DataDome Blog

The U.S. Census Bureau has begun launching its report series on older (55+) workers in 31 states, based on data from the Local Employment Dynamics (LED) program.

• The first report, The Geographic Distribution and Characteristics of Older Workers in Iowa: 2004 [PDF], highlights the age composition of the state’s work force, job gains and losses for older workers by industry, industries in which older workers are concentrated and their job stability and earnings. Get the pdf report.
• Second wave: Maine, Vermont, Arkansas, Hawaii and Indiana.
• Third wave: Maryland, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky and South Carolina.
• Fourth wave: Alabama, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia.
• Fifth wave: California.

Check out the online tools from LED, too.

QWI (Quarterly Workforce Indicators) shows 8 economic indicators: total employment, net job flow, job creation, number of new hires, separations, turnover and average monthly earnings for all workers and new hires. Each indicator combines wage information with demographic data to use as a measure of a local area’s workforce and economy.

Industry Focus allows users to identify the leading industries for an area, focus on a particular industry to see how it ranks among top industries, and view graphs and charts of worker characteristics within industries. Users can analyze industries by state, county, workforce investment or metro area based on eight workforce indicators.

On the Map is a Web-based mapping tool that shows where people live in relation to where they work. It includes reports on age, earnings, industry distribution and local workforce indicators.

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According to an FDS International study of work attitudes across 23 countries, and including nearly 14,000 workers, the United States ranks 4th in “whiney” workers. A “whiney worker” is unhappy and/or demanding about pay, actual income relative to cost of living, average number of weekly work hours, and work impinging on their private life.

Here’s the lineup.

1. France
2. United Kingdom (tie)
3. Sweden (tie)
4. United States
5. Australia (tie)
6. Portugal (tie)
7. Canada(tie)
8. Greece(tie)
9. Poland
10. Germany (tie)
11. Spain (tie)

Where are the “least whiney” workers? Ireland, the Netherlands and Thailand.

The Netherlands has the highest morale, and Irish and Thai workers rank second. Japan has the lowest.

Russian workers were most likely to complain about their pay (61%), compared to 43% of Chinese workers, 40% of British workers, and 38% of American workers who expressed dissatisfaction with their compensation. Workers in Ireland and the Netherlands were least likely to complain about their pay.

British workers are demanding about holidays; despite having 33.5 leave days and public holidays.
Only 13% of Irish workers whine about holidays, despite having fewer of them.

“…after France, Britain, and Sweden, the world’s biggest workplace whiners are Americans, despite their having by far the highest levels of income relative to their cost of living. Compare them to Thai workers: while real levels of income are more eight times higher in the United States, more workers in the US feel their pay is a problem than in Thailand.”

(via HR BLR)

Observations:

They weren’t shy on the value judgment of people who participated in the study and expressed honest information. Of course “whiney workers” is catchier, but why not look at it as targeted information that could be used to improve morale, productivity, loyalty and talent retention?

I also see a problem in that we have no indication of any sort of demographic breakdown by job position or class, which would affect the interpretation of results. What is the context? In some places, there may be simple gratitude about having a job, any job, and there is certainly a wide range of available social “safety net” options in different countries and class levels.

What might be the impact of cultural difference? For instance, would people in different places view complaining, demanding, or even sharing negative information differently? Is there any gender difference? Urban vs more rural? Service or manufacturing? Are they comparing apples to oranges in the study?

How would you discriminate between “whining” and the simple expression of real-life problems may have about such things as working too many hours for the pay, or having your job impinge too much on your private life?

Are such studies attempting to say, in effect, “be happy with what you have, there are people worse off than you are” – comparable to the way mothers used to get children to eat food they didn’t like? If so, that strategy isn’t going to work as the talent shortage heats up. U.S. companies that take such an attitude will simply cease to be competitive.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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

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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?

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One reason China is likely to overtake the U.S. as the world’s most important country in this century is that China puts more effort into building human capital than we do.

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ISR polled 2,157 male senior leaders and 731 female senior leaders in 11 multinational firms in various industries and found that the factors that engage senior organizational leaders differ by gender.

The top engagement driver for both genders is knowing that the leadership was effective – 24% of female leaders and 26% of male leaders responded accordingly.

However, they found that female senior leaders are more concerned about “how business success is accomplished,” while their male counterparts show more concern with “personal advancement” (Hold your laughter).

Priorities differed among the other top engagement factors surveyed as well.

For female senior leaders, other top engagement drivers are the quality of relationships in the workplace, organizational support for empowerment, career growth opportunities, the quality of supervision and customer focus.

Male senior leaders were most engaged by opportunities to grow their careers, supervisory quality, rewards and the strategic direction of the organization.

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We’ve installed the new Sphere Related Content WordPress Plugin. It was very simple to install and customize.

Sphere connects news and blogs.

We already had a Sphere-it button in our Sociable links (those little icons where you can Sphere-it, Digg-it, Technorati-it, or whatever you like).

The new plug finds related content to your post in the Sphere network of other blog posts, as well as media articles.

If you click on the icon at the bottom of each post, you will see a pop-up window that shows related content.

It’s very fun, and very useful. We give it high ratings, top kudos, an enthusiastic woo-hoo, and a somewhat furtive hurray!

The Sphere blog mentioned Data Dome as a favorite new partner site – thank you!

Get the Sphere Related Content Plugin here.

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