The Working Week 53. Dr Judith Bardwick on the psychological recession
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.
