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?
The latest reading on employer reactions to the recession brings more mixed results.
While most organizations are maintaining or increasing their workplace flexibility, creative cost-cutting efforts that can preserve morale—and ultimately profits—appear to have gotten short shrift, according to a new report from the Families and Work Institute.
The study of 400 U.S. employers finds that 81 percent of organizations have maintained their workplace flexibility options, and an additional 13 percent have increased them. Only 6 percent have reduced such programs.
In addition, 26 percent of employers say they have used flexible workplace options to minimize the need to lay off employees.
Still, layoffs have been common, according to the report, which involved surveying organizations with 50 or more employees in May. Just over three-quarters of employers have taken at least one step to cut labor and operational costs in the past year, and of them 64 percent reported layoffs.
Layoffs may be necessary and smart in some situations. But they also risk hurting a company’s esprit de corps. Polling firm 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.
Given the connection between engagement and business success, it’s disconcerting that companies haven’t worked harder to hold on to workers. Just 19 percent of organizations cutting costs in the past 12 months tried increasing telecommuting to save on occupancy costs, for example. Twenty-two percent increased their use of compressed workweeks, which also can limit occupancy expenses. And just 27 percent reduced pay.
The same goes for reduced hours. It’s hard to get a sense for how widely companies have been trimming hours from the Families and Work Institute report. It finds that among employers cutting costs in the past 12 months, 29 percent have tapped voluntary reductions in hours, and 28 percent have used involuntary cutbacks. But the categories weren’t mutually exclusive. And the institute doesn’t provide a figure for the total percentage of firms using some form of reduced hours as a cost-cutting strategy.
Overall, the new report adds to a muddy picture of employer actions and employee engagement during the recession. Further complicating the situation, morale isn’t just a function of company practices. It is shaped also by broader trends around opportunity, security and risk for workers in America—meaning health care reform and the overall economic health of the country and world play a role.
Still, there’s a consistent message for employers: Those organizations that treat workers well in these tough times likely will be among the leaders as the economy picks up.
A recent essay in the liberal-left magazine The Nation makes a bold proposal: The federal government should create a grand strategy to get nearly every American a job. Does such a full-employment policy deserve the backing of businesses?
This idea merits at least some consideration from the corporate world. After all, one of its authors is a former captain of industry—Leo Hindery Jr., who served as CEO of AT&T Broadband.
Hindery’s co-author is Donald Riegle Jr., a former U.S. senator from Michigan.
Hindery and Riegle say the nation’s economic priority ought to be creating 24 million jobs so virtually every American interested in working can find employment and the economy can reverse course.
“The right way to earn our way back to long-term prosperity is through stimulus efforts that will help develop, broadly deploy, fairly compensate and, especially, fully employ our human capital, which will always be our greatest source of national wealth,” they write.
Part of their argument is that the official unemployment rate dramatically understates the extent of a job shortage in the U.S. While the official unemployment rate was 8.5 percent in March, a broader Department of Labor measurement of labor “underutilization” indicates the situation is nearly twice as bad. The so-called “U-6” figure adds in people who want full-time work but had to settle for a part-time schedule and “marginally attached workers,” who aren’t working or looking for work but who want and are available for a job and have looked for work in the recent past. The U-6 rate was 15.6 percent in March.
Pointing to the country’s still-skimpy safety net and Hooverville-like tent cities emerging around the nation, Hindery and Riegle say the billions being funneled into the financial sector bailout and first stimulus package aren’t up to the task of getting Americans back to work.
A second stimulus package should focus on employment, they argue. Among their specific proposals are several that business leaders—especially the leaders of multinational firms—are unlikely to like. These include passing the Employee Free Choice Act designed to make unionization easier and a strong “Buy American” requirement for federal government purchases.
On the other hand, business leaders probably can appreciate the authors’ call for tax incentives for business investments in such things as new laboratories, innovative products and manufacturing equipment. Also appealing to the business crowd should be Hindery and Riegle’s push for more public investment in infrastructure, improved trade adjustment assistance, additional aid to state and local governments and expanded job training for young people in skills such as advanced welding and computerized machine tool operation.
They also say the government ought to help create millions of jobs for American adults, in part through a new program that emulates the best of New Deal initiatives—the Works Progress Administration and Tennessee Valley Authority.
“None of the actions we call for will be easy to accomplish, nor will they come cheap. Yet we need all of them so that American workers can be fully employed in jobs that pay fair wages. We need them to rebuild, and sustain, the great commercial engines that fostered the broad American middle class of the past century and underpinned the global prosperity of the past quarter-century. We need them to bring an end to America’s sorry status as the world’s largest debtor nation. And we need them for our national and economic security.”
Yes, Hindery and Riegle’s “Jobs Solution” runs the risk of bureaucratic waste and higher corporate taxes in the long term. And companies historically have feared full employment for the bargaining clout it gives workers. But businesses rely on healthy consumers, who ultimately are just workers wearing a different hat. Given the dead-end nature of growth fueled by consumer debt, decent jobs for average Americans is the way forward for both workers and firms. A full-employment economy, in other words, may be the best solution out there for employers.
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