Monday, May 18, 2009

Workplace Abuse Keeping America in Recession

By Ross Reck, PhD

Zogby International conducted 7,740 online interviews of a panel that is representative or the adult population of the U.S. The survey found that not only were tens of millions of workers not being treated well, but 37% or an estimated 54 million American workers had personally experienced an extreme form of workplace abuse referred to as "bullying."

The study defined bullying as "repeated health-harming mistreatment" that takes one or more of the following forms:

*Verbal abuse: shouting, swearing, name calling and malicious sarcasm
* Offensive behaviors: threatening, intimidating, humiliating and inappropriately cruel conduct
* Work interference: sabotage, which prevents work from being done

The study also found that an additional 12% of the American workforce (or 17.5 million people) had personally witnessed bullying behavior. This means that 49% of the workforce or 71.5 million American workers have been touched by this extreme form or workplace abuse. And, who are these bullies? Seventy-three percent of them were bosses/managers!

This is not only an outrage; it's immoral, cruel and barbaric; and it's keeping us in this recession. When employees feel abused, their motivation is to get even and find another job somewhere else. Researchers Gostick and Elton estimate the cost of employee turnover in America to be $1.7 trillion annually. Then, if you factor in the other things employees are motivated to do when they feel they're being abused such as taking more sick days, missing work more often, stealing from the company, doing as little work as possible and a poorer quality of work, convincing other employees not to work as hard and refusing to share their ideas on how to improve products and services, we're probably looking at a four to five trillion dollar price tag for this abusive behavior. This is huge especially given that the size of the entire American economy is only $14 trillion. Just think of the shot in the arm it would be to our economy if American business could recover a sizeable chunk of this amount.

The question then becomes: can this mess be turned around? The answer is yes, and it can be turned around immediately, but it's up to the senior managers who run American businesses. They could easily reclaim the lion's share of these four to five trillion dollars if they would do the following three things sincerely, consistently and well... [more...]

No comments: