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Jim Clifton, Chairman of Gallup, wrote an interesting book entitled The Coming Jobs War. This is a book that everyone should read. It explains why creating good quality jobs are at the heart of our nation’s economy and our individual economic security. The construction industry has complained for decades about the difficulty of hiring and retaining qualified people. While the recession has masked that issue in the short-term, attracting people to the industry is really about creating quality jobs. Of course, some companies do a better job than others in creating desirable jobs. But if your company is struggling with finding enough good people, you should look at the quality of the jobs your company provides.

Jim Clifton, Chairman of Gallup, wrote an interesting book entitled The Coming Jobs War. This is a book that everyone should read. It explains why creating good quality jobs are at the heart of our nation’s economy and our individual economic security.

The construction industry has complained for decades about the difficulty of hiring and retaining qualified people. While the recession has masked that issue in the short-term, attracting people to the industry is really about creating quality jobs. Of course, some companies do a better job than others in creating desirable jobs. But if your company is struggling with finding enough good people, you should look at the quality of the jobs your company provides. This is important because Gallup’s research indicates only 28 percent of employees are actively engaged, another 53 percent are not engaged, and a staggering 19 percent are actively disengaged. While the 53 percent are just going through the motions, the 19 percent are actively doing harm to your business.

If you can increase the number of people actively engaged in your business and reduce those that are disengaged, what would that do for the productivity of your organization? The question is how do you get your people actively engaged?  In his book Clifton identifies five issues that should be addressed to insure your company is creating good jobs.

1. A good job means the worker is employed full time, works at least 30 hours per week, and creates an income that is above the poverty line and allows the worker to contribute to the country’s economic output.
2. The worker knows what is expected at work and has inherent capacity to perform the required tasks of the job.
3. The boss takes an interest in the success and development of the worker.
4. The worker’s opinion counts in your organization.
5. The worker feels that his or her job has an important mission and purpose.

The above five criteria will not solve all the problems, because as Clifton points out there are several issues outside the company that must be addressed by business leaders. However, if you aren’t addressing your internal issues, the fixing of the external problems might actually hurt your company because people will move to other employers that are engaging their employees.

This problem is urgent. This isn’t something for another day. What are you doing to engage your people?  What actions are you going to take?

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