Looked at one way, a raft of recent data about what employees want suggests they are hopelessly schizophrenic.

But it’s also possible to read the research as showing workers to be entirely sane—and asking for things employers either can’t fathom or don’t want to know about.

Let’s look at job security first. According to a recent Watson Wyatt Worldwide survey, job security was cited as a reason for joining an organization by 37 percent of top-performing employees, making it the second-highest-ranking reason. But research from the Corporate Executive Board indicates that once workers take a spot in a firm, organizational stability is not one of the most important drivers of employee engagement.

Indeed, employees say they want excitement. In a Salary.com study published this year, 35 percent of employees named “boredom” as a significant factor in an employee’s decision to look for a new job, enough to make it the fourth-highest factor. But Corporate Executive Board data show that employee engagement is deflated by disruptive change such as massive restructuring, and even more so by the anticipation of such change.

Employees also say they want a caring, encouraging employer. In a recent Randstad study, 80 percent of American employees said their ideal employer “cares about their employees as much as their customers,” putting that response in a tie for first place. And 75 percent of employees said that “recognizing and rewarding employee successes” was an important leadership practice.

That ranked as employees’ top answer for leadership practices. But right behind it was a nod to standards: 74 percent of employees said that “holding people accountable for their behavior” was an important leadership practice.

Given these responses, do employees collectively suffer from multiple personality disorder? I think not. Taken as a whole, what workers are getting at is a common-sense desire for a baseline of economic stability as well as a supportive yet challenging work environment.

These goals can be better understood in the context of economic and cultural trends going back 30 years. Economic risk has shifted to workers and families from business and government since the 1980s. Layoffs, pay cuts and roller coaster retirement accounts during the past year have added to the financial anxiety.

What’s more, the rise of social networking has highlighted the role others play in enabling individual success. And it’s ever clearer that a degree of predictability promotes happiness. 

Employers don’t seem to get this picture of what workers want. In the Salary.com study, only 20 percent of employers thought boredom was a significant factor in an employee’s decision to look elsewhere—a difference of 15 percentage points from employees. And in the Watson Wyatt report, job security didn’t turn up among the top five reasons employers gave for why employees join a firm.

I’d bet the disconnect is partly ideological. Many company execs adhere to a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality, downplaying the role of the group or the need for stability. It also may be that companies consciously want to avoid opening the door to an earlier era where their flexibility to hire and fire was limited.

In any event, some companies seem to be sticking their heads in the sand about security. Adam Zuckerman, a consultant with advisory firm Towers Perrin, says a lot of companies don’t ask directly about security when surveying employees. Another business consultant involved with engagement issues, Laurie Bassi, says she has talked with company leaders who didn’t want to ask their employees about job security.

“This is kind of like going to the doctor and saying, ‘I don’t want you to do that cancer test, because I just don’t want to know,’ ” Bassi says.

The attitude of denial suggests to me that business leaders, more so than workers, may need a head examination. In a world where engaged employees are increasingly critical to business success, a wise company will want to think clearly about how to win over its workforce.

Recent grim economic news amounts to a test for companies regarding their workforces.

Will firms take a short-term, panicked approach, axing people and valuable programs to shore up earnings over the next several quarters? Or will they act according to a long-term vision, where they live up to claims of treating people as “their greatest asset” even at the expense of short-term profits?

The stakes are big, and could well determine which firms emerge as the places with the most employee engagement, the best ability to attract talent and the greatest sustainable performance.

Signs of a double-dip recession or protracted downturn include the June employment situation. U.S. job losses in June outpaced those in May, reversing several months of improving payroll job declines.

It’s hard to judge how employers have handled the economic troubles so far with respect to their people. On the one hand, there’s evidence firms rushed to cut employees—72 percent of firms surveyed by consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide in April had laid off employees or otherwise reduced their workforce.

But there also are indications of sound responses. A May report from consulting firm Towers Perrin (which plans to merge with Watson Wyatt) found that 74 percent of employees agree their company’s structure facilitates efficient operations, up from 66 percent in the last quarter of 2008 and 58 percent in the first quarter of 2008, “suggesting the latest rounds of restructuring have been done thoughtfully and in a manner that doesn’t automatically demand doing more with less.” In addition, company interest in furloughs—which can preserve morale if used instead of a layoff—has grown.

Towers Perrin found that employee engagement globally held steady between the fourth quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of this year. But polling firm Gallup found a slight drop in engagement among U.S. workers between July 2008 and March 2009.

And the Corporate Executive Board research group found that the percentage of employees globally displaying high levels of discretionary effort dropped sharply between 2005 and the first quarter of 2009.

By now it’s pretty clear that engagement can be a key to company success, and a management model focused on engaged, involved employees seems likely to be the best bet for tomorrow’s fast-paced global economy.

In this light, trimming jobs from already lean firms is risky. Gallup has found that organizations with a layoff or downsizing saw the level of “actively disengaged” employees rise by 3 percentage points, to 24 percent.

It’s possible to avoid an engagement drop with a layoff, says Jim Harter, chief scientist for Gallup’s workplace management and well-being practice. Experts including Harter suggest management explain the rationale for any downsizing to employees.

Some companies may have to cut people in the coming weeks or months just to stay afloat. There are no easy answers in this ugly economy. But it may be time to suck it up and hold on to the employees that firms profess to value so highly. The long-term payoff—in engagement, in reputation and in performance—could be much bigger than the short-term pain.

Have we gone overboard with the social workplace?

I’m a big believer in teamwork and togetherness when it comes to workplace productivity and even macroeconomic policy.

But some recent books and columns have me thinking our society, and our businesses, may be paying too little attention to the importance of solitude.

Yes, Twitter, Facebook and the like can be useful tools for collaborating and communicating. Companies are tapping such social networking technologies in intriguing ways. Retailer The Gap, for example, had employees post videos about their philanthropy projects online, where workers and the public voted on the most worthy one.

But there’s a cost to too much Twittering and YouTubing. New York Times columnist John Tierney recently interviewed Winifred Gallagher, author of the new book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life.

Gallagher suggests starting the workday with a laser-like focus on your most important task for 90 minutes. It can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption, Tierney writes.

“Multitasking is a myth,” Gallagher tells Tierney. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: It’s either this or it’s that.”

David Brooks’ recent New York Times column about genius makes a related point: Excellence takes a ton of focused effort.

“The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess,” Brooks writes. “Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.”

In his book Outliers last year, author Malcolm Gladwell helped popularize a key threshold: 10,000 hours of practice appear to be needed to achieve world-class expertise.

It’s too much to think all employees will produce on the level of Mozart or Tiger Woods if they just have more practice time in their cubicles. And a key to deliberate practice is an outside eye that can correct errors and offer suggestions.

Still, it stands to reason that time for focused work will boost skills and therefore productivity.

There’s a balance to be found here. My cubicle in a small, quiet office in San Francisco lacks the energetic pulse of bustling newsrooms, which helped propel my work at previous jobs. But my writing now benefits from minimal office distractions—a state I’ve sought to preserve online by severely limiting my use of Twitter and Facebook.

Amid the all the interactivity of instant messages, Tweets and e-mail alerts, employees—and ultimately employers—can benefit from quality quiet alone time.

SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard continues to be a larger-than-life personality.

Dalgaard’s move late last year to dramatically downsize his HR software firm was on par with the company’s super-sized spending on sales and marketing in recent years.

And his comments about the cuts have been at turns callous toward those losing jobs and refreshingly contrite.

In a recent interview, Dalgaard told me that expanding SuccessFactors’ headcount as quickly as he did was, in retrospect, misguided.

“I blame myself,” he said last month. “I am the one who made a mistake.”

Amid the quickly deteriorating economy, SuccessFactors’ headcount fell by 173 people in the fourth quarter of 2008, from 769 to 596. The 22.5 percent reduction is much deeper than the typical corporate downsizing. Even in this dreary business climate, firms generally don’t lop off more than 10 percent of their employees.

The scale of SuccessFactors’ cut raised eyebrows about whether the action would hurt the quality of its people management software or the level of service it provides customers. Dalgaard, though, said customer service was untouched, and the engineering capacity remained as strong as ever. The layoffs, he said, focused on areas including sales and marketing and new software implementations.

It also seems on the surface that San Mateo, California-based SuccessFactors may have violated California’s WARN Act. That law, which is tougher than the federal WARN Act, applies to establishments with 75 or more employees, and requires employers to give affected employees and government officials 60 days’ notice in advance of a plant closing or mass layoff. A layoff of 50 or more employees within a 30-day period, regardless of the percentage of the workforce involved, generally triggers the rule.

California records show SuccessFactors did not give notice of a layoff.

Dalgaard said SuccessFactors avoided violating the state law. He indicated that the cuts were made in a piecemeal way over time, as the economy worsened. “We were taking out people every week of the quarter,” he said. Also, the company said, not all of the cuts were made in California, and some people left the firm voluntarily.

SuccessFactors declined to say how many people were laid off from the San Mateo headquarters in the fourth quarter of 2008. It also declined to say how many employees currently work in that location, saying it has never broken out headcount by geography.

Even if Dalgaard and crew carried out the downsizing legally, the move initially carried a whiff of the way the firm shifted blame to its workers in the course of reducing its headcount by dozens of people in early 2008. At that time, the company terminated workers in conjunction with the chopping of a type of business group, but claimed the move was not a layoff . Instead, SuccessFactors portrayed the action as axing low performers.

Dalgaard has acknowledged laying off workers at the end of 2008. But in a February 9 conference call with analysts, he suggested those cut loose were less-deserving employees.
 
He noted that SuccessFactors used its own Stack Ranker product—designed to “quickly identify low performers to let go during difficult times”—in the layoff.

“Did we cut into any of the A-players?” Dalgaard asked rhetorically in the call. “And the fact is, we did not. And so that’s kind of the key. You are left with the absolute top performers.”

Later, he added: “I think the morale is … spectacular because these are a bunch of winners that really want to go and change the way the world works for a living.”

It may not be a new practice for businesses to try to shed poor performers during a downturn. But Dalgaard’s comments effectively rubbed it in for those laid-off SuccessFactors employees. And it’s not clear the claim about “A-players” is accurate.

Terrance Seto was cut late last year as part of the trim, after about a year and a half at SuccessFactors. Seto, who worked to configure product demonstrations, said that earlier in the year he had gotten a handwritten letter from Dalgaard praising him as one of the top performers in the firm.

Seto criticizes the way SuccessFactors hired so rapidly earlier in 2008—it added about 75 people between the end of March and the end of September—only to lay off many workers at the end of the year.

“It’s kind of disrespectful to the employees,” he says.

Seto also wishes the company would admit it erred in growing so fast.

Such a confession was not to be seen in SuccessFactors’ press release about fourth-quarter results or during the related conference call with analysts. The company portrayed the headcount haircut as a wise, if difficult, move that was part of a shift from “hyper” growth mode to a more moderate growth mode.

But in my recent interview with Dalgaard and Dominic Paschel, the firm’s director of public and investor relations, the tune changed some. They conceded that good people were lost in the reduction. And Dalgaard showed a rare willingness among corporate executives to admit a mistake and take personal responsibility for it.

“I feel like a total loser for having to take the cut,” he said. “That was the worst thing I’ve had to do in my life.”

I’ve appreciated the way Dalgaard combines the ambitious capitalism of his adopted America and the socially minded humanism of his native Denmark. For better and for worse, both those qualities were on display in this downsizing. It’s the latest incident in which Dalgaard has seized the spotlight. And I suspect there are more to come.

Here’s one way companies can avert public relations problems associated with layoffs: disclose, disclose, disclose.

As it stands, employers often are not forced by law to admit when they engage in modern layoffs—of the 5 to 15 percent of headcount variety. California is a rare exception, with its notification law triggered by a layoff of just 50 employees.

But in an era of Facebooking, Twittering and other forms of electronic self-expression, stories about job cuts are going to be told.

“There’s no ability for a company to control the message like they used to,” Jennifer Benz, a San Francisco-based communications consultant, told me recently.

She points to Telonu.com, a site that welcomes stories of layoffs. At Glassdoor.com and Vault.com, ex-employees also are invited to talk about their old firms.

The New York Times recently reported on some 4,600 North American job cuts at IBM.

“The cutbacks surfaced only because of their size and timing, with word spread through blogs, employee message boards and [union group],” the Times said.

I, for one, back an idea raised in the article: requiring large corporations to annually report employment country by country.

“All our multinational companies are increasingly less American, except when they are asking for tax breaks and increased government spending in their industries,” Ross Eisenbrey, a researcher at the labor-leaning Economic Policy Institute, is quoted as saying. “Knowing where their employment really is would be useful information for policymaking.”

Whether that rule ever comes to pass, smart firms are getting in front of this issue. They’re disclosing their cuts and explaining them. Examples include online retailer Zappos.com and software giant SAP.

The public may not love hearing about more job-loss woes. But people—who include potential customers and future employees—will be much more sympathetic to the transparent company than the one whose layoffs only surface when angry ex-workers vent.