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  • Employee Attitudes in the Economic Recovery: Take This Job …

Business Strategy

12 Jan 2010

Employee Attitudes in the Economic Recovery: Take This Job …

  • By Bill Conerly
  • In Business Strategy, Economy
  • 1 comment

I always loved listening to Johnny Paycheck sing Take This Job and Shove It.  Now some workers are actually saying that.  Here's the number of quits in the entire economy:

Quits
Quits are still well down from the boom days, but the latest news suggests that there will be more to come.  In the recession, managers can get sloppy without losing workers.  It's not that the managers are inherently bad (most of them, anyway), but that they became preoccupied with cash flow and business survival.  The often did not recognize that their staff were stressed out, worried, and maybe angry and resentful.

As the economy improves, business leaders need to make employee relations a higher priority.  Employees will have more choices, and more of them will quit.  Most quits are not about pay and benefits so much as about feeling valued and respected.  So here's the agenda for managers and small business owners:

  • Thank employees for their efforts in general
  • Recognize specific employee achievements
  • Acknowledge that the work environment has been difficult
  • Acknowledge that management has been preoccupied with corporate survival
  • As business earnings improve, evaluate how to boost compensation.  Perhaps reinstating old benefits that were suspended in the recession is not the best strategy; this is a time when old benefits can be replaced with new benefits.
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    Comments

  1. Dennis Snow
    January 18, 2010

    Bill,
    Great post. A couple of other suggestions for supporting employees during lean times:
    – Provide specific training that helps employees improve productivity – Training on time management, dealing with difficult customers, effectively using the capabilities of current technology, stress management, etc. are all options that, while not making the increased workload go away, help employees to deal with it.
    – Provide new tools or adapt old ones to set employees up for success – A simple revamp of the work schedule, for example, is sometimes all it takes to make sure that you have optimum coverage at crunch times. While work schedule changes can cause employee frustration, I find that most employees are even more frustrated when staffing levels don’t align with actual workload fluctuations.
    All the best,
    Dennis Snow

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