Data Dome Workforce Trends and Assessments

Approximately 32% of a worker’s desire to stay or go is the result of feeling or not feeling trust towards their boss. An employee’s longevity with a company directly correlates with how much they trust their immediate manager or boss. The extent to which an employee trusts their direct boss directly relates to their desire to spend their career with a company.

People tend to trust their direct boss a bit more than they trust top management.

• 34% of people strongly trust their direct boss.


• 35% moderately trust their direct boss.


• The remaining 31% range from not trusting to strongly distrusting their direct boss.

• Only 20% of people strongly trust the top management of their organization.
• 36% moderately trust their top management.


• The remaining 44% range from not trusting to strongly distrusting their top management.

Specific trust issue predictors for employee loyalty and retention:

1. By far the most important factor is that their direct boss responds constructively when employees share a work-related problem (26% of wanting to stay or go).


2. The direct boss makes smart decisions (adds another 3%).


3. The direct boss is honest and truthful (adds another 2%).


4. The direct boss helps employees grow and develop professionally (adds another 1%).


5. Employees receive consistent direction from their immediate supervisor.

[Data from the Leadership IQ organizational trust study, which polled 7,209 executives, managers and employees.]

How do you find out whether your managers meet these predictive factors? Ask the people who report directly to them! Ask your employees specific questions, using a third party survey provider that can provide complete anonymity (Many employees, understandably, will not provide honest – useful – information unless they can be sure that their answers cannot be held against them in the workplace). Data Dome provides surveys to assess all aspects of organizational culture vitality, and trending surveys are also available, so that you can validate successful changes.

How do you hire and develop trustworthy managers that will fulfill the terms of these predictive factors? Use the proper validated assessments as part of your hiring process. Run 360-degree surveys to get the complete picture on their performance (make sure that survey questions are specific and validated). Invest in professional development and communication training.

How can you build trust toward top management? Communicate your vision better, include bottom-up on-the-ground information insights in the planning process. Make sure that employees understand how they fit into the organization and how they affect the bottom line.

If, in fact, your employees are correct to mistrust top management, it is long past time to confront and reshape the ethical values of the organization. Your top resource is the talent that drives the business and enables it to thrive and grow. As the skilled workforce shortage has an increasing impact, you’re going to need to be able to attract the best talent – and to do so in a much more competitive environment.

Salary Search is a new resource to determine the full range of salaries a job position is commanding – all the way from the top 10th to the bottom 10th percentile. Offered by the Compensation wing of Business and Legal Reports (BLR), it currently offers information on 2400 job titles.

“We have been collecting compensation information from thousands of companies each year for decades,” says BLR’s founder and CEO Robert L. Brady, “But previously we issued this data only in a lengthy report exclusively for employers. SalarySearch.com is a logical new use of this massive database.”

An employer or employee can receive one free salary report.

“This information helps employers know they’re paying competitively so they can acquire and retain the best talent, but without overpaying,” notes Baker. “Meanwhile, jobseekers and current employees know what to ask in job applications, performance reviews, and salary increase discussions. So when the boss says, ‘what are you looking for?,’ workers can back up their answer with comparative data.”

A preliminary report issued by the Conference Board has found that non-profits – whose growth is currently outpacing the rest of the economy – will likely be hit hard by the talent shortage just when it needs talent the most.

The demographic of the retiring baby-boomers affects almost all sectors, but executive-level and leadership skill shortages are already disproportionately affecting service sectors such as healthcare and social services. As non-profits grow, there are fewer skilled people to step up to the plate.

The Conference Board report suggests that non-profits need to invest more than they have in human resource management, and in developing younger leaders.

We would add that in addition to internal professional development, non-profits also need tools to identify talent from the start – and to employ effective strategies to retain the talent that they have developed.

An amusing spoof article on workforce trends at The Spoof:

A six-year study by industrial psychologists, the first of its kind, reveals that inspirational posters in company cafeterias and employee lounges cause depression among workers and may trigger homicidal rages.

...

Inspirational posters in the workplace became popular in the 80’s as globalization first began to exert downward pressure on U.S. wages and benefits. “You don’t need them if you’re having a layoff because then people are motivated by fear,” says Flynn. “It’s when you’re grinding people down with nothing but a cost-of-living increase that you need to buck their spirits up.”

The posters lost some of their effectiveness as they became a common fixture in plants and offices across the country, forcing designers to refine their message. “’Hang in there, baby!’ was a classic in its time,” says Carole Connolly of Workplace Solutions, a Cleveland benefits consulting firm, referring to a widely-used posting depicting a kitten clinging desperately to a tree limb. “We refocus that image for particular situations, such as loss of health insurance, so people are thankful they still have a job at all.”

The U.S. Postal Service, which has experienced some of the worst workplace violence in American history, has gone so far as to ban inspirational posters altogether. ...

Copyright 2007, Con Chapman

Depression has the single largest negative effect on productivity and healthcare costs, according to a study conducted by pharmaceutical company Eli Lily. This effect is magnified when depression is accompanied by fatigue, sleep problems, anxiety, and other co-factors.

Among the most prevalent physical and mental conditions, depression had the largest negative effect on overall work performance, followed by fatigue, anxiety, chronic sleeping problems, obesity. Painful conditions also had large effects. However, when the effect of each condition was examined while controlling for comorbid depression, the independent effect of the condition was diminished. This suggests that the other conditions examined in this study have their biggest impact on work performance when they occur with depression.

At one of the companies, depression in the absence of anxiety or fatigue/sleep disturbance was associated with a 3.5 percent reduction in the presenteeism score, equivalent to seven to eight full-time workdays per year. Depression with anxiety or fatigue/sleep disturbance was associated with larger negative effects (6-8 percent reduction in average presenteeism score), and having depression with both anxiety and fatigue/sleep problems was associated with a 13.2 percent reduction.

Employees experiencing depression had average annual costs in excess of both employer sample averages ($4,132 and $3,504 compared to $3,286 and 2,653, respectively). Employees who reported experiencing fatigue or sleep problems with depression had significantly higher average annual costs than those with depression alone ($6,665 and $5,306). (All results noted above statistically significant, p<0.05). Although having anxiety with depression was associated with lower rating of work performance, direct healthcare costs were not significantly different from costs of employees with depression alone.

We have a vague idea of the solutions that Eli Lily might recommend.

I wonder how they would have ruled other factors (workplace conflicts, caregiving commitments, other medical conditions, etc.) to make the claim that depression affects productivity and healthcare costs more than anything else?