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A battered workforce carries on
The hours are long, the stress high and layoff fears deep, with no relief in sight
11:45 AM CST on Saturday, March 20, 2004
When Dean Xeros entered corporate America in the late 1980s, he didn't think twice about job security.
"There was still a lot of employee loyalty. You never worried about layoffs or even expense freezes," he says.
But for the technology sales veteran, everything changed in the late '90s. Within a two-year period, he weathered two layoffs and his earnings dropped by nearly half from their peak at the height of the dot-com frenzy. He even worried about whether his travel and other business expenses would get reimbursed.
"It was pretty much everyone out for themselves," he says.
The second-generation Greek American had had enough. In July 2002, he launched his own company, Opa Foods, which sells a line of Greek food seasonings that he created.
Though Mr. Xeros, 44, wound up having to take another sales job, he works on his food company nights and weekends, and dreams of one day spending all his time running it.
"I'm getting tired of having my destiny, my future and the welfare of my family controlled by others," he says.
Mr. Xeros' attitude isn't unique. For many workers, life in corporate America is increasingly turning into a pressure cooker loaded with nonstop stress, long hours and never-ending fears about the next layoffs.
Workers are being asked to do more with less and at faster speeds even as they contend with downsizings, restructurings and now offshoring.
As if the wage freezes and pay cuts of recent years weren't enough, many are now forced to shoulder more of the cost of rising health care premiums. Some stand to lose overtime pay, thanks to new government rules soon to go into effect. And a growing number of workers can't even send e-mails without their employers monitoring their messages.
"It used to be working hard meant you got a promotion," says Mitchell Marks, a San Francisco organizational psychologist who helps companies cope with mergers and other workforce changes. "Now working hard means staying in the same place."
'A steamroller'
The more demanding and intense corporate environment – a dramatic switch from 15 years ago – can be blamed on a number of forces, from technological change to globalization and companies' focus on meeting Wall Street's short-term demands, workplace experts say.
"Everybody is now part of a global workforce," says Arlene Johnson, vice president of WFD Consulting, a Watertown, Mass., human resources research and consulting firm. "We now know our competition is all over the world.
"The pace and the reaction time, the speed at which people are trying to process things has really increased."
Bruce Tulgan, a workplace expert and chief executive of RainmakerThinking Inc. in New Haven, Conn., describes the situation as the "real new economy – where employers must be ruthless to survive and individuals must be very aggressive to succeed."
In a recent study, his firm found that employers are less tolerant of employee error, waste and inefficiency. At the same time, workers are getting less management guidance and support, less downtime and greater fear of imminent job loss.
"There is a lot of grumbling on the front lines like, 'I don't know how long I can do this,' " Mr. Tulgan says. "Market forces are like a steamroller. Market forces leave casualties."
Little balance
The focus on faster, better, cheaper is inserting itself into the workplace like never before.
Most employees must not only book their travel arrangements themselves but also hunt for the cheapest fares and stay at budget motels. Many are on call 24 hours a day, rising early or staying late at the office to talk to colleagues in other countries. And these days, only top executives get assistants.
In addition to all that, technology hasn't reduced many employees' workload.
"There's still more pressure on you as an individual to take on more because of the advances in technology," says an employee of a Dallas real estate company. The worker, who did not want to be identified, says his firm is getting by with 70 employees instead of the 300 normally associated with a company its size.
These kinds of demands are making it nearly impossible for people to achieve the work-life balance that a host of management experts touted as the model for life in the '90s. Employees were supposed to work hard but also have a life, with flexible schedules and understanding bosses.
Instead, jobs have become so demanding that more than three-quarters of employees go into work when they're sick, according to ComPsych Corp., a provider of employee assistance programs. Unscheduled absenteeism fell to an all-time low last year, says CCH Inc., an employment law and human resources firm.
In fact, working 60-hour weeks and taking only one week of vacation is now perceived to be a good thing, says Frank Kenna III, president of the Marlin Co., an employee communications firm in North Haven, Conn.
"People are wearing that as a badge of honor," he says. "People are proud of that."
So far, the intensifying corporate rat race has yet to significantly alter overall job satisfaction.
This measure, which takes into account a variety of factors, has been relatively stable over the last decade, says Richard Arvey, a professor who teaches a course on job satisfaction at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.
But not everyone is buying into a life full of unrelenting pressure and little or no job security.
A few years ago, Dora Tovar found herself working 10-hour days and many weekends as director of public relations for the Bravo Group, an advertising agency that serves the Hispanic market.
Three days a week, she flew from her home in New York City to meet clients in Miami, Chicago and other cities. Phone calls from her office interrupted each day of every vacation she took.
When the World Trade Center towers came tumbling down on 9-11, Ms. Tovar began rethinking her priorities.
"I really had no life," she says. "I came to the realization that, if I am going to work this hard, I might as well work for myself."
So two years ago, Ms. Tovar started her own public relations consulting company aimed at the Hispanic market. She moved from Queens, N.Y., to Arlington and now works out of her home.
Today, the 40-year-old still travels to see clients but is often able to greet her two children when they arrive home from school each weekday.
Corporate America has this attitude that "we pay you a significant amount of money, therefore there is this entitlement to your life at any hour," she says.
Improving morale
Many employers recognize the importance of employee morale. And they are seeking to improve it.
Hewlett-Packard Co. surveys its more than 93,000 employees worldwide each year to try to make the company one of the best places to work. This year, it is also setting aside 20 percent more money for its employee education and development budget, said company spokeswoman Brigida Bergkamp.
Last year, Electronic Data Systems Corp. increased its funding for raises and bonuses for some workers and upped the amount of severance pay for longtime employees.
Service companies such as Delta Air Lines Inc. are especially aware of the need to keep workers satisfied.
"In order to provide this level of customer service, our final and perhaps most important area of focus is to ensure a high level of employee morale," Gerald Grinstein, Delta's chief executive, told Wall Street analysts during a January earnings conference call. "The quality of that service relies heavily on the spirit, confidence and motivation of our workforce. In other words, high employee morale."
Companies are trying to improve the workplace environment by adding or expanding employee assistance programs, says Barbara Lyon, who teaches human resource management at Tarleton State University's College of Business Administration in Stephenville.
They are also holding more employee recognition sessions to bolster morale.
But during tough times, morale often takes a backseat to cost cuts. In recent years, many employers stopped dangling hefty bonuses, and many of them cut the free massages and other perks that had popped up during the '90s economic boom.
Pay cuts, wage freezes and layoffs took their place. The shift has made many workers less loyal to their employers than they used to be. A January survey of 1,200 U.S. workers by the consulting firm Watson Wyatt & Co. found that overall employee commitment levels have dropped since 2002.
Loyalty lacking
A research firm, Walker Information, found that although 75 percent of workers were satisfied with their jobs, only 30 percent were truly loyal to their employers.
That means many workers are going to bolt for the exits as soon as the economy generates plenty of new jobs, workplace experts predict.
"Those employers that have been treating their employees shabbily are going to find their best workers leaving," says Roger Herman, a workplace futurist and author. "When things start picking up, they are going to pick up very strongly."
Until that point arrives, many workers find themselves staggering under the weight of expanding workloads and onerous deadlines.
"We're burning up the resilience of our workforce," says Ms. Johnson of WFD Consulting. "I think we are on the verge of starting to say, 'OK, we need to relook at how work is done.' "
The human toll is all too evident to Mr. Marks, the organizational psychologist. During his 20 years in practice in San Francisco, he has assisted in 100 corporate mergers and downsizings.
Today, people are taking longer to return phone calls, he notes, and when they do call back, they are a bit ruder.
"It's not because they are bad people," he says. "They are frazzled. People are just running scared.
"People can't change, change, change. People aren't machines," he warns. "It's going to get worse before it gets better – this focus on speed at any cost, this focus on short-term results. The human machine is going to break."
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