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.
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.
Under the contract, thousands of recruiters in cities and districts across China will use London-based MrTed’s software to better connect employers with workers in the private sector.
“For the employer, it’s a recruiting service,” says Jerome Ternynck, CEO and co-founder of MrTed. “For the employee, it’s a placement service.”
Recruiting software products such as MrTed’s TalentLink do such things as manage job requisitions, track résumés and rank applicants against job openings.
Ternynck says the project in China is focused on “talent,” which refers to a class of workers distinct from farmers and civil servants. The goal behind the software effort is to speed up the time it takes to return “talents” to employment from an average of four months to three months, Ternynck says.
Although exact terms of the contract weren’t disclosed, Ternynck says it will bring MrTed annual revenue in the seven figures in U.S. dollars. The deal amounts to a feather in the cap for MrTed. Ternynck’s firm prides itself on its global capabilities, and calls the Chinese effort the largest-ever implementation of talent acquisition software provided over the Internet.
According to U.S. government estimates, China’s urban unemployment rate was 4 percent in 2008. But if the country’s large population of migrant workers is included, the total unemployment rate may have been as high as 9 percent.
Labor unrest in China can get ugly, and potentially represents a threat to the authoritarian government. In this light, the deal with MrTed is a forward-thinking move. I’m also not aware of many other deals by government agencies along these lines. Ternynck says MrTed was tapped for a similar pilot project in France not long ago, and showed decent results. But the effort died partly because of bureaucratic infighting, he says.
If so, it wouldn’t be the first time promising technology for boosting employment was unplugged for suspect reasons. In 2007, the Bush administration killed public job board America’s Job Bank without a thorough explanation. The absence of the site hamstrung an effort at the beginning of the recession to help Americans get back to work.
Not only will more jobs restore a sense of economic stability and peace of mind to millions of out-of-work Americans, but it will also help make the nascent recovery more sustainable.
China is taking action to combat unemployment. America can too.
There’s been talk of late of the withering effects of corporations on workers’ souls.
It’s true that many jobs in corporate America are draining and can challenge one’s ethical code—telemarketing posts come to mind. And during this recession it appears many firms acted in shortsighted, callous ways that have helped kill workers’ spirits.
But I don’t think large companies are beyond redemption. In fact, the seeds of renewal are at hand for a better place to work for employees and managers alike.
Among the chief critics of the corporate workplace is Matthew Crawford. Crawford owns a motorcycle repair shop and writes about the virtues of manual labor and the moral perils of “knowledge work.”
In an essay published earlier this year in The New York Times Magazine, Crawford makes some interesting points about the way working as a mechanic prompts attentiveness, receptivity and humility. His earlier work as a writer of article abstracts and as leader of a Washington think tank, by contrast, pressured him into misrepresenting others’ ideas and fitting facts into foregone conclusions.
“Mechanical work has required me to cultivate different intellectual habits,” he wrote. “Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street.”
But many workers in modern corporations have to pay close attention to business operations or market trends to succeed. And they are keenly aware they can fail with a new software product or ad campaign or manufacturing process.
As Kelefa Sennah suggested recently in The New Yorker, a retail marketing specialist tweaking a display rack is interacting with the physical world not too differently from the way a motorcycle mechanic does. “Why shouldn’t a retail display rack count as a tool, in Crawford’s sense of the word?” Sennah writes. “It’s a physical device meant to perform a particular function, and the shop’s cash registers generate a fairly accurate record of how well it succeeds.”
The real question with work, Sennah argues, is whether it is dull and repetitive, not whether it is manual.
Crawford’s vision for work that is absorbing and meaningful, ultimately, is the same one companies have for their workers. Firms want engagement, given that passion and commitment lead to better business results.
Engagement appears to have slid during the recession. A recent report from consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide found employee engagement levels for workers overall dropped 9 percent since last year. Engagement fell close to 25 percent for top performers.
But there is still hope for corporations and workers, it seems to me. Regulatory, demographic and cultural trends are pushing firms to become more careful about job cuts, more socially responsible, more transparent, more democratic and more sustainable. Companies out ahead of these forces include Indian technology services provider HCL and online retailer Zappos.com, whose egalitarian, high-performance culture helped persuade Amazon.com to buy it.
U.S. workers themselves haven’t given up hope on companies. A recent report from staffing Randstad finds that Americans’ ideal employer cares about its employees and delivers on its promise to customers. The report also shows Americans want leaders who hold people accountable.
Caring, integrity, accountability. What workers want in organizations are soul-nourishing characteristics. Will companies fulfill those wishes?
Recent reports about workplace morale make it clearer still that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of the disposable employee.
Employees feeling more secure on the job are much more satisfied with their work, according to a study published last month by job board SnagAJob.com. The survey of about 1,000 U.S. workers found that 52 percent reported a decline in job security compared with a year ago—and of those, just 49 percent expressed happiness with their jobs. Of those who think their jobs are more secure, 70 percent say they are happy at work.
Job happiness is a close cousin to employee engagement—the commitment employees feel to their employers and how much extra effort they give. Employee engagement data in recent months has been mixed but on the whole indicates a decline. And drooping engagement weighs on the bottom line.
Earlier this year, the Corporate Executive Board said the percentage of employees showing high levels of discretionary effort had dropped from 17.2 percent in 2005 to 6.5 percent, and that the decline in engagement is decreasing overall productivity by 3 to 5 percent.
A new report from staffing firm Randstad, on its surface, finds a countervailing trend. Employee morale in the U.S. is at its highest since 2004, says the survey of about 2,200 employees and some 830 employers. What’s more, 57 percent of employees say they are loyal to their firms, up 8 percentage points from last year.
But Randstad finds rockiness amid the rah-rah. Just a quarter of employees say their companies are loyal to them. And, the report notes, a morale boost is typical in a recession.
“This isn’t really a picture of satisfaction,” the study says. In the wake of widespread layoffs, “remaining workers are happy to have their jobs, but they feel the loss of their workplace families,” the report says. “They are optimistic about their futures, but the feeling is slipping every year.”
Americans’ resiliency has been battered by three decades of firms treating employees as disposable, as author Louis Uchitelle puts it.
It’s as if workers want to love their employers, but keep getting spurned by firms fundamentally focused on short-term results in a cutthroat global economy.
It’s a testament to Americans’ hopefulness and sense of dignity that, if anything, workers want more from workplaces these days. The Randstad survey found that 80 percent of employees say their ideal employer “cares about their employees as much as their customers,” up from 66 percent last year. That was the top response, tied with “delivers on its promise to customers,” which was up 15 percentage points from last year. It seems that in the wake of fraud in the housing and financial fields, workers are putting a higher value on a firm’s integrity.
Even if we’re headed toward organizations with a smaller “core” of employees, those workers likely will perform best with a degree of job security and a culture of true respect for customers and workers.
Another way to frame the issue is to move to seeing employees as “recyclable.” That is, don’t trash them to make the quarterly numbers. Do your best to keep them, and keep helping them upgrade their skills to fit your changing business needs.
Companies hoping to thrive in the recovery ahead would do well to get out in front of the pendulum’s return. Ever more data indicates the era of the disposable employee is coming to an end.
A new picture of the economy is emerging, one that may threaten large organizations when it comes to talent.
Companies keep cutting workers during the recession, and indications are they won’t rehire many during a recovery. A report this month from consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide finds that 43 percent of firms expect a permanent decrease in staff size in three to five years compared with pre-economic crisis levels. Twenty-nine percent expect a permanent increase in staff size, and 28 percent expect no change.
Earlier this year, Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson saw an economic tectonic shift in the works. Bigger corporations, he argued, have to make bigger, riskier bets with lower payoffs. And amid fast-paced change, larger organizations are likely to become less flexible given increased regulation.
“[T]he next new economy, the one rising from the ashes of this latest meltdown, will favor the small,” Anderson wrote in May.
Many top employees could be headed to new startups. Earlier this year, the Corporate Executive Board research firm found that one in four high-potential employees plan to quit over the next 12 months. As disturbing, the report found that disengaged workers are 31 percent less likely to quit than they were in 2006.
No wonder the study found that engaging employees was the top priority for this year among global heads of HR.
What is a Global 1,000 company to do? In general, large firms will want to get their culture headed in the right direction—toward a team orientation and history-making mind-set described by authors Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright in their 2008 book Tribal Leadership.
More than a specific contract with an individual or bargaining unit, I’m talking about the overall principles that guide a firm’s relationship with employees. In the last three decades, the compact has shifted from one grounded in a degree of economic security for workers to one more about arm’s-length, transactional ties with employees. Layoffs became ubiquitous and health care and retirement risks were pushed onto employees in the quest for higher profits.
But it’s becoming clear that this treatment of workers has its limits. An employee-employer bond built for lasting success, it seems to me, would include a bias toward sustained connections, transparency, shared decision-making and concern for the “whole” worker—including their overall economic security and the well-being of their community. These principles should lead to trust, engagement, productivity and even greatness.
Creating such a 21st century connection with employees is a major undertaking. But especially if small becomes huge in the economy of tomorrow, large organizations will need to think big today.
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