor, and since Zephyr has some odd notions about corporate culture, this means HR’s floor is actually third from the top of the building. The first floor belongs to the CEO, who seems to exist only in voice mail. Likewise, HR seems inhuman. There’s just a desk, and a calm, terrifying, disembodied voice that, when it speaks, seems to know every employee’s secrets.

Things are funny in a more realistic way at the failing Chicago advertising agency that is the setting for Then We Came to the End. Everyone is about a day away from being laid off—or, as the office lingo goes, “walking Spanish,” after a Tom Waits song and a pirate term. The anxiety levels are high. The book is told in first person plural, which seems like a gimmick at first, but you’ll find it grows on you—it’s easier than getting used to talking mice or Santa as CEO.

Few books capture a workplace’s intense, hilarious, pathetic and occasionally terrifying atmosphere as well as this one. There’s an honesty to it that cuts through all the malarkey you tend to find in the business books that offer easy answers about complex workplace issues. Take this section, on the complicated nature of a diverse workforce and the bad feelings roiling around a senior art director, Karen Woo:

“We hated Karen Woo. We hated hating Karen Woo because we feared we might be racists. The white guys, especially. But it wasn’t just the white guys. Benny, who was Jewish, and Hank, who was black, hated Karen too. Maybe we hated Karen not because she was Korean, but because she was a woman with strong opinions in a male-dominated world. But it wasn’t just the men; Marcia couldn’t stand her, and she was a woman. And Marcia loved Donald Sato, so she couldn’t be a racist. Donald wasn’t Korean, but he was Asian of some kind, and everybody liked him as much as Marcia did even though he didn’t say a whole lot.”

You won’t learn everything you need to know about managing a workforce from either book, but you’ll get some insights that you won’t find among the monkeys and other faddish mascots that populate some business books.