Employers seeking to retain good workers and improve employees´ engagement in their jobs and companies may want to try two common-sense human resource policies, according to surveys by Sirota Survey Intelligence and the authors of The Enthusiastic Employee.

• Treat all employees with dignity and respect
  
  
• Deal effectively with the few workers who are consistently poor performers

Employees who do not feel treated with respect by their employers are more than three times more likely to intend to leave their jobs within two years than those who feel they are treated respectfully, according to Sirota Survey Intelligence and the authors of  The Enthusiastic Employee.  63% of those who do not feel treated with respect intend to leave within two years, vs. only 19% of those who feel they are shown respect, according to a Sirota survey of 370,378 employees.

Failure to deal effectively with the relatively few workers who are consistently poor performers may also decrease the extent to which other employees are engaged in their jobs and their companies.  Only 2 out of 5 employees who feel their companies are doing much too little to correct poor employee performance are favorably engaged at work, according to a Sirota survey of 34,330 employees.  This compares with a favorable engagement level of 73% among those who feel their companies are taking the necessary steps to correct poor employee performance.

Why Respect Matters

How well-respected employees feel is also directly related to how enthusiastic they are about their overall employment situations.  Employees who feel "very good" about how they are treated by management are more than three times as enthusiastic (highly satisfied) as those who just feel just "good" about how well they are treated.  37% of employees who feel very good about how they are respected are enthusiastic about their employers, compared with only 12% of employees who just feel good about how they are treated.

The main reason employees don´t feel they are treated with respect isn´t due to abusive behavior by management so much as it is management´s indifference - or the failure of management to go out of its way to demonstrate respect to employees, according to David Sirota, lead author of The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit By Giving Workers What They Want (Wharton School Publishing, 2005).

"Management´s ´sins´ are mainly acts of omission - what management does not do - rather than commission, such as abuse.  But indifferent treatment, such as failing to recognize and reward employees for jobs well done, has an enormous impact on how employees feel, and employers´ ability to retain them," added Sirota.

Added Douglas Klein, President of Sirota Survey Intelligence: "The data clearly support what many employees feel - that non-management employees are treated with less respect than management (especially senior management).  While almost half of senior-level managers feel they are shown a great deal of respect, just one-quarter of supervisors, and only one-fifth of non-management employees, feel the same way.  In fact, one out of every seven non-management employees actually feels they are treated poorly or very poorly."

Employees Want Poor Performance Dealt With

Fully 33% of management and 43% of non-management employees think their companies are not doing enough to deal with poor performers, say the authors of The Enthusiastic Employee.  Results are pervasive across union and non-union, as well as public and private sector, organizations.

"A very small percentage of employees at a typical workplace - usually around only 5 percent - are ´allergic to work,´ and do as little work as they possibly can," said Sirota.

"The main reason they get away with this is the lack of management´s will and persistence in stepping up to the problem.  Management needs either to help employees understand they must pull their own weight and coach them to improve, or let them go.  This is an unpleasant task that many managers choose to avoid," said Sirota.

Many non-managers feel that failure to effectively deal with poor performers is unfair to the great majority of employees who consistently work hard at their jobs.  "This finding belies a commonly held myth that many in non-management want to take it easy," said Klein.

Founded in 1972, Sirota Survey Intelligence (www.sirota.com) specializes in attitude research.  Headquartered in Purchase, NY, Sirota has conducted thousands of attitude surveys around the world that have helped organizations build strong, productive relationships with their employees, customers, communities, opinion leaders, investors, suppliers, and other publics.  The major results of their surveys have been summarized in The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want (Wharton School Publishing www.enthusiasticemployee.com). 

Compiled since 1972 and continuously updated, Sirota´s multi-national, multi-industry database comprises data from millions of employees collected through the firm´s employee survey research (predominantly among the Fortune 500).  It is possible that the results from the companies in Sirota´s database are more favorable than a national probability sample.