The Sharp Dropoff In Worker Happiness
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
This might be something that UK/EU folks might not be able to empathise with, but for US workers, the need for health insurance is a crucial factor in how they choose to stay/leave/accept any job.
To say folks should just "up and leave" if they feel they're under appreciated is not so clear-cut when your medications, nay your family/spouse/child's health is on-the-line while you try to run off in search of "greener pastures".
In my mind, one very real reason healthcare reform has failed in the US is that companies[1] are very aware that being the main/sole provider of their workforce's healthcare provides very strong leverage over them.
Now having said that, it is true that healthcare costs companies alot of money, and it may be something that a large percentage of them would like to avoid -- a possible factor in their preferrence for a younger workforce perhaps -- but to ignore healthcare and its effects psycologically on our society and workforce as a whole is doing us a disservice.
[1] I guess I'm really thinking of "big" companies with a need for a large dependable workforce, not your mum & pop/start-up/entrepreneurial kind...
Pretty weird/absurd tie-in between professional life and the genetic lottery imo, due to the strange way health risk pools and employment pools have gotten conflated in post-WW2 America. Anyone can be an entrepreneur, as long as you didn't get unlucky in the womb!
The cost of health insurance is an active deterrent to me risking my own startups.
Hypocrisy and contradictions from the free market zealots is nothing new.
And yet I remain stunned that the same freaks who say they want a flexible work force, ya know, that whole "free market" thang, actively oppose the single biggest enabler to a mobile work force, universal health insurance.
I'm stunned that people that hate monopolies seem to be fine with a government-run one. In all cases, innovation stops and quality declines because nobody really has a choice.
When you can assure me this won't happen, I might start supporting universal health care.
I can barely trust the bloated and inefficient government to run un-important things..I sure as hell can't trust them to run something as important as health care.
However I would be open to a voucher-type system where the actual providers are private, competing for customers who pay into a common risk pool. It's the tying of the risk pool to employers that's most problematic to me, and which imo severely weakens other parts of the free market, by reducing labor mobility. That might actually improve some free-market elements of healthcare, since the actual customers would choose providers, rather than their employers doing it for them.
1) long wait times for any major surgery 2) sub-par equipment/hospitals 3) elderly patients don't get treated as well as they should
Nearly all of them come over to the US and pay for major surgery.
I also find it strange that in any of these discussions, nobody that lives under universal health care will talk about the bad things.
Without this sort of honesty, I will never want a public system in the US.
I don't think every public health system is well run, but I think the better ones are better-run than the US, and lead to much greater peace of mind, because I don't have to worry if I'm covered or not--- I know I am. The total expenditures are actually lower, too, because the U.S. spends a lot of money on public healthcare, just very inefficiently. Perhaps I'm part of some evil conspiracy to lie about how I like living in Denmark, but the numbers seem to back me up. There's plenty of other things I'll be happy to complain about about Denmark and Danish culture, too, but the healthcare system isn't one of them.
I don't think I've been treated well in the US healthcare system, in any case, and there were long wait times and subpar equipment. I also had to change doctors when I changed jobs, something that Denmark doesn't require me to do. And I had to spend a lot of time on the phone with insurance companies, who seemed to always make mistakes and miscode things; anyone who thinks governments are bureaucratic hasn't tried to deal with a large corporation's phone tree.
But I suspect you are putting ideology above any actual interest in rationally evaluating different healthcare systems based on evidence.
Yes, like all other systems, universal health care has problems. Canada definitely has a shortage of specialists in rural areas.
So what? The USA has plenty of shortages.
If you desire "honesty" in a policy debate, I encourage you to start with the widely published, thoroughly vetted, and oft cited comparative studies. If you're feeling very daring indeed, and want to learn something, you could start with google.
http://www.google.com/search?q=health+care+costs+per+capita
http://www.google.com/search?q=life+expectancy+by+country
TL;DR: Canadians spend 1/2 per person and live 2 years longer.
They're just the payer. There's still an entire ecosystem of value-add private entities. Clinics, hospitals, specialists, pharmaceuticals, equipment mfg, labs, etc.
I understand everyone's reservations about bureaucratic inefficiency. The key is in the incentives.
Single payer enables the capitation model of service, where people are rewarded for staying healthy. Versus the current model where everyone profits from disease. That's why single payer is (generally) cheaper per capita with better results.
Please explain how capitation will get people to cut way back on carbohydrate consumption and exercise every day. Those two factor cause the majority of morbidity and mortality in the US.
Stil, it's a pretty good question.
Doctors generally don't push nutrition. I think that's changing as the best available science continues to improve and be more broadly accepted. I personally evangelize the "cave man diet", probably to the point of annoyance.
But the real driver is coming from public awareness and social change. There are now serious efforts to limit, tax, regulate, remove sugars from a public policy standpoint. Examples are taxes on candy, removing vending machines from public schools, etc.
Capitation, by focusing a wellness and efficiency, would accelerate that trend.
Capitation gives the same payment whether diabetics are cured or ignored. What we need are ways to preemptively deploy extra money to diabetics. They need to go to fat farms and have visiting nurses nag them at home.
I have to pay for police and yet I don't even get a say in what color cars they have, the same with firemen. And don't get me started on the way the navy never asked me what to call their new aircraft carrier.
Big business gets to choose which congressmen to buy - why shouldn't I get a choice as well?
I'm glad we agree.
"Big business gets to choose which congressmen to buy - why shouldn't I get a choice as well?"
a choice which makes it so the rest of us can't choose?
In all cases where there is no longer an intrinsic or external incentives to maintain quality or innovate, sure, those things tend to drop off. A private monopoly has no near-term financial incentives, and are left with whatever intrinsic motivation the owners may have. This isn't true of a public monopoly run by a democratic government, however -- there's always incentives there, even if they aren't market incentives.
And speaking of incentives, it's a real mistake to assume that the same kinds that often work to produce effective products/services in other markets are at work in insurance. In most cases, vendors make money the more operational efficiency they have and the more utility people derive from what they're offering. In insurance, there are issues of operational efficiency, of course, but they're limited and quite secondary to the fact that insurance pools do better the less participants need them. The incentives that insurers have are to screen and pick their customers from among those as likely as possible to get the least utility out of the product. And, of course, to provide the minimally acceptable utility.
So you end up with a product where the vendor has strong incentives not to sell it to those who need it most, and to try and aggressively market to groups who are statistically most likely to need it the least (say, those who are usually able to go into work five days a week).
When the natural incentives for a given product don't line up right, no amount of market freedom is going to mean a better product. If there's going to be insurance products that are truly helpful for most everyone who needs them, heavy regulation and public monopolies are pretty much the only option.
Under such circumstances, even people who don't otherwise like monopolies might well get behind a public one.
When you can assure me this won't happen, I might start supporting universal health care.
Why don't you just go somewhere that has it available and observe the results for yourself, instead of making up hypotheticals? It costs some more money in taxes, but delivery of service works nicely in practice and patients aren't required to become expert in billing administration.
Private companies are there, but it essentially makes it so only the very, very rich can afford them..so we have only one choice.
I'm sure you could find some equivalent comparison page for health insurance in the UK, or examine offerings from BUPA, the leading firm in that market.
The only evidence I saw of government bureaucracy was when the hospital send somebody around to make sure everything was fine because it was especially important to them to make sure Medicare patients were getting all the care they needed.
When 90% of the US population is on this program, I guarantee you it won't be like this.
Or I could, and maybe this is crazy, listen to any one of my friends who has actually lived in a country with universal health insurance.
With an ideal free market there is at least reasonable theory about how price signals will get sellers to produce the goods and services people want. So with single payer, does that payer just work very carefully to make sure the prices they offer for various medicines and services are good enough that enough doctors and hospitals will be willing to do the things that people need done?
This is really an easily falsifiable statement. Australia has a government run Medicare. Innovation has not stopped because of it. There is still medical research being done within Australia. For example, there has been spray-on skin invented for burns victims, the Cochlear implant was invented here, and numerous other innovations in medical care.
Interestingly, Australia also has private medical insurance, with a large uptake. It's just that we don't force those who can't afford it to use it just to get basic healthcare.
They don't want a free market. Like everyone else, they want a market that favors them. In their case, that means a market that is corporatist - in favor of large companies and those who are already wealthy.
An alternate solution would be to end the favorable treatment of employer-provided health insurance. Once everyone is purchasing their own insurance we will have a reasonably functional market, as we do with auto, homeowner's, and life insurance.
I agree with parents' feeling that were the regs to be fixed (or a new regulation enacted that stopped this bundling) a better market (as exists in car insurance etc) would develop.
It's especially not good in cases where the feedback loops are long and highly variable in outcome. Humans are very good at optimizing frequent choices with readily visible consequences, but are terrible otherwise.
It is not hypocrisy to suggest that the people who banned drop side cribs are unsuited to guard the public health.
These are not the sort of people you want in charge of all health care.
Rigorous safety standards for consumer goods are one of the things we have the government for. Sure, it can be draconian sometimes. Raw milk, for instance, would have been a much better example for you to bring up then defective baby cribs. Nevertheless, rigorous safety standards are much better than the alternative.
Now please excuse me while I go drink a glass of tap water.
This is what the US federal government does to almost everything it touches. It operates at too large a scale to make sensible decisions. It kills babies "for the children", it imprisons drug users to keep them from being trapped in an unpleasant situation, it makes education loans non-bankruptable to ensure a good life for students, and so forth.
It would do exactly the same to medicine if given total, absolute control.
Why the fuck doesn't congress fix that then?
This would cost employers money.
who do you think pays for congressmen?
As to third party insurance: Yes, technically you can buy third-party insurance. But, no, it really isn't a remotely functional market. In short, if you don't really need the insurance, you can probably get reasonable coverage. But if you actually need it, it will be too late and nothing will be remotely affordable and/or cover much.
Not "the day after you break your leg".
Though there's a lot to be said about not being able to get insurance to defray costs of a 'pre-existing' condition. Sure, it's unworkable to allow people to buy insurance 5 minutes after they break their leg and then cancel it 5 minutes after it's set in a cast and their prescriptions are filled. But there's no reason a contract couldn't be drafted, obligating someone to pay for a particular insurance plan for X months, complete with early termination fees and such.
Verizon and Comcast figured this out. Is it really too much for Aetna?
A major medical incident (or worse: being diagnosed with a chronic condition) can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Any kind of "payment plan" would likely bankrupt a good number of subscribers, and then the "insurer" (really, in this case, a creditor) is left having to make up a big loss.
My preferred solution would be for the government to strongly encourage (who knows if a mandate will end up judged Constitutional) everyone to buy into truly catastrophic care coverage, with high annual deductible limits that would be subsidized for the poor. Ideally, you'd end up with a market where everyone's covered privately from birth against actual "insurable" events.
Let employers or private sellers offer "benefit plans" that cover things like Viagra, dentistry and pregnancy with better deals than you could negotiate yourself.
But ACA combines the worst of both worlds: Mandate coverage of every politically popular treatment, often with no communication to the consumer of any price information at all.
We have any number of exceptions in bankruptcy law to make such debts difficult-to-impossible to discharge. Surely such medical coverage could be worked in. And, yes, morphing coverage into essentially medical credit is the desired effect, as insurance companies negotiate far, far better pricing than individuals and credit for medical expenses is otherwise extremely difficult to arrange.
That said, I do agree to the general concept you're advocating and would prefer that sort of solution. We should just outright tax people to directly pay for the "we're not going to leave you for dead" care hospitals already provide. This makes far more sense than having hospitals eat those costs and over-charge everyone else to make up for it. Further, we should expand that base level of high deductible care to subsidize the basic preventative care that will keep the final costs of such coverage low. [1]
And then allow third parties to provide additional coverage.
Though I would most-strongly advocate a severing of the employer-health care link. If nothing else, that needs to go. The grouping of employees has serious distorting effects on the labor market. Risk pools should be insurer-wide. And insurance contributions by employers can/should be handled like a second direct-deposit. Even if we keep the employers' tax deduction. [2]
But the insurance choices needs to be in the employees hands. The risk groups need to be wider. And changes need to not be forced upon a change of employers.
[1] e.g. Basic doctor visits and generic drug coverage for things like antibiotics to cheaply treat conditions that will otherwise wind up in the ER; provide family planning care; etc.
[2] Though i'd like to see that removed and treated like any other wages from the employer-side, but exempt from income tax on the employee side.
6 years ago, Safeway's CEO announced they would be requiring preventative care and physicals to cut medical costs: http://www.yalemedlaw.com/2008/11/the-safeway-effect/
After completing college, I've found that the 4 companies I've worked for (mid-level IT for fortune 50 financial/tech companies) claimed they couldn't afford to pay for any medical care. Instead, they reminded us how much compensation they were already providing.
Why are grocery stores able to pay for this when nobody else will?
(former actuarial consultant, worked on union health funds)
They are reducing it, by putting a larger share of the cost on to the employee.
The key here is not that health insurance becomes affordable via an employer, it's that it becomes at all possible via an employer for many employees.
Recognizing that, it just becomes an exercise in how large a share of the cost employers can shift to their employees, factoring in their ratio of young/healthy/mobile workers to old/needy/trapped workers.
You are absolutely correct. As long as the US is unwilling to socialize its health care, there is very little sympathy for people putting up with soul-sucking jobs because they are against some half-baked notion of "socialism". (And I would argue that many Americans do not know what socialism is - they often conflate it with communism, which is entirely different).
Things aren't so simple as just 'socializing health care'. For a country in which the majority of medical spending is state subsidy, it's hard not to think we already have. And while I might personally be a closer fit to your unsympathetic libertarian strawman, I recognize that I'm a tiny minority in the American population at large. It seems rather harsh to deride a population of people for having to put up with a regulatory environment that clearly isn't of their choosing.
I used to believe this also but changed my mind after the 2004 elections in the US. We are living in an environment that clearly is of our choosing - we either voted for it or didn't care enough to vote against. While it's true that some people don't like how the current system works, very few people in America seem to believe that it would be worthwhile throwing everyone out of office or demanding real discourse in politics.
It's true that the world is dominated by sound-bytes, etc. but there's a reason that stuff keeps showing up on TV and other media - it sells. When people value thinking about the world they live and realize that good solutions usually are not "partisan" things might change for the better. But that seems unlikely.
The reason companies have the power to put their thumb into their employees is because workers have let their dignity and pride go, just to get a paycheck. Proverbially speaking, you get what you pay for. In essence, if you take a job that is below a threshold of tolerance that you would like, that's exactly what you're going to get.
I realize it's easy to espouse this kind of view. I don't have a wife or children who rely on me to have a constant job. I'm in an industry whose companies are essentially in a full-court press hiring mode. But I think from this position, I gain perspective.
When you're at a job you hate, you lose passion. Passion for everything from hobbies, to friends, to (most tragically) family. Your partner sees a frail person who has given up. Your kids see a failure. Someone who never reached for and got what they wanted. They not only pity you, but they have contempt for you.
Be the person they want you to be, which, incidentally, tends to be the person you want to be. Don't say "Yes" to 2 weeks vacation and 10k under market. That's ridiculous. Stand your ground. You're worth something.
Companies have effectively gotten prospects to race to the bottom in terms of compensation, either because the prospects are too stupid or too scared to ask for more.
If more people took a little pride in themselves and asked for what they deserved, we wouldn't all be so paralyzed under the slave traders.
At the end of the day, no one can leave the abuser behind but you.
I think if you had any experience of being the powerless one in an employee-employer relationship you'd gain far more perspective.
You may not be able to change your current company. But you may be able to find something else. It will properly pay less, but there are ways around that (/r/frugal, say). You may be able to get enough self-respect that you dare to stand up to your boss.
My grandparents were as close as you can get to poverty without actually starving -- better not drop this piece of meat, because that is all I have and there isn't enough potatoes to make up for it -- poor.
Grandpa worked his ass of getting crazy overtime to make a bit of money. Yet once when his boss became really mean he told to stop doing that shit or he would quit. He didn't exactly have much of cushion at home, but he knew that he wouldn't stand for abuse either.
If people invoked a definitive reaction like 'hate' when referring to their job they would reach the same conclusion as you and quit more quickly. However, most people in this type of situation are probably earning good money (e.g. at/above market rate) with decent benefits, which in turn cause one to be ambivalent to their job.
The situation you describe is one of certainty: job hate, withering joi de vivre, loss of family respect and increasing resultant psychological pressures.
The situation most people may be in is of great uncertainty: job tolerance, decent joi de vivre (fun hobbies, supportive friends), happy family, less psychological pressure outside of work.
The second situation is more conducive to stability in one's life, which is no laughing matter when you have a family. I appreciate your perspective, and hope that you can apply it to the second situation.
EDIT: I'm not condoning the more ambiguous situation, merely explaining that this is probably what happened to the long-time bank manager in the article. The general malaise from work slowly spread until he couldn't take it any longer.
Well, I sure hope that if/when you may face a time where your passion has worn thin that your loved ones may find in themselves some compassion for you rather than pity or contempt. I think this actually is the default in most families than pity or contempt. Otherwise, what would be the point of having them?
I think your perception may be a self fulfilling prophecy.
Going to go out on a limb and recommend reading Learned Optimism, by Martin Seligman.
I have a predisposition to seeing the negative side of things myself, but I actively work on trying to minimise that.
Life really is too short.
This is the logical conclusion of not spending enough time together, or time spent together while one or more of an organizational unit are under serious duress.
The way to alleviate is to enjoy "quality" time together - guess what folks don't have time to do when their stress levels are up?
Another reason they have more power is because of the steady decline of unions.
It's easy to lose sight on that when you're in the "top 10%" of the pyramid. Most people aren't...
If worker preferences meant nothing, programming would be mostly abused minimum wage workers, which is obviously not the case.
The problem is that so few people are as introspective as the GP to your post. Most will take the bad job because work > no work in most peoples minds.
This is a problem that cannot be fixed at the leaf nodes, it must be fixed at the root. But the root is currently doing very well for themselves and won't see it as a problem (because there are always more workers)
The solution that factory workers came up with to solve this problem was to organize. But that caused more problems in the long term than it solved (it's economically unfeasible)
This ignores the directed and deliberate efforts to suppress workers' rights to organize and workers' ability to leave for a better job.
Noncompete agreements, union-busting, high costs of health-care outside of BigCorp jobs, labor arbitrage, labor monopsonies... it all adds up.
The problem is that even for a talented hard working passionate person who Gets Shit Done, it feels like you are Conan pushing the wheel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVI9MULtv8g). When you falter, you get the whip, which means you always have to be on your game. When you go above expectations, you get a pat on the back and a thumbs up. After a while you realize that the rewards are simply not worth it. This leads to unhappiness.
I want to be a part of an organization that feels like its a family; like its us vs the world; like everyone has a role to play and that role is vital, meaningful and important. I think this is partially the reason why going to work for a startup is becoming more popular. (I left my old company to start my own business)
Traditional megacorp jobs want nothing less than to own your soul. I am not exaggerating. It isn't enough to require 50 hours a week with a measly 2 weeks of vacation. No, you need to constantly prove you are committed by working harder than all your coworkers. Otherwise, you're not a team player. You're expected to be loyal with your time, your energy, and give 110%. But they don't have to be quite as loyal, because, you know, those shareholders are so Very Important. (Never mind the employee is the one that is actively generating value.)
Every little metric is latched onto because business is still pissed that productivity is not this neat, quantified number that can be put into an excel spreadsheet. So they seek to optimize everything that can be quantified, even if it hampers productivity.
I value myself too much to be put into that position again. My freelancing gig's purpose is actually me interviewing companies to find one that will respect me.
What I've seen as the big parts of the puzzle are stagnant wages, longer hours and whether people perceive themselves as trapped. (higher overall unemployment ~= less chance of switching ~= less happy)
(or, given the length of this recession, perhaps "several-years-ago self")
I find the scale you chose to be interesting. At the low end of the scale, you chose the word "hate," which is a fairly strong negative. At the high end of the scale, you chose the phrase "like ... just fine," which is somewhere between neutral and luke-warm. It's a shame that people never "love" their job. Considering how much of our lives we spend at work, liking my job "just fine" isn't good enough for me.
I've noticed the same vacillating. In my experience, there is usually a catalyst that makes someone hate their job---usually a decision by someone higher up that the person strongly disagrees with. Over a period of time (one to two weeks), the person gets over it and grudgingly accepts the new norm (returning to liking their job just fine). In a way there is no real day-to-day change, because the source of the catalyst events is the same, but the event itself can be a change.
To be fair, part of that is just American society. It's acceptable to complain about crap work and low pay. Whereas celebrating your awesome job and high pay is seen as uncouth. [1]
So whenever you tally up public statements about jobs, you should expect it to be tilted toward the negative.
In this case, I was trying to restrict it to people I've known whose attitudes changed while doing essentially the same job at the same place. But you know how anecdotes go...
[1] The same goes for many aspects of American life. When things go well you're expected to keep quiet in deference to those who haven't had such good fortune.
Hence "Fuck my life" and "white people problems" are memes. But there are no comparable analogues.
Amusingly, the only time Americans generally acknowledge that there's lots of complaining and little celebrating, is in the context of complaining about the complaining. (e.g. "Everything is Great and No-one is Happy")
I wonder if that could be a source of the problem. Would Americans be happier if the societal norm allowed for celebrating your awesome job? I think we would be. It's been shown that smiling makes people happier [1]. I don't think it's far-fetched that that theory could extend to expressing happiness with your job affecting your opinion of it. Since our emotions can also affect those around us, if it's only acceptable to complain about your job, that probably drags down those who actually enjoy theirs.
Another way this societal norm could be a source of a happiness problem is that even if bosses understand that they should care about their employees happiness at work, it's difficult to measure and focus on if people aren't supposed to express their happiness.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/18/science/a-feel-good-theory...
I personally feel that the main problem with organizations and employee happiness and retention is the current system of command and control where all employees are assumed to be idiots that need to be micro-managed. How is anyone suppose to be happy in that kind of environment? Work should not be an extension of school where we store and manage people in order to keep them out of trouble until they are old enough to retire. No, work should be a place where people want to go because they know that they own a little bit of that business and are really responsible for its success and/or failure.
I think a good work environment has more to do with the way management executes on priorities, how the information is communicated to those involved, trust between the business unit and information technology group, and the level of respect/trust between the managers and their employees.
Agile doesn't solve problems with management and or managers, it's just a different way of getting work done.
Others I have known who have worked for banks have had similar issues. I have yet to talk to one person who is part of software development at a bank and have them say a single good thing about their job.
Well of course. The American economy was reengineered, from being driven by invention, innovation and productivity increases to being driven by just making everyone work harder.
When you deliberately hurt working conditions and cheapen wages as an ideological crusade on behalf of the Protestant Work Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, of course people will hate their jobs!
In the middle of recession style "your raise this year is the fact that you still have a job", a 5% raise would earn you a lot of loyalty... and a 10% raise is stuff of legend.
A 10% raise for a department is cheap: say the business laid off 10 people in the department over the last 4 years, and 3 people remain to run a formerly (about) dozen person department. So you're spending 1/3rd of an average salary to keep those people on. Compared to the 20% a headhunter would take + the productivity loss of replacing workers... sounds like a deal to me.
What would you rather have given to you as an incentive: a raise, more free time or a weekly barbecue with the blokes from the office?
With that said - give me a stretch goal, and a huge bonus if I make it and I'm really happy. Most employers miss that bonus part.
Reading the article reminded me of my past life... I heard "treating one another with dignity and respect" several times a day.
Imagine being a regular joe employee: no equity, maybe a little bit of stock options, whose seen the price of things go up over the last 4 years little by little. Some things (health care, college savings, potentially rent/housing) costing a lot more than they did... while you see your department friends chipped away because of layoffs.
Maybe even getting your benefits cut little by little: the health insurance plan you had last year covered a little bit more, and was less expensive, than the one you have this year.
Money isn't everything, sure, but more office happy hours is a lot different from "Here's $50 more in your paycheck", or "Here's $5K lump sum as a quarterly bonus, thank you for your hard work"
s/tell/show/
I absolutely hate it when a manager tells me, "We really value your contributions," and then asks me to work 60-hour weeks. Words are cheap. Don't tell me that you value me. Show me.
Edited to add: To be fair, the article does allude to the fact that you have to back your words with action, but I want to make this distinction explicit. From the article: "To be successful, all your future behavior must demonstrate to your employees that their best career move is to remain working for you" (emphasis mine).
They really do value your contribution, at $x, and if they can get you to do more contributing for the same $x then they will be much happier.
If they didn't value your contribution they wouldn't want you to do more of it!
Summary: Since 1980s, the decision power in US corporations started to move to the hands of shareholders. They care about short term profits, not about the employees.
> And then, in the 1980s, the holy grail was found. It was called the principle of shareholder value maximization. It was argued that professional managers should be rewarded according to the amount they can give to shareholders. In order to achieve this, it was argued, first profits need to be maximized by ruthlessly cutting costs – wage bills, investments, inventories, middle-level managers, and so on. Second, the highest possible share of these profits needs tobe distributed to the shareholders – through dividends and share buybacks. In order to encourage managers to behave in this way, the proportion of their compensation packages that stock options account for needs to be increased, so that they identify more with the interests of the shareholders. The idea was advocated not just by shareholders, but also by many professional managers, most famously by Jack Welch, the long-time chairman of General Electric (GE), who is often credited with coining the term ‘shareholder value’ in aspeech in 1981.
> Soon after Welch’s speech, shareholder value maximization became the zeitgeist of the American corporate world. In the beginning, it seemed to work really well for both the managers and the shareholders. The shareof profits in national income, which had shown a downward trend since the 1960s, sharply rose in the mid 1980s and has shown an upward trend since then. And the shareholders got a higher share of that profit as dividends, while seeing the value of their shares rise. Distributed profits as a share of total US corporate profit stood at 35–45 per cent between the 1950s and the 1970s, but it has been onan upward trend since the late 70s and now stands at around 60 per cent. The managers saw their compensation rising through the roof, but shareholders stopped questioning their pay packages, as they were happy with ever-rising share prices and dividends. The practice soon spread to other countries – more easily to countries like Britain, which had a corporate power structure and managerial culture similar to those of the US, and less easily to other countries, as we shall see below
> Now, this unholy alliance between the professional managers and the shareholders was all financed by squeezing the other stakeholders in the company (which is why it has spread much more slowly to other rich countries where the other stakeholders have greater relative strength). Jobs were ruthlessly cut, many workers were fired and re-hired as non-unionized labour with lower wages and fewer benefits, and wage increases were suppressed (often by relocating to or outsourcing from low-wage countries, suchas China and India – or the threat to do so). The suppliers, and their workers, were also squeezed by continued cuts in procurement prices, while the government was pressured into lowering corporate tax rates and/or providing more subsidies, with the help of the threat of relocating to countries with lower corporate tax rates and/or higher business subsidies. As a result, income inequality soared and in a seemingly endless corporate boom (ending, of course, in 2008), the vast majority of the American and the British populations could share in the (apparent) prosperity only through borrowing atunprecedented rates.
To put a face on this: I had a boss who lectured my team on "shareholder value" and "capitalism" to justify his decisions regarding how he chose to restructure our team, set goals, etc. I left that company within 60 days of that lecture. Not because I fundamentally disagree with the philosophy of shareholder value, but because the outcome of his decisions destroyed my morale. Any attempt to discuss the issue with him was always steered back to increasing shareholder value. He didn't seem to grasp the fact that other things matter, too.
But that's not what happened. It was just rhetoric for covering executive team compensation maximization. Shareholders have been screwed along with the rest of us (he says while checking his 401k).
Wild-eyed socialist that I am, the single biggest, quickest improvement to corporate responsibility and governance would be to increase shareholder rights.
Moreover, if your primary shareholders are, say, hedge funds, the motivations for all parties have become so removed that in that case increased shareholder rights would almost always be a bad thing, especially if your metric is over worker happiness.
I'm aware of the "low information voter" problem. And yet I'm a pollyanna. I believe (as a matter of faith) that high quality information leads to high quality decisions.
Given the choice between corporate rule (oligarchy) and mob rule, I guess I'd side with the mob.
The decision-making power was always in the hands of the shareholders. They own the corporation, fer chrissake.
Corporations are no different. Shareholders want higher returns and less risk. But they ultimately get the compromise they're willing to live with.
Shareholder short-term value maximization is a bad thing.
Wow, that's quite a coincidence, because I don't really give a rat's ass about them either.
The growing popularity of entrepreneurship in the US is evidence that people want more autonomy. Phil Libin (Evernote) is right: you shouldn't start a startup for money or more spare time, but he's wrong that the only reason to do it is to "change the world." The most compelling reason to found a startup for those of us who've worked for a big-co is autonomy.
There is a middle ground though - Valve is a perfect example of a growing organization giving workers the autonomy they desire. It requires a rabid dedication to hiring the right people, but if you can pull it off this may just be the winning model of our age.
It has always been the environment.
Again, in my personal experience, pack people in like veal, and the misery rises. It certainly does, for me.
P.S. I will include in my definition of environment *sshole employees (of whatever level). Differing opinions, I can deal with. True manipulators have one solution: Get rid of them, either by their leaving or by your leaving.
Who becomes happy from that? Mankind is not doing anything worthwhile on this planet right now. We are in the dark ages.
Color me surprised.
This "lean" model has a number of results, but chief among them is that managerial accountability is only upward. With this model, even a terrible manager will have 2 or 3 loyal reports who do good work, clean up the messes, and pick up the slack. Usually, these are the 2-3 who are established enough to know the ropes and be effective, and who are holding on because they hope to outlive the bad manager.
Fundamentally, the problem is a system where decent managers are overburdened, bad managers aren't caught out, and almost all companies are poorly managed in general. The smart people figure this out and jump ship as soon as they figure out they're not going anywhere.
Can you describe what you mean by "lean" here?
I'm a little confused since the organisations I understand as following lean practices don't have the attributes that you talk about. Possibly this is a US/EU thing though...
Around where I tend to hang out when used in the context of organisations, especially technical ones, it usually refers to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_software_development - so I was confused :)