The Work-More Economy

While politicians and pundits fret about unemployment and underemployment rates, growing numbers of employees are under pressure to do more. And the situation threatens not just workers’ sanity but companies’ long-term success. To read more about the “work-more” economy, click here.

By Ed Frauenheim

Employers are demanding more and employees are engaging less, but there is one way to keep your best workers from checking out completely—recognizing who they are and rewarding them accordingly. To read more about rewarding your employees, click here.

By Rita Pyrillis

A promotion can do a lot to make up for the longer hours and extra duties that many workers have been wrestling with in the past couple of years. But firms often fail to see where employees who are learning on the job might fit into a new role. To read more about employees fitting into new roles, click here.

By Ed Frauenheim

Like Charlie Chaplin’s character in the comedy Modern Times, about an assembly-line worker who loses it after tightening one bolt too many, HR consultant Art Quinn says that when employees are pushed to their limits, the workplace can be a dehumanizing place. To read more about the current workplace atmosphere, click here.

By Rita Pyrillis

Scholars say employees have a reservoir of physical and psychological resources for fueling their work contributions—and those tanks are running low. To read more about the low-on-fuel employees, click here.

By Ed Frauenheim

Software: A variety of talent management software tools can help companies tackle questions related to worker burnout and disengagement. Applications that encourage managers and workers to set goals and make career plans can help rekindle employee commitment. Vendors selling such performance and career management tools include Halogen Software Inc., SuccessFactors Inc. and Taleo Corp. These applications can make it easy to connect employee goals with the broader organizational objectives—a capability called “cascading goals.”

Succession planning and recruiting software tools that help match internal candidates with open positions also can benefit the company as well as fire up employees—who often are itching to get a promotion given the extra work they’re doing. Increasingly, applications from talent management vendors are allowing workers to update their own employee profiles. That makes it more likely that internal searches will capture the latest skills and accomplishments of employees.

Website: Glassdoor.com. This workplace feedback site may be able to tell you if you’re working your employees too hard. Employees or ex-employees have left anonymous reviews on more than 100,000 organizations at Glassdoor. Workers have to give positive as well as negative comments, so the site encourages balanced assessments.