The Green Tie – The Official Blog of NAEM

Would you fire your boss?

July 20, 2011 at 10:54 am Leave a comment

Alex Pollock

I recently read that 24 percent of employees in the United States would fire their bosses. Does this surprise you?

Well, workplace engagement research supports that if workers feel their supervisor cares about them as a person they aren’t as likely to want to fire them. Is this problem limited to the U.S. workplace? I don’t think so.

Gallup studies of 4.5 million employees in 112 countries indicate that fewer than one in every two employees feels strongly that they have a supervisor who cares about them as a person. With data now showing a link between workplace stress and medical issues such as coronary heart disease, “organizations need to take the workplace environment and the quality of employee/manager relationships seriously, because the health of employees may have an enormous effect on the bottom line in lost productivity, absenteeism and insurance costs’” according to Dr Jim Harter, Chief Scientist in Gallup’s workplace management practice. (From the book “Decade of Change”)

What’s your reaction to this research? Are we just bad at picking good supervisors and managers or is the issue more complex? With all the efforts to appear “green” and globally sensitive to the outside world, do companies now need to dedicate effort at regaining the hearts of their employees?  With all the talk recently about reinventing and reinvigorating the American economy it seems to me that upping employee engagement would be a great place to start. What do you think?

Entry filed under: Career Management, Leadership Development, Uncategorized. Tags: business management, business management skills, Employee Engagement, employee satisfaction, leaders, Leadership, Leadership Development, leadership skills, Management, management skills, workplace satisfaction.