One Foot Out the Door

How to Combat the Psychological Recession That’s Alienating Employees and Hurting American Business

Author: Judith M. Bardwick
Pub Date: 2007
Your Price: $24.95
ISBN: 0814480586
Format: Hardcover

• Overview
• Listen to the podcast
• About the Author
• Sample Chapter
• Employee Commitment
• Customization
• Press Release
• The Psychological Recession
• Statistics
• Request an Evaluation Copy, INSTRUCTOR ONLY!

Statistics

How people feel about their jobs and their company does matter—to the bottom line. Here is a small sampling of the significant data affirming the link between feelings and financial results:

• The one-third of employees who are alienated from their companies will actively seek a new job within two years, and 50 percent will find a new employer within five. Companies with high turnover pay a high price. Replacing critical clerical and front-line customer service workers costs about 50 percent of their annual pay. The figure for executives soars to 200 percent of their base salary.

• Gallup, the world’s leader in opinion polls, has done extensive studies of employee engagement, drawing on a database of 4.5 million workers in 12 industries. Among its findings: an astonishing 80 percent of employees do not care about their employer. In the majority of organizations, about 60 percent of employees work only enough to keep their jobs and another 20 percent would hurt the organization if they could.

• In a study of over a thousand companies with 500 or more employees, the international consulting group Towers Perrin documented a “statistically significant correlation” between how employees felt about work and shareholder return over a five-year span. The more positively employees felt, the higher the companies’ profits and share price.

• To quantify the relationship between how an organization relates to its people and how those practices relate to financial results, the global consulting firm Watson Wyatt created the Human Capital Index (HCI). The firm devoted two years to administering HCI surveys to 51 organizations in the United States and Europe, and then compared the results with each participant’s five-year total returns to shareholders. Organizations with low HCI scores averaged a 21 percent total return while those with high HCI scores averaged an impressive 64 percent return.

• Vanderbilt University and Hewitt Associates, human resource consultants, studied the financial performances of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” from 1998 to 2003. The companies recognized for their investment in people dramatically outperformed their industry competitors, with cumulative stock returns averaging 50 percent above the market norm. The trend continues. The publicly traded companies on Fortune’s 2007 list of “100 Best Companies to Work For” consistently beat the market over the preceding 10 years.

Adapted from ONE FOOT OUT THE DOOR: How to Combat the Psychological Recession That’s Alienating Employees and Hurting American Business by Judith M. Bardwick, Ph.D. (Published by AMACOM Books).

Search the full text of this book