The American economy might be recovering, but the Americans themselves aren't feeling the satisfaction.
A new poll released today by Gallup, based upon the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, found that 87.5 percent of workers were content with their jobs in April. And while that's up from the low of 86.9 percent in July and August of last year, it remains below the peak reached in February 2008, when 89.4 percent of workers said they themselves were satisfied with their job.
If there were something you could add to your car's engine, so that after driving it a hundred miles, you'd end up with more gas in the tank than you started with, wouldn't you use it?
Even if nothing like that exists for your car just yet, there is something you can give your employees that will have the same effect ... interesting work.
Now I know what you're thinking. "Finding your work interesting is nice, but the work has to get done, interesting or not." This is the attitude many managers take when they hear complaints from employees about work being too boring, tedious, or difficult. As if interest is a luxury - something that is pleasant but unnecessary, like little chocolates on your hotel pillow.
Interest in work is not a luxury--it is a powerful motivator. In fact, research shows that finding what you do interesting and believing it has inherent value is probably the single best way to stay motivated despite difficulty, setbacks, and unexpected roadblocks.
But as they say in the infomercials, that's not all. A new set of studies shows that interest doesn't just keep you going despite fatigue, it actually replenishes your energy.
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It started when the baby rolled off and under the bed when she was in the shower getting ready to go to work. It got worse when the nanny couldn’t figure out how to e-mail her a photo of a nasty cut on her toddler son’s chin.
Then, when she was passed over for promotion for the second time because her boss didn’t think she could handle the job and her “family responsibilities,” Jennifer Folsom, an Alexandria consultant with an MBA from Georgetown, had had it. She quit, joining a small but persistent stream of educated, upper-income women who drop out of the workforce when they find they simply can’t have it all when it comes to work and family.
But Folsom didn’t opt out for long. She joined a fledgling recruiting and placement company and turned her prodigious energy toward helping mothers like her to “opt in” — to find fulfilling work in their own time and on their own terms.
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AMERICA'S recovery has not been an easy one for workers. For months, the economy expanded without doing much at all to create jobs and bring down unemployment. And recently, the economy has shown signs of faltering yet again, raising the possibility that in 2011 recovery would once more fail to bring meaningful gains to workers.
The Bureau of Labour Statistics has given American workers a big reason to hope, however. This morning, the BLS released payroll employment numbers that show a labour market growing progressively stronger. American firms added 244,000 jobs in April, and the private sector added 268,000. Payroll figures for February and March were both revised upward. Over the past three months private-sector employment has risen by an average of over 250,000 jobs per month.
Since the employment bottom in February of 2010, the economy has added 1.8m jobs and the private sector has added 2.1m. Most of those jobs were created in the past year, and about a third of them in the last three months. This is not yet the hiring pace one would hope to see after so deep a recession—there are still 13.7m unemployed workers and nonfarm employment remains nearly 7m jobs below the pre-recession peak. But this is better than anything the American economy has seen in years. The last time the private sector added this many jobs in a month was February of 2006—more than five years ago.
Read the full story: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/05/americas_labour_market
Title: Driven by Social Comparisons: How Feedback about Coworkers’ Effort Influences Individual Productivity (PDF)
Authors: Francesca Gino (Harvard Business School) and Bradley R. Staats (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Publisher: Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 11-078
Date Published: February 2011
This paper examines the impact of performance reviews on productivity, and finds that feedback delivered on a regular basis, whether positive or negative, tends to result in improved performance. On a short-term basis, though, the impact varies, sometimes in ways that are counterintuitive: Positive reviews, for example, do little to boost productivity, and negative reviews that are somewhat vague and indirect cause performance to fall off, but reviews that are directly negative cause productivity to leap. The research offers guidance to managers concerning the pitfalls and potential benefits in framing their messages in reviews, and suggests there is a need to provide feedback on a frequent basis.
In an ideal scenario, employees would be evaluated through the use of objective standards, but as the researchers point out, in organizational settings this is rarely possible. Instead, the very nature of performance feedback promotes what they call social comparison processes, as employees are informed about their performance relative to that of their co-workers. In this study, employees were not told their exact ranking, or that of their co-workers, but were informed where they stood in relation to either the “bottom 10” or “top 10” in terms of productivity.
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The U.S. economic recovery continued to chug along as employers added jobs for a third-straight month of strong growth.
The economy created a robust 244,000 jobs in April across a wide range of industries, according to a Labor Department report Friday. Gains in private-sector hiring — 268,000 jobs — were especially encouraging, although the number was offset slightly by jobs lost in state and local governments.
The government also said job growth in previous months was even stronger than first reported, revising its February figures to 235,000 new jobs from 194,000 and March numbers to 221,000 from an initial report of 216,000.
Some analysts forecast that the strong growth will result in a lower unemployment rate in the near term, despite the fact that a separate report showing that the jobless rate edged up to 9 percent last month from 8.8 percent in March as more people began looking for work.
Retailers led the way in hiring, with 57,000 jobs. Factories and financial companies also showed gains, as did the education, health care and even construction sectors — one of the worst-hit by the long and painful recession, according to survey data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The figures signal an improvement in business confidence despite weak growth earlier this year and soaring gas prices that have weighed on consumers and threatened to put the brakes on the recovery. Most analysts agree the economy has strengthened enough to keep growing this year.
In a nutshell, it's because they don't have much choice.
The bright spot in a drab employment picture is that workers have been stretched so thin during the past couple years that companies are going to have to (gasp!) hire more.
You may be understandably suspicious. Corporate America has been raking in massive profits – they flooded in at a record $1.68 trillion annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2010 – with unemployment near 9%. Initial jobless claims are rising again after falling for much of 2010, yet the stock market is just short of record levels. Do companies really want to change this picture by hiring people and paying them and stuff?
The answer is they may have no alternative. The hiring picture is improving largely because the productivity gains that drove the profit rebound and the rip-roaring stock market rally of the past two years are petering out.
Is it possible that the traditional office worker has the most dangerous job in America?
Consider the following studies that found sitting for extended periods is hazardous to your health. In 2007, Dr. Rikke Krogh-Madsen, a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre of Inflammation and Metabolism in Copenhagen, decided to test the effects of a sedentary lifestyle. To do this, the doctor culled together a group of nonsmoking, healthy men in their twenties. Before the study began, Krogh-Madsen split the men into two groups: Those who walked on average 6,000 steps per day and those who averaged around 10,000. Then, over the next two weeks, she forced them all to reduce their walking routines—by sitting more often—to 2,000 steps per day.
The result? Both groups had a 60 percent increase in the amount of insulin circulating in their blood, as well as an increase in heart disease risk factors, including a seven percent average increase in abdominal fat. "It is amazing that only two weeks of reduced stepping can induce numerous metabolic abnormalities," Dr. Rikke Krogh-Madsen told U.S. News & World Report.
Read the full story: http://www.inc.com/articles/0502/Action-Tips-for-Healthy-Employees.html
In a speech last week to Facebook employees, President Obama discussed the role immigrant entrepreneurs play in U.S. economic competitiveness. "We want more Andy Groves here in the United States," he told the crowd, touching on the Hungarian-born entrepreneur's startup success. "We don't want them starting Intel in China or starting it in France."
Sadly, our President didn't back his words with action. He simply said he would support "comprehensive immigration reform," which is legislation that has no chance of passing. This is because it tries to fix all the problems with immigration at the same time. Most Americans will support legislation to admit more doctors, scientists, and entrepreneurs, but they are deeply divided on the issue of amnesty for illegal immigrants. So we're in a messy stalemate.
Our leaders don't seem to understand the urgency of the situation. They fail to recognize how much the world has changed. Entrepreneurs see abundant opportunities in places like India and China now. The world's best and brightest can stay home and achieve as much success as they could in the U.S. Skilled workers who immigrated to the U.S. are optimistic about these opportunities; many are headed back home.
Read the complete story on MSNBC
Does this mean the U.S. may be heading for a skilled worker shortage? Let us know your thoughts.
The nonprofit Partnership for Public Service and The Washington Post’s On Leadership site produce the Federal Coach, hosted by Tom Fox, director of the partnership’s Center for Government Leadership.
The goal is to “engage, inspire and learn from you, the federal worker, whether you are a new hire, a contractor or a manager at the highest level.”
Most people know how to behave in the workplace, but there are always outliers who are aggressive or quirky, or who have never figured out the acceptable social norms.
Recently, a colleague shared a rather bizarre story of a federal employee who would burp in the face of a colleague or manager when given a task he didn’t want to perform. Even though the employee’s job performance was fully satisfactory, people complained about this behavior and saw it as mocking and a sign of deliberate disrespect.
Although this seems like a scene out of the television comedy “Parks and Recreation,” uncomfortable issues arise in offices across the country every day.
For example, a search on the phrase “body odor in the workplace” on Google yielded more than 85,000 articles and blog entries. From improper attire to offensive e-mails, inappropriate office behavior comes in many forms.
Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules on how to deal with awkward and embarrassing situations. Even though it can be tricky, you need to confront unusual behavior quickly, because it may be hurting your team’s morale and ability to do work.
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