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Corner Office, with a Side of Employee Disdain
While many treated Oct. 16 as just another Friday, it actually marked the passage of National Boss Day -- perhaps the most notorious of the Hallmark holidays on the calendar. For employees, it gets them thinking about their bosses making higher salaries, driving nicer cars and sitting in nicer offices. For bosses it's not much better. The idea of herding the troops into the conference room for cake and soft drinks in honor of themselves can't sound too appetizing. It's possibly a move that only Michael Scott (Steve Carell) from The Office could pull off. It's not surprising the holiday hasn't really caught on. Most employees hold a low opinion of their bosses, at least according to the results of the American Insights Workplace Survey by Melville, N.Y.-based Adecco Group North America. More than half (53 percent) of those surveyed say their boss is dishonest, and the same amount say their boss is unfair. Others described bosses as impatient (58 percent), disloyal (66 percent) and lacking motivational skills (76 percent). These numbers are staggering, given that nearly all (89 percent) say the employee/boss relationship is one of the most important links to job satisfaction. And this year's results are no different than workplace surveys taken in other years, says Joanie Ruge, senior vice president of Adecco Group North America. All employees ask themselves three questions when starting a new job, she says: Is my boss competent? Can I trust them? And, do they care about me? "Throughout a good economy, a bad economy, a new job and old job, they're going to be asking those three things pretty consistently," she says. "We need bosses to realize and leaders to realize that those are the traits [employees] are looking for and they need to demonstrate those traits. People that demonstrate those traits have the highest retention rates across the board." But HR executives are often rolling out new initiatives to train effective managers. So why haven't they worked? "Bosses, in general, have taken their eye off the ball," says Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York. "The assumption over the last 18 months during this Great Recession is that you needn't pay attention to your people, your talent. They have to sit tight and deliver their all because they don't have any alternative. Well that's not true." To keep their people happy without breaking the bank, Hewlett suggests a greater emphasis on inexpensive recognition, rewarding people with time instead of money or offering workers the chance to give back to the community. "The way you get out of recession is by innovation, by brain power, by your people delivering 110 percent," says Hewlett, who authored Top Talent: Keeping Performance Up When Business is Down. "This is a knowledge economy and if you can't nurture your people and stick around and fire on all six cylinders, you really are dead in the water." Sunny Claggett, corporate vice president of talent management and organizational development at Cleveland-based CBIZ, Inc., says that the solution to this attitude problem is simple: If managers want their people to think they're honest, loyal and trustworthy, they've got to act honest, loyal and trustworthy. She says HR leaders can play a big role in helping their managers achieve those standards by providing continuous employee feedback. "When that data comes back to a manager, she or he can't run and hide from it," says Claggett. "It's statistically valid; it's coming from the people who they impact most." The recession certainly hasn't made it easy to be a boss. They are supervising employees whose morale has been shaken by salary freezes and by watching their co-workers get laid off. "They feel like maybe their bosses aren't telling them everything about the company's financial position ... ," says Ruge. Many bosses also seem to believe that workers should be happy just to have a job in this economic climate, and their actions sometimes display that attitude. "Right now, employee satisfaction is on the decline," Ruge says. "We're seeing a pattern here that people aren't that happy with." To combat the problem and get people to feel better about their bosses, Hewlett says it's important to increase the engagement levels of top talent. She cites the Action Learning Forum program at Cisco Systems Inc., where the San Jose, Calif.-based company brought together its best people for a competition that rewarded employees of innovative ideas with venture-capital funds to develop the ideas. Along with the wealth-generating ideas, retention is stable, with 20 percent of the 360 participants so far becoming promoted and just two percent of AFL alumni leaving the company, according to Hewlett. "Companies need to continue to invest in their teams, in their people development, in their leadership-training programs," she says, "and not just think that they can economize on those fronts."
November 9, 2009 Copyright 2009© LRP Publications |
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