A press release issued by the London-based Work Foundation says employers are poorly equipped to weather the recession because they use workers' skills and talents poorly, tie them up with rules and give them little say over how they do their work. The link at the bottom of this post will take you to the full press release.

While the press release is specific to the UK, Australia and New Zealand will be similar.

I've never heard of the Work Foundation. It turns out it is a rebooted version of  The Industrial Society.

The name and business model changed in 2002. The Industrial Society is an 80-year old independent organisation campaigning to improve people's working lives. It studies issues like work-life balance.  The board and directorate are people drawn from the real world of industry, not academia.

The press release writer emphasises the waste of bad management from an employer point of view. And rightly so. Showing managers how their behaviour damages their business' performance is one way to get to sit up and take notice.

But from an employee point of view this waste is even more disheartening.

There's nothing worse than working in a job where your skills are under-used, you spend hours wading through bureaucracy and feel powerless to make changes — even ones that would obviously improve the company's performance.

Employers who waste human resources this way deserve to fail.

The Work Foundations survey of the work-lives of 2011 workers found that:

• 40 percent of employees have more skills than their jobs require

• 65 percent of workers said the primary characteristic of the organisations they worked for was 'rule and policy bound' – though just five per cent said this was their preference

• 40 percent said they had little or no flexibility over the hours they worked

• 20 percent of graduates are in 'low knowledge content' jobs

Here are the knowledge worker posts on this week's reading list:

The E-Learning Curve Blog: Emergence of Knowledge Workers: a Short History.

At first sight Michael Hanley's history looks to be too short to say anything useful. In fact, it's one of a series of related posts defining the nature of knowledge work and knowledge workers. You may like to read this and compare it with my Just who are the Knowledge Workers?

Cube Rules: Career Management Needs Adaptive Change.

Scot Herrick blogs about the difference between technical and adaptive change.

LG & Associates Search / Talent Strategy: "Making Talent a Strategic Priority": Thoughts From the Fringe (Part 1).

Ex-marine sergeant Josh le Tourneau quotes from a McKinsey Quarterly article Making Talent A Strategic Priority. Interestingly he argues the companies who make the most noise about the importance of talent are  the ones who underpay the human resource executives expected to manage the companies' talent pool.

The Cutter Blog: The New Knowledge Workers: Are they a new breed? Are they different? (Does it matter?).

Three questions in one headline here. While all are relevant to knowledge workers, you won't find the answers in this post. In fact, the post leads to a questionnaire. Author Robert Mason promises further discussion in future posts. Although the Cutter Consortium has a clear IT industry orientation, this promises to be a rich line of investigation into the way knowledge workers are (or are not) changing.

Web Worker Daily: What makes web working more difficult?

Celine Roque looks at why American knowledge workers and their employers aren't making more use of telecommuting. The obstacles apply just as much in New Zealand and Australia.