Needed a new contract between workers and employers

There are warning signs all over the place.  You do not have to talk to many corporate employees to figure out that our current model of doing business doesn't necessarily do a great job for either consumers or workers.

Investors, CEOs, and corporate insiders do pretty well.  Obviously, there are people who would probably disagree with me, but I think I have some evidence that is hard to refute.

There are exceptions to every general observation, but more and more I am convinced we have become a an economy based on throw-away employees. More and more employees are no longer real employees with benefits. They end up being contractors with litte security.

Employees used to stay with corporations for life. That is long gone. Lean and mean corporations are not so lean but plenty mean.

Skilled workers leaving corporations rarely translate into new companies driven by the innovative ideas of those frustrated employees. In spite of it being easier throw up your own shingle, the real barriers to entry in the corporate world are high. Too often former employees are shackled with non-compete clauses that keep them out of the businesses they know best. I even know of someone at a large lawn service company who has a non-compete clause.  While there are companies that understand how to harness the power of their workers, I suspect they are far outweighed by companies whose vision is limited by that of their CEOs and the management structure around them.

I have often said the best way to build anything is to hire competent people and get out of their way.  That is a simplistic way of looking at things, but I think it is harder and harder to do because of employee churn and short-term goals of management.

We need companies that achieve their current goals and at the same time take bright, hardworking new college graduates and the best of their about-to-retire employees and build new lines of business or better ways of doing business based on new ideas meeting experience. Now new employees and veteran employees are often like ships passing in the dark.  Only by infusing new employees with the experience of older employees will we be able to compete in a global economy. 

While I nodded my head at a few of the points in David Brook's article, A Reality-Based Economy, (Times Select Required), I had to laugh at the following comment.

...companies are getting more efficient at singling out and rewarding productive workers. A study by the economists Thomas Lemieux, Daniel Parent and W. Bentley MacLeod suggests that as much as 24 percent of the increase in male wage inequality is due to performance pay.

Sixth, inequality is also rising in part because people up the income scale work longer hours.

Brooks' comment would make sense if he said companies were getting better at rewarding their CEOs while ignoring almost all their other employees.

I am sure there are a few companies that are good at handing out performance rewards, but I also know that the process is usually fatally flawed.  I can verify that many people who work long hours do so because they are afraid of losing their jobs if they don't.  Getting more pay for more work isn't usually part of the equation.

I know how hard I had to work to reward a couple of exceptional employees.  Really the only way that I could reward one was to help him go to work for someone else in the company. I also know of a couple of exceptional employees who ended up working for a completely useless boss who decided they were not needed anymore when they were exactly the type of employees the company needed.  He preferred to hire his friends even if they were not qualified.

American business has become more and more of a who you know is more important than what you know. While some companies can escape this, most don't. I have made a lot of friends while in the business world, but I have not made the mistake of hiring people because they were friends.

We need to work hard to get back to a corporate environment which rewards not only hard work and intelligence but the ability to get the job done.  That would be a far cry from the companies where personal ties determine the direction of the company and who gets rewarded or even who keeps their job.

Companies need to figure out how to absorb the critical assessment of their weaknesses which are often painfully obvious to longtime employees leaving for retirement or another job. One of the best sales people I have ever known left Apple.  His real push to leave was frustration in trying to do a job that management did not even understand much less help him get it done.

I wonder how many great workers are leaving companies with their secrets of how to get the job done while young workers are being thrown into a corporate meat grinder with the hopes that they might end up successful? I often think America's hiring policy is taking new workers, throw them up against the wall, and see who sticks.  Doing otherwise would be to take a long-term view instead of focusing on quarterly profits.

Likely seeing who sticks is not going to be a strategy for success in the global economy. Neither is our messed corporate performance reward system. I would like to see corporations keep hiring those new workers but actually, commit real resources to grow them and making them part of the companies.

While blind corporate allegiance isn't very healthy, neither is this new environment where there is no corporate allegiance and certainly no attempt to build the kind of employees that could create unbelievable customer service and perhaps better ways of doing business. I would like to see a minimum one-year commitment between employees and companies with some challenges in the mix for both employee and company.

Right now too many good potential employees get ground up.  I would also like to see some basic fairness imposed on the whole process of when employees are let go.  I saw many employees leave because no one was around to help them become productive. In our current, political and judicial environment companies can pretty well do whatever they want when getting rid of employees.

Just ask any aging technology person how they are being treated by their employer assuming they haven't already been shown the door because they were too expensive.