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Execs and the like will continually screw over their employees/underlings by taking away benefits, hiring complete narcissistic idiots to manage things, being as stingy as possible with vacation time, actually paying decent and fair wages etc. Only looking at the bottom line and nothing else. If you treat your employees like garbage and treat them as if they should feel privileged for working for you instead of you feeling privileged they are working for you it causes all kinds of issues. Morale greatly suffers, they'll talk bad about you and the company, they'll do half-assed work etc. etc.
How do these idiots not realize keeping their employees happy should be their number one goal and everything else will subsequently fall into place?
Their number one goal is to make a profit. Period. They might accomplish that by keeping their employees happy. Or well paid. Or not. But the goal is not employee happiness.
As for "everything falling into place" when employees are happy, it's apparent that you've never worked for or with people that are never happy.
Links to show unhappy employees means the company makes less money? Employers really don't care - for the most part - if employees are happy. There's no way on earth to make every employee happy.
You could give them each a million dollars a year, 30 hour work week, work in their pajamas with a KCup machine on their desk, free lunch included and you'll still find employees who complain.
Google is one company. Google employees work like dogs! I know a few folks who've worked there and MicroSoft. They've said the pay and benefits were great. However, the work was horrible. The amount of work you had to do and the overtime was insane. So who cares if the benefits are great if you're working 80 hours a week? And yes in many companies employees are just as dispensable as office furniture. They all ave costs and have to be accounted for.
Depends on team. And you're making a further flawed argument in correlating compensation with happiness. You're clearly a Theory X managerial type. Welcome to the Theory Y world, I recommend you giving it a try.
I don't need to go digging for links that shows reduced productivity based on happiness - common sense doesn't need citations. Higher levels of unhappiness leads to increased churn. Increased churn leads to increased ramp up times as you are constantly having to bring new people up to speed. Increased churn also leads to longer periods of time by which there is a skills gap present within a company. Simply dumping that extra work onto another worker has been shown to increase their stress levels, and there is a direct correlation between stress and health. Therefore, by stressing out your existing workers, you are leaving them more prone to illness, both physical and mental, which results in reduced productivity.
This is all Common Sense 101. Of course, the old adage about the unusual thing about common sense is how uncommon it is applies, I think.
But you're right - Google is but one company. Thing is, I could list a hundred more off the top of my head just like them. I can also list companies that decided "to go a different direction", and show what happens when you make the employees wildly unhappy (Yahoo, which was sold for peanuts; IBM, which has had reduced profits for 21 straight quarters; Dell, which took a profitable EMC, changed the culture and is now losing like a billion dollars a quarter or some absurd number).
Wrong- Executive management realize that in US corporate environment the best thing for their companies is keeping their shareholders happy. Employees are replaceable and there is no shortage of talent in US. As long as the board is happy, share prices are up plenty of talent can be bought with right amount of $$
Then don't work for places like that..........see how simple that is.
This really is kind of the answer. Sometimes you don't have a choice, but you always have a choice to continue to look and develop your skill set to become more marketable. There are still decent places to work, I work for one. But they take a little while to find. What breaks my heart is when people settle for less than what they could have. I see it a lot.
Wrong- Executive management realize that in US corporate environment the best thing for their companies is keeping their shareholders happy. Employees are replaceable and there is no shortage of talent in US. As long as the board is happy, share prices are up plenty of talent can be bought with right amount of $$
It is shocking to me how short-sighted and incapable some people are of seeing the forest from the trees.
I'll try to explain this using small words. If you have happy workers, they will make more. If they make more, the business makes more money. If the business makes more money, that makes shareholders happy. Happy shareholders increase shareholder value.
Has the American education system fallen so far that such a simplistic and basic concept is considered too advanced to teach? And I hate to break it to you, but there's a very real shortage of talent in a number of industry in this country. Nursing, cybersecurity, actuaries, artificial intelligence and deep learning specialists, data scientists, energy engineers, pharmacists....all have more jobs than there are people to do them.
The disconnect here is that people adopting the "suck it up, buttercup" mentality on this particular thread either come from or are associated with backgrounds that typically have large talent pools due to low barrier of entry into a given profession. As we transition to a knowledge based economy, that gets turned on its head. Only so many smart people get produced.
It is shocking to me how short-sighted and incapable some people are of seeing the forest from the trees.
I'll try to explain this using small words. If you have happy workers, they will make more. If they make more, the business makes more money. If the business makes more money, that makes shareholders happy. Happy shareholders increase shareholder value.
Depends on team. And you're making a further flawed argument in correlating compensation with happiness. You're clearly a Theory X managerial type. Welcome to the Theory Y world, I recommend you giving it a try.
I don't need to go digging for links that shows reduced productivity based on happiness - common sense doesn't need citations. Higher levels of unhappiness leads to increased churn. Increased churn leads to increased ramp up times as you are constantly having to bring new people up to speed. Increased churn also leads to longer periods of time by which there is a skills gap present within a company. Simply dumping that extra work onto another worker has been shown to increase their stress levels, and there is a direct correlation between stress and health. Therefore, by stressing out your existing workers, you are leaving them more prone to illness, both physical and mental, which results in reduced productivity.
This is all Common Sense 101. Of course, the old adage about the unusual thing about common sense is how uncommon it is applies, I think.
But you're right - Google is but one company. Thing is, I could list a hundred more off the top of my head just like them. I can also list companies that decided "to go a different direction", and show what happens when you make the employees wildly unhappy (Yahoo, which was sold for peanuts; IBM, which has had reduced profits for 21 straight quarters; Dell, which took a profitable EMC, changed the culture and is now losing like a billion dollars a quarter or some absurd number).
You're stating your opinion not facts. Back up your opinion with facts.
I don't need your recommendations on your goofy theories. I've been a very successful manager and business owner. I'm doing quite well for myself so I must be doing something right!
It is shocking to me how short-sighted and incapable some people are of seeing the forest from the trees.
I'll try to explain this using small words. If you have happy workers, they will make more. If they make more, the business makes more money. If the business makes more money, that makes shareholders happy. Happy shareholders increase shareholder value.
Has the American education system fallen so far that such a simplistic and basic concept is considered too advanced to teach? And I hate to break it to you, but there's a very real shortage of talent in a number of industry in this country. Nursing, cybersecurity, actuaries, artificial intelligence and deep learning specialists, data scientists, energy engineers, pharmacists....all have more jobs than there are people to do them.
The disconnect here is that people adopting the "suck it up, buttercup" mentality on this particular thread either come from or are associated with backgrounds that typically have large talent pools due to low barrier of entry into a given profession. As we transition to a knowledge based economy, that gets turned on its head. Only so many smart people get produced.
This isn't true. Sure SOME happy people MAY be more productive. More production doesn't necessarily increase profits however.
Say Sam is uber happy and kicks 100 widgets a day when his quota is 42. George has to QA those widgets. George is fine with his job. His quota is 42 widget inspections a day. Well now Sam has screwed George whose workload just more than doubled. George is no longer fine and annoyed by Sam and his awesomeness. Neither one of these guys is a manager. They're both pee ons. One is uber happy and one is annoyed because Mr. Uber Happy Pants. Welcome to the world!
It is shocking to me how short-sighted and incapable some people are of seeing the forest from the trees.
I'll try to explain this using small words. If you have happy workers, they will make more. If they make more, the business makes more money. If the business makes more money, that makes shareholders happy. Happy shareholders increase shareholder value.
.
Reminds me of the same kool aid that proponents of trickle down economics want ppl to drink. What you described might work for a small mom and pop small business but not in a corporate world. In a capitalistic environment the shareholders and C level executives are rewarded the most with true benefits and bonuses for a companies performance. If the company makes money, the regular employees prob get 10-20% bonus max whereas the percentage for the higher ups is significantly higher. These are the realities of shareholders capitalism in US.
CEOs are tasked with balancing interest of various groups, stakeholders & customers are usually top of the list. Employees are usually on the other end of the spectrum in terms of priorities. Most of the successful US corporations who have done well in last 2 decades or more have followed similar model by focusing on shareholders and not employees. . The hierarchy in public companies is setup in such a way that it gives shareholders more power to influence their management and make them work towards their goals over employees. Anyone who disagrees with this hasn't ever attended any board or shareholder meeting in person.
Once the company has made enough capital and customers are happy, employees are eager to work for such companies regardless of working conditions because the brand name on resume is more appealing to them. Go ask employees of Amazon, apple or google how happy their employees are living in Bay area with their current salaries and you will get your answer. The only thing that keeps them hooked on to the job is the stock options which goes back to my point as to what is important to corporations. On the contrary, remember the 70k minimum wage experiment in Seattle? whatever happened to that initiative...
STEM job shortage discussion is irrelevant here. Politics at work environment is common no matter if you work at NASA or MCDonalds. Getting a specialized education is not going to shield you against a narcissist boss or a nepotistic management hierarchy.
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