The Working Week 53

On this week's Working Week, Wayne talks to Dr Judith Bardwick, author of One Foot Out the Door - How to Combat the Psychological Recession That's Alienating Employees and Hurting American Business.

After years of downsizing, outsourcing and corporate greed gone wild, today's workers simply don't believe that their employers value them. And as new generations enter the workplace, this belief is only getting stronger.

As she says in her book, "after many decades of being fat, dumb, and happy, American businesses and American workers have been forced into a change. In a relatively short time, fat has morphed into thin and happy into frightened. Prolonged fear does not bode well for future success."

It follows, Judith argues, that employee's perceptions and feelings have a direct impact on their productivity, leading to the state of affairs in the U.S. where a huge proportion of workers are either actively looking for new jobs or going through the motions at their current jobs.

These vulnerable and resentful feelings amount to a wholesale "psychological recession" which is taking a real a toll on organizations' bottom line. And unless organizations face up to the problem, it is only going to get worse.

Judith is a writer, speaker and management consultant whose clients have included IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Johnson & Johnson. Prior to forming her consulting business in 1983, she was a professor and associate dean at the University of Michigan. She also served as a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego.

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• Dr. Bardwick speaks to the ingrained and covert beliefs that Dr. Bruce Lipton refers to in his work. Since 90% of the subconscious drives the results, it is in that 90% that the limiting notions of what is possible or not are embedded. Surfacing them and changing them is a matter of using out of your mind learning methods to see the unseen and then make the changes. The second thing i heard in the interview falls under personal spirit, where one's outlook on lif or sense of initiative has become compromised, usually thanks to cultural values that work against expression of talent. The outlook sounds like: is the glass half full or half empty? The color of the lens we see and interpret life with. Thanks for a new way of describing what amounts to outright neglect of the human spirit in the workplace: psychological recession.

  Dawna, Vancouver, B.C.