Bob Sutton reports worker dissatisfaction is at an all time high in America. Less than half of all workers are satisfied with their jobs.

He says many workers are laying in wait and will dash for the exits when the job market improves.

Sutton points to research which shows people quit bosses, not jobs or companies.

The exodus has already started in New Zealand. Recently, in Companies lose as staff look elsewhere, the New Zealand Herald reported "Fifty-three per cent of New Zealand workers are leaving their jobs within the first two years of being employed".

It all comes down to bosses not being in touch with how employees really feel.

If you're a boss and you saw the recent recession as an opportunity to pressure staff, you are a stupid arsehole and you deserve to lose all your good people. And you will lose them. It's too late to fix the problem now.

Sutton, who wrote The No Asshole Rule warns power often goes to the head of bosses who are blind to their shortcomings.

He says even good bosses who behaved well during the recession should take stock and start treating workers even better. The day of reckoning is near.

Dear Bosses: Is It Your Last Chance To Reverse Your Vile Ways? Or Is It Too Late? – Bob Sutton.

When a business goes through change, the way people react depends on whether they feel in control.

Think of radical business change as a fast drive over a tricky mountain pass.

The journey might be thrilling while you’re in the driver’s seat. Sitting in the front seat with a route map guiding the driver and anticipating what’s coming up is nearly as good.

But from the passenger’s point of view the journey might be terrifying – or worse.

If you’ve ever looked down from a passenger window on a mountain pass and found you can’t see the edge of the road, you’ll have a good idea of what change management feels like from the average employee’s point of view.

We’ll stretch the metaphor further. While most of us feel it is best to have some control over the hazardous journey, we’d like to feel whoever is in the driving seat is up to the job. This isn’t just a matter of the driver having the right credentials and exuding confidence, the passengers are about to trust that person with their lives.

People’s feeling about control over their working lives goes beyond change management. The European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions surveyed workers and found employees in certain occupations and industries now have less control over the pace and methods of work than in the past. This lack of control is directly linked to workplace stress.

Participative management under attack

While the modern idea of participative management is under attack from all directions it remains the best way of giving employees a feeling of control over their working lives.

You might feel this is a luxury at a time when most knowledge-based industries are in recession, but this downturn will finish soon.

When that happens employers will once again struggle to find workers with key skills. Employers with enlightened human resource policies during times like these will be first out of the recession and will be positioned to keep up momentum.

Participative management says ownership plays an important part in ensuring people commit to workplace actions. Allowing people to take part in management, planning and decision-making means they’ll feel better about implementation.

This doesn’t mean management cedes its decision-making responsibility to the workers.

In most cases ordinary workers will only control a minor part of any change process. But they’ll quickly recognise being able to comment at any level is important. What’s more, being able to have control over workplace minutiae is massively better than having no control.

Happy workers are productive workers

Workers who are given more choices and power will feel happier about any process. To use the jargon, they’ll take ownership of the change.

On the other hand, if change is merely imposed as a fait accompli they’ll do their utmost to resist.

On the psychological front, workers who feel powerless and out of control will feel stressed. There’s a whole body of evidence to back this up. Stressed workers under-perform, they make errors and their absentee rate will rocket as sickness and lassitude kick-in.

But this will be the least of your worries. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter described in her 1977 book, Men And Women of the Corporation, in organisations it is not power that corrupts but powerlessness. (You can read an online summary of parts of the book at this address.)

Mr and Mrs Jobsworth

Kanter, who is a sociologist by training, describes the way powerless people become petty and territorial. She says they become rules minded and over controlling. The British term for this kind of attitude is ‘jobsworth’, as in “I can’t do that, it’s more than my job’s worth.”

The issue here is people who lack formal control over their work put huge amounts of energy and thought into controlling the little part of the world where they are able to exercise power. One thing they do is take extraordinary measures to scotch any reforms or changes. In other words they’ll actively work against workplace change.

Two-fisted managers might rationalise none of this matters. They may remind themselves that a period of change and upheaval is a good time to turf out dead wood and end resistance.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; after all, one driver for workplace change is to shake out poor performers and various roadblocks to progress.

However, this resistance can become so great, it undermines the change process or somehow damages the core business along the way.

Moreover, during a period of mishandled change, it is not unusual for the dead wood to stay and for key workers to decamp. Remember that, even in a time of relatively high unemployment for knowledge workers, employees who are particularly skilled and therefore valued by one company are likely to be valued by another.

Things might not look too hot now, but knowledge workers will soon be in demand again. Employers who showed a dark side during the recession will struggle to fill vacancies.

Despite the recession, New Zealand still has a severe shortage of building industry skills and there are pockets of the IT business where vacancies have remained since the global economic meltdown began.

Australia already shows signs a severe shortage of IT skills could hamper companies and government departments as early as next year.

In Demand for ICT professionals on the rise, bottom is in Stan Beer at iTWire reports; “The bottom in ICT employment has been reached and demand for skilled jobs is once again on the rise, according to the latest market survey from a major technology recruiter. The news adds to a growing list of evidence of a return to health of the ICT jobs scene.”

A week earlier ITNews covered a report from Australia’s largest recruiter Peoplebank saying the demand for contractors was rising. A similar story appeared in CIO magazine in June with Seek Employment noting the overall job market was stabilising with IT consultants in high demand.

Australia’s ITNews reprinted a story from Britain's Computing newspaper on July 7 saying the antipodean nation is busily recruiting IT specialist in the UK to meet a shortage.

The Australian reported on a skills shortage in research organisations in Upgrade ignores skills shortage (story no longer online). And the New Zealand Herald reports there are many shortages in engineering.

New Zealand CIO magazine carried a report suggesting most IT employers face a skills shortage despite the recession. Despite downturn, opportunities remain for APAC IT candidates suggests one in four tech employers expect to increase their headcount this year. The story singles out specific skills in business analysis, datawarehousing, ERP (Oracle/SAP), web development and infrastructure (architecture) as being of particular interest.”

Some shortsightedness is in evidence in IT training budgets slashed at ITNews which suggests employers have slashed skills spending and can expect to see a serious skills vacuum by 2112.

What does this mean?

First, it’s a safe bet the skills shortage will return to Australia in the next year or so and to New Zealand soon after – the two countries are effectively a single market for knowledge workers. If anything it could be worse than before for a couple of reasons. Many skilled workers will have drifted off into other occupations or even early retirement. At the same time employers have cut back on training during the recession. While there are increased numbers of people taking tertiary courses in technology and similar subjects, many won’t enter the workforce in time for the recovery and they’ll have knowledge, but little experience, which means only a handful will hit the ground running.

Employers who behaved cut back staff, skimped on training or held on to skilled workers and pushed them too hard during the recession will all suffer once the skills shortage kicks in again. Knowledge workers will be able to drive better bargains – and recent experience will teach people to look beyond the pay packet.

Yesterday I heard of an employer who boasts about deliberately hiring down-on-their-luck knowledge workers.  He offers workers low wages (monthly, not hourly), insecure contracts and bullies them into working long hours and performing ethically dubious tasks.

The conditions are Dickensian.

From a worker's point of view, it's a nightmare. The manager thinks he is clever. And in the short-term he may be. But it is a dumb strategy:

• First, despite everything, while some workers are desperate now, most  still have options. Exploited workers will move on at the first opportunity. So an exploitative employer in any knowledge-based industry can expect to have an unstable workforce and be constantly getting new workers up to speed.
• Second, the recession isn't going to last forever. Sooner or later there will be another skill shortage. In fact there are already signs of this in Australia. Employers with an exploitative reputation will struggle to find anyone willing to work for them. This applies to companies and to exploitative individuals.
• Third, having downtrodden workers impacts on other staff. Those who can will ask themselves "is my turn next?" Staff will options will bail out.

If your employment strategy is to hire desperate people, you're in trouble.

Cruel, unpleasant, short-sighted, wasteful and stupid are just some words describing the attitude of many employers towards hiring older knowledge workers.

I’ve used the word ‘older’ in the opening sentence, but the age threshold we’re talking about is barely middle-aged.

Put it this way, if you’ve been around long enough to remember where the headline on this story originally came from then you’d better watch out because by many recruiters’ standards you are already over the hill.

Over the years I’ve spoken to or been in contact with workers, employers and recruiters who believe anyone over the age of 40 will find it hard going looking for a job in knowledge industries.

This gives the lie to all the fancy talk we hear about the value of experience. At the point in their life when a knowledge worker has built up enough personal experience to know what they are doing, they drop off the employers’ wish list.

While the much talked about skills shortage of recent years is no longer pressing, you have to ask yourself what was going on when employers bemoaned the lack of trained workers and at the same time refused to consider anyone with grey hair.

Some older workers complain they didn’t get interviews or replies to their enquiries about vacancies even at the height of the skills shortage.

At the same time I heard from freshly minted graduates who couldn’t through the door. That sets the age limits for desirable recruits at roughly between 25 and 40 – a  small percentage of most people’s productive working lives.

Go East, that's where the tech jobs are. Network World says Hong Kong IT vacancies are up 22.6 percent in the first quarter of 2009. It could be a good place for unemployed or underemployed Australians and New Zealanders to sit out the recession.

Hong Kong IT vacancies up 22.6 percent in Q1 – Network World.

One of the themes of the Knowledge Workers web site over the past year has been the need to recognise and understand the role of skills in a modern economy. Despite the current recession, many skills are still in short supply. And this is acting as a break on the smart innovative companies that can drag New Zealand, or that matter any other country, out of the current economic mess.

New Zealand’s Productive Economy Council has weighed in to the debate making an interesting plea to the government over skilled migrant workers. In a press release the Council said; “

The government needs to think carefully before deciding to limit temporary work visas for skilled migrants or interfere in any way with the retention decisions of companies.

Cutting back on the number of skilled workers entering New Zealand would be a sure-fire way of making the recession last longer and bite deeper. That’s not an opinion, it’s a simple statement of fact.

There are roles in industry and elsewhere that create real wealth and add real value. These are skilled positions. The people doing those jobs earn money which circulates elsewhere in the economy and pays taxes. Restricting the pool of available skilled workers to perform those tasks is a way of hobbling our industries.

All migrants create work and wealth. People who bring much-needed skills to New Zealand create even more work and wealth.

The Productive Economy Council'sSelwyn Pellett says:

The High Tech sector has only been able to survive in New Zealand thanks to skilled migrants and without them we would progressively lose over $2 billion in exports generated from that sector alone, and I suspect these figures apply in other elaborately transformed export sectors.

Scoop: NZ business needs to protect its core skills

Knowledge workers are likely to get through the recession in better financial shape than other workers. Here's some encouraging statistics from the USA:

One statistic which surprised me was the unemployment rate for college graduates. It stands at 3.3 percent compared to the high-school level which is over 11 percent. Clearly the demand for knowledge workers still exists, even in this depressed market. As we enter the recovery and leading-edge Baby Boomers gain enough confidence to retire this statistic will likely become even more startling.

via The State of the Contingent Workforce.