Workers: Trust Is Lacking

Results from the second annual APCO Worldwide and Gagen McDonald employee engagement study show high rates of confidence among employees, but they sense their companies aren’t committed to them.

The Employee Confidence Index, which measures optimism, and the Employee Connection Index, which measures loyalty, yielded high numbers – 81.4 and 83.5, respectively. But the Employer Connection Index posted a score of just 63.3.

The firms offer three reasons for the gap:

•Degree to which the executive team supports and lives the company values

•Authentic, open and honest communication from the executive team

•Employees receiving consistent information from all the leaders in the company

The firms surveyed 500 full-time workers across the United States who have been with their companies for at least one year and work for companies with at least 100 employees.

This perceived lack of commitment by employers should not come as any surprise.

Many employers during the Great Recession that began in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009 dumped bodies like a snake shedding its skin.



Millions of loyal and veteran workers found themselves on the outside looking in – and wondering what the hell happened in a blink of an eye.

Some of the layoffs and buyouts across a multitude of industries – everything from publishing to construction – were justified.

Who could argue the logic of a half loaf being better than no loaf if a company’s survival is at stake?

But now there seems to be a nagging sense among many workers – including 14.5 million people who remain unemployed – that some companies took advantage of the national downturn to cut costs by axing employees.

These employers seem to fall into two categories:

•privately owned companies which had grown accustomed to the revenue boom days of the 1990s, when double-digit profits were possible.

•publicly held companies which had cut budgets to the bone before the Great Recession to make the bottom line rosier for shareholders.

I worked for both types of companies in my former newspaper career, and I can say it does make a big difference where you sit when things go wrong.

My former employer, The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., cut its staff by about 40 percent in late 2008 and early 2009.

The state’s biggest daily paper belongs to Advance Publications, the largest family-owned (Newhouse) media company in the United States.

The Ledger’s owners warned the paper would be closed or sold if steep staff cuts were not made.

The family owner offered a severance package of full salary and health care benefits for one year – a generous deal they did not have to strike with staffers.

Contrast that with the Home News Tribune of East Brunswick, N.J., another former newspaper employer of mine.

The corporate owner, Gannett Co. (USA Today), has sliced hundreds of jobs from its New Jersey papers, including the HNT, with little or no severance pay.

Those cuts continue at the HNT and follow a downsizing of the paper’s staff that began in the early 2000s as a way for management to improve its bottom line.

When the Great Recession hit, Gannett had no cushion and its stock fell like a rock.

I enjoyed my 30 years as a print journalist, and I learned a great deal about people, places and life – good and bad.

But perhaps the most valuable lesson I took away is simply this: Trust is earned, not given.

 Ken Cocuzzo

iDaily Could Be Game Changer

Out of adversity comes innovation, and perhaps nothing more illustrates that leap forward than the Daily, a joint venture by Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch to offer an iPad news publication exclusively via download.

It could provide a much-needed digital game changer which the print newspaper industry, battered by online information competition and sharp advertising declines, has sought desperately during these recession years.

Simply put, the idea is to have the news you want at your fingertips whenever and wherever you want it – something dead-tree publishing by its very format could never do. The Daily could be the business model for news publishers now and in the future.

The collaboration between Murdoch (right), head of the media giant News Corp., and Jobs, chief executive of Apple, was done secretly in New York for several months.

The Daily promises to be the world's first “newspaper” designed exclusively for new tablet-style computers such as Apple's iPad, with a launch planned for early next year.

Intended to combine “a tabloid sensibility with a broadsheet intelligence,” the publication represents Murdoch's desire to push the newspaper business beyond the realm of print in the 21st century.

There will be no “print edition” or “web edition,” or competing/overlapping formats. The central innovation, developed with assistance from Apple engineers, will be to dispatch the publication automatically to an iPad or any of the growing number of similar tablet devices.

With no printing or distribution costs, the United States-focused Daily will cost 99 cents a week.

Reports say it will operate from the 26th floor of the News Corp. offices in New York, where 100 journalists have been hired, including Chris D’Amico, former managing editor of The Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest daily newspaper (and a previous employer of this author).

Murdoch, 79, whose News Corp. owns the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, is said to have had the idea for the Daily after studying a survey that suggested readers spent more time immersed in their iPads than they did – comparatively speaking — on the Internet, where unfocused surfing is typical.

Sources say Murdoch is committed to the project, in part, because he believes the Daily will demonstrate consumers are willing to pay for high- quality, original content online.

That position runs counter to current thinking that Web publications need print editions to justify themselves to advertisers.

Putting aside personalities, we, at WMB, see merit to the Murdoch-Jobs partnership because it represents the entrepreneurial spirit that leads to innovation. You need visionaries with leadership and daring to make advances regardless of the type of industry.

Murdoch and Jobs (left) have proven themselves in previous endeavors, so there is no reason to believe the Daily cannot succeed. This product is not a bridge (bandage?) between online and print news editions; it’s something completely different under the sun.

WMB believes there always will be a place for good journalism, regardless of the format, so why not increase access for the average consumer. Projections are there will be 40 million iPads in circulation by the end of 2011.

A source says of Murdoch: “He envisions a world in which every family has an iPad in the home and it becomes the device from which they get their news and information. If only 5 percent of those 40 million subscribe to the Daily, that's already 2 million customers.”

WMB believes there’s no fuzzy math in that assessment, just the logic of a businessman who sees a big opportunity within reach through the marriage of smart technology and quality content by professionals.

There also could be some new, strong branches for dead-tree journalists sidelined by the abrupt shake-up in the print news industry. While many of these professionals remain computer savvy enough to change with the times, their employers were stuck in the information highway’s slow lane.

The Daily could be the catalyst, or game changer, for competitive journalism on a scale not seen since the days of multiple daily papers in America’s largest cities. It could be the “what next” for journalism.

As for me, I practice what I preach at writenowworks.com. If you like this post, please share it!