If they could choose, would they stay?

In these troubled times, it’s hard for organizations to focus on employee moral and happiness. I’ve heard many ‘leaders’ say things like “they should be happy they have a job” when confronted with low moral and employee unhappiness.

My response to those ‘leaders’ is this:

Think about what will happen when the economy rebounds and the job market returns…will you be so casually responding to your employees’ low morale? Most stare blankly at me and have no response.

I then hit them with “Do you think your employees will stay in your organization as soon as the rebound happens?” To their credit, most have been honest and answered “no”.

Organizations *must* focus on their people during this downturn if they have any hope of surviving and thriving when the economy picks back up.

If you’re a manager, ask yourself this question to keep your focus on your people: If they could choose, would they stay?

About Eric

Eric D. Brown, D.Sc. is a technology consultant, investor and entrepreneur with an interest in using technology and data to solve real-world business problems. Eric currently runs his own consulting practice focused on helping organizations use their data more efficiently when combined with Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Additionally, he is the Chief Information Officer of Sundial Capital Research, publisher of SentimenTrader

Eric received his Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) in Information Systems in 2014 with a dissertation titled “Analysis of Twitter Messages for Sentiment and Insight for use in Stock Market Decision Making”. His research interests are currently in the areas of decision support, data science, big data, natural language processing, sentiment analysis and social media analysis.In recent years, he has combined sentiment analysis, natural language processing and big data approaches to build innovative systems and strategies to solve interesting problems. You can read some of his research here: Eric D. Brown on ResearchGate

In addition, he is an entrepreneur that has launched a few companies with the most recent being a company focused on proving data analytics and visualization services to the financial markets.

Eric is also a semi-professional photographer and enjoys taking photographs when he can.

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Stacey Derbinshire

14 years ago

Great post. I will read your posts frequently. Added you to the RSS reader.

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[…] If they could choose, would they stay? […]

Billigflug

Hey In this times humans work like machines- They must be funtional. It´s very cheerless, but this is the actualy truth. There´s nobody who ask you the question if you realy want this job- you must do it for your family/ because of high taxes and huge prices you didn´t have any choice. There´s nobody which support your family. In this time theres no room for wishes.But this system couldn´t work forever, because of missing satisfaction.I hope there will be an improvement, and everybody could take a choice and get his “pefect job”.Standing up in the morning with a smile… Read more »

Eric D. Brown

Billigflug – I disagree.

Of course, there is no utopia, but you can build an organization that gives people the ability to enjoy their work. Treating people like machines is what has built business into a soul-less beast.

New blog post: If they could chose, would they stay? http://tinyurl.com/5lhruj

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