Bye-Bye, Boss
A survey by the job-placement firm Manpower Inc. has found that 84% of workers say they plan to look for a new job in 2011. That’s up from 60% last year.
Douglas Matthews, president of Right Management, a division of Manpower, termed the results “a wake-up call to management.” “This finding is more about employee dissatisfaction and discontent than projected turnover,” he said.
Job satisfaction numbers are notoriously all over the place. But, as we’ve explored before, Peter Drucker certainly understood the need for employers to meet their workers’ needs on many levels: physiologically, psychologically, socially and economically.
[EXPAND More]What’s more, Drucker also knew how quickly workers—especially those in knowledge-oriented jobs—are apt to say goodbye to their present employers. “Employees who do manual work do not own the means of production,” Drucker explained in his book Management Challenges for the 21st Century. “They may, and often do, have a lot of valuable experience. But that experience is valuable only at the place where they work. It is not portable.
“But knowledge workers own the means of production,” Drucker continued. “It is the knowledge between their ears. And it is a totally portable and enormous capital asset. Because knowledge workers own the means of production, they are mobile. Manual workers need the job much more than the job needs them. It may still not be true for all knowledge workers that the organization needs them more than they need the organization. But for most of them it is a symbiotic relationship in which they need each other in equal measure.”
So, what do you make of the Manpower survey? Why are so many people saying they’re ready to quit?[/EXPAND]
