Knowing What Makes Workers Tick

Work with me here. I know we don’t have any statistics about how many people hate their jobs in T&T, but I’m betting because we like to imitate the US so much, that we comfortably fall into their statistics for job-hating individuals, relatively speaking. Rest assured, if you hate your job, you’re not alone. According to a 2013 Gallup State of the American Workplace Report, just 30 per cent of full-time workers in the US consider their work engaging or inspiring. That was reportedly up from 28 per cent in 2010.

A little more than half of workers (52 per cent) claimed to possess serious cases of Monday blues: they are present at work in body, but not spirit and they’re not particularly excited about their job. The remaining 18 per cent were said to be “actively disengaged” or, as Gallup CEO Jim Clifton put it in the report, “roam the halls spreading discontent.” Worse, Gallup reports, those actively disengaged employees cost the US up to $550 billion annually in lost productivity.

Realising this, many US companies have begun a cheery campaign of keeping workers contented. Companies target office perks. Google, which is said to have topped Fortune and the Great Place to Work Institute’s annual list of 100 Best Companies to Work For in four of the past seven years, installed a roller hockey rink, nap pods and other workerfriendly amenities at its Mountain View, California headquarters in the San Francisco bay area.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/digital/new-members