Positive Workforce Quotes

How does paying people more money make you more money? It works like this. The more you pay your workers, the more they spend. Remember, they're not just your workers- they're your consumers, too. The more they spend their extra cash on your products, the more your profits go up. Also, when employees have enough money that they don't have to live in constant fear of bankruptcy, they're able to focus more on their work- and be more productive. With fewer personal problems and less stress hanging over them, they'll lose less time at work, meaning more profits for you. Pay them enough to afford a late model car (i.e. one that works), and they'll rarely be late for work. And knowing that they'll be able to provide a better life for their children will not only give them a more positive attitude, it'll give them hope- and an incentive to do well for the company because the better the company does, the better they'll do. Of course, if you're like most corporations these days- announcing mass layoffs right after posting record profits- then you're already hemorrhaging the trust and confidence of your remaining workforce, and your employees are doing their jobs in a state of fear. Productivity will drop. That will hurt sales. You will suffer. Ask the people at Firestone: Ford has alleged that the tire company fired its longtime union employees, then brought in untrained scab workers who ended up making thousands of defective tires- and 203 dead customers later, Firestone is in the toilet.

leadership that knows what it wants, communicates those intentions, positions itself correctly, and empowers its workforce.

The conventional public opposition of 'liberal' and 'conservative' is, here as elsewhere, perfectly useless. The 'conservatives' promote the family as a sort of public icon, but they will not promote the economic integrity of the household or the community, which are the mainstays of family life. Under the sponsorship of 'conservative' presidencies, the economy of the modern household, which once required the father to work away from home - a development that was bad enough - now requires the mother to work away from home, as well. And this development has the wholehearted endorsement of 'liberals,' who see the mother thus forced to spend her days away from her home and children as 'liberated' - though nobody has yet seen the fathers thus forced away as 'liberated.' Some feminists are thus in the curious position of opposing the mistreatment of women and yet advocating their participation in an economy in which everything is mistreated.

At first glance, the stewardess appears to have been a reflection of conservative postwar gender roles—an impeccable airborne incarnation of the mythical homemaker of the 1950s who would happily abandon work to settle down with Mr. Right. A high-flying expert at applying lipstick, warming baby bottles, and mixing a martini, the stewardess was popularly imagined as the quintessential wife to be. Dubbed the “typical American girl,” this masterful charmer—known for pampering her mostly male passengers while maintaining perfect poise (and straight stocking seams) thirty thousand feet above sea level—became an esteemed national heroine for her womanly perfection. But while the the stewardess appears to have been an airborne Donna Reed, a closer look reveals that she was also popularly represented as a sophisticated, independent, ambitious career woman employed on the cutting edge of technology. This iconic woman in the workforce was in a unique position to bring acceptance and respect to working women by bridging the gap between the postwar domestic ideal and wage work for women. As both the apotheosis of feminine charm and American careerism, the stewardess deftly straddled the domestic ideal and a career that took her far from home. Ultimately, she became a crucial figure in paving the way for feminism in America.

I’m done being polite about this bullshit. My list of professional insecurities entirely stems from being a young woman. Big plot twist there! As much as I like to execute equality instead of discussing the blaring inequality, the latter is still necessary. Everything, everywhere, is still necessary. The more women who take on leadership positions, the more representation of women in power will affect and shift the deep-rooted misogyny of our culture—perhaps erasing a lot of these inherent and inward concerns. But whether a woman is a boss or not isn’t even what I’m talking about—I’m talking about when she is, because even when she manages to climb up to the top, there’s much more to do, much more to change. When a woman is in charge, there are still unspoken ideas, presumptions, and judgments being thrown up into the invisible, terribly lit air in any office or workplace. And I’m a white woman in a leadership position—I can only speak from my point of view. The challenges that women of color face in the workforce are even greater, the hurdles even higher, the pay gap even wider. The ingrained, unconscious bias is even stronger against them. It’s overwhelming to think about the amount of restructuring and realigning we have to do, mentally and physically, to create equality, but it starts with acknowledging the difference, the problem, over and over.

Qualities such as honesty, determination, and a cheerful acceptance of stress, which can all be identified through probing questionnaires and interviews, may be more important to the company in the long run than one's college grade-point average or years of "related experience." Every business is only as good as the people it brings into the organization. The corporate trainer should feel his job is the most important in the company, because it is. Exalt seniority-publicly, shamelessly, and with enough fanfare to raise goosebumps on the flesh of the most cynical spectator. And, after the ceremony, there should be some sort of permanent display so that employees passing by are continuously reminded of their own achievements and the achievements of others. The manager must freely share his expertise-not only about company procedures and products and services but also with regard to the supervisory skills he has worked so hard to acquire. If his attitude is, "Let them go out and get their own MBAs," the personnel under his authority will never have the full benefit of his experience. Without it, they will perform at a lower standard than is possible, jeopardizing the manager's own success. Should a CEO proclaim that there is no higher calling than being an employee of his organization? Perhaps not-for fear of being misunderstood-but it's certainly all right to think it. In fact, a CEO who does not feel this way should look for another company to manage-one that actually does contribute toward a better life for all. Every corporate leader should communicate to his workforce that its efforts are important and that employees should be very proud of what they do-for the company, for themselves, and, literally, for the world. If any employee is embarrassed to tell his friends what he does for a living, there has been a failure of leadership at his workplace. Loyalty is not demanded; it is created. Why can't a CEO put out his own suggested reading list to reinforce the corporate vision and core values? An attractive display at every employee lounge of books to be freely borrowed, or purchased, will generate interest and participation. Of course, the program has to be purely voluntary, but many employees will wish to be conversant with the material others are talking about. The books will be another point of contact between individuals, who might find themselves conversing on topics other than the weekend football games. By simply distributing the list and displaying the books prominently, the CEO will set into motion a chain of events that can greatly benefit the workplace. For a very cost-effective investment, management will have yet another way to strengthen the corporate message. The very existence of many companies hangs not on the decisions of their visionary CEOs and energetic managers but on the behavior of its receptionists, retail clerks, delivery drivers, and service personnel. The manager must put himself and his people through progressively challenging courage-building experiences. He must make these a mandatory group experience, and he must lead the way. People who have confronted the fear of public speaking, and have learned to master it, find that their new confidence manifests itself in every other facet of the professional and personal lives. Managers who hold weekly meetings in which everyone takes on progressively more difficult speaking or presentation assignments will see personalities revolutionized before their eyes. Command from a forward position, which means from the thick of it. No soldier will ever be inspired to advance into a hail of bullets by orders phoned in on the radio from the safety of a remote command post; he is inspired to follow the officer in front of him. It is much more effective to get your personnel to follow you than to push them forward from behind a desk. The more important the mission, the more important it is to be at the front.

Great leaders know that positive reinforcement of good performance is one of the best ways to maintain a lasting, committed workforce.

In 2020, 92.6 percent of CEOs on the Fortune 500 were white.36 A survey conducted that same year of more than forty thousand workers at 317 companies found that while white men make up just 35 percent of the entry-level workforce, they compose 66 percent of the C-suite.37 For every one hundred men who were promoted to manager, only fifty-eight black women and seventy-one Latina women were promoted. Only 38 percent of respondents in entry-level management positions were women of any race.

Masses of women feel angry because they were encouraged by feminist thinking to believe they would find liberation in the workforce. Mostly they have found that they work long hours at home and long hours at the job. Even before feminist movement encouraged women to feel positive about working outside the home, the needs of a depressed economy were already sanctioning this shift. If contemporary feminist movement had never taken place masses of women would still have entered the workforce, but it is unlikely that we would have the rights we have, had feminists not challenged gender discrimination. Women are wrong to “blame” feminism for making it so they have to work, which is what many women think. The truth remains that consumer capitalism was the force leading more women into the workforce. Given the depressed economy white middle-class families would be unable to sustain their class status and their lifestyles if women who had once dreamed solely of working as housewives had not chosen to work outside the home.

You better ask somebody!

While traders might have seen what was coming, it appeared that the general public did not. O’Neill saw a gap in the market in early 2000. A giant gap. The price of gas options was cheap—too cheap to account for what was apparently coming down the road. In other words, the insurance policies against a sudden price spike were not as expensive as they ought to have been. So O’Neill started snapping up the options and holding on to them, knowing that they would become more valuable. As usual, he wasn’t just making a bet that prices were going to go up. He was primarily betting that markets were about to become more volatile. He built up a large position with his natural gas options and underliers that was “long volatility,” meaning that he bet volatility would increase. He assumed that the positions would provide a good return for Koch Industries. He was wrong. He grossly underestimated the riches that the coming volatility was about to deliver. Senior executives in Koch Supply & Trading realized that they could no longer pay their traders like engineers. There was a competition for talent, and too many well-trained people were bleeding off the Koch trading floor. There was one person who seemed to resist big paydays for the traders: Charles Koch. The business failures of the 1990s impressed on Charles Koch the need for humility among his workforce. The thinking went that it was the high-flying ambition and loose planning that led to many of the business losses at Purina Mills.

In 1975, another landmark paper showed that mothers presiding over an empty nest were not despairing, as conventional wisdom had always assumed, but happier than mothers who still had children at home; during the eighties, as women began their great rush into the workforce, sociologists generally concluded that while work was good for women’s well-being, children tended to negate its positive effects.

Perhaps the most common device for giving people focus and direction is goal setting, but goals, as often as they are used, have their pros and cons. Sure, if you can convince everybody that profits must increase 20% next quarter or we’re going out of business, people will hurry around looking for ways to hype profits by 20%. When discussing “mission” I assigned Susan a goal of 25% improvement in sales, based on what I calculated was needed to avoid closing the factory and on what I felt her district could reasonably provide. It was not a number pulled from the ether, and I went to some length to explain this to her. Short of any such basis in reality, people will often do the easiest things, such as firing 20% of the workforce, canceling vital R&D programs, or simply not making any payments to suppliers. In other words, they will take achieving the goal as seriously as they feel you were in setting it; they will sense whether you have positioned yourself at the Schwerpunkt. Goals, as we all know, can be motivators. Cypress Semiconductor, a communications-oriented company founded in 1982, used to have a computer that tracked the thousands of self-imposed goals that its people fed into the system. Cypress founder T. J. Rodgers identified this automated goal tending system as the heart of his management style and a big factor in the company’s early success.136 Frankly, I find this philosophy depressing, not to mention a temptation to focus inward: If the boss places great importance on entering and tracking goals, as he obviously does, then that is what the other employees are going to consider important.137 In any case, what’s the big deal about meeting or missing a goal? A goal is an intention at a point in time. It is, to a large extent, an arbitrary target, whether you set it or someone above you assigns it. And we all know that numerical goals can be gamed, like banking (delaying) sales that we could have made this quarter to help us make quota next quarter. Unlike a Schwerpunkt, which gives focus and direction for chaotic and uncertain situations, what does a goal tell you? Just keep your head down and continue plugging away?

The pipeline that supplies the educated workforce is clock-full of women at the entry level, but by the time that same pipeline is filling leadership positions, it is overwhelmingly stocked with men.

In 2012, a series of studies compared men in more "modern" marriages (whose wives worked outside the home full-time) to men in more "traditional" marriages (whose wives worked at home). The researchers wanted to determine if a man's home arrangement affected his professional behavior. It did. Compared to men in modern marriages, men in more traditional marriages viewed the presence of women in the workforce less favorably. They also denied promotions to qualified female employees more often and were more likely to think that companies with a higher percentage of female employees ran less smoothly. The researchers speculated that men in traditional marriages are not overtly hostile toward women but instead are "benevolent sexists" ---holding positive yet outdated views about women (another term I have heard is "nice guy misogynists").

I left the practice of law when it became clear that my autistic son needed an advocate. The collective chaos of managing three children, a fourth pregnancy, two nannies, a housekeeper, and a demanding career finally overwhelmed me. My husband and I considered hiring someone to manage our autistic son’s education and therapies, but I simply couldn’t delegate his care. I needed firsthand knowledge of his diagnosis and how to treat it. Leaving professional life was hard. I walked away from friends, a schedule, a salary, and social stature. I plunged into full-time parenting, something at which I was not proficient—something that still perplexes me! However, remaining in the workforce would have been harder. I made a free choice, fully apprised of the risk I took, and I have never looked back. Philosopher Ayn Rand believed there is no such thing as sacrifice. Rather, there are only rational decisions that bring us closer to our ultimate goals. In other words, the choices we make are irrefutable evidence of what we value. Even generous acts reflect a set of values. Living in accordance with those values gratifies us, hence our gain outweighs our loss. In a world of scarcity and competing demands, Rand’s view has a certain hard-nosed rationality. We give up something we want for something we want more. We each have a single life, made up of finite seconds that tick inexorably away. How we choose to spend each day both expresses our values and carries us closer to our ultimate goals, even if we have never articulated precisely what those values and goals are. I was fortunate that my decision to come home had a positive, even miraculous, outcome for my son. Others make similar decisions without such obvious payback. I still have professional aspirations, and I’m pursuing them wholeheartedly, but I will not return to the practice of law. My time at home focused my values and helped me understand what I want to do with my remaining days, months, and years.

Employee Engagement “Employee Engagement” has become a very hot topic in recent years. The escalating statistics for disengagement are alarming. In 2015, the Gallup Polls’ “The State of the American Workforce” survey found that only 32.5 percent of the U.S. Workforce is engaged and committed where they work, and 54 percent say they would consider leaving their companies if they could receive a 20 percent raise elsewhere. Disengagement not only lowers performance, morale, and productivity, but it’s costing employers billions of dollars a year. It's a growing problem, which has many companies baffled.

What we believe about people, positive or negative, is self-fulfilling, and it’s fundamental to workforce attitude and motivation.

Two million may not at first seem enormous in a population of thirty-four million. But Aboriginal peoples are now one of the largest cultural groups in the country. Combine that size with their historic role, their treaty powers, their legal and constitutional positions and their influence over large stretches of commodity-rich land. Think of them as the majority, or the near majority, or the second-largest group in the three northern territories as well as in Labrador, the northern half of Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. Soon to be one-third of the Saskatchewan workforce. Think of them as the single most convincing argument for Canadian legitimacy in the Arctic. Think of their continuing victories in the courts, re-establishing the historic balance. These numbers and legal strengths are now

Correlations made by big data are likely to reinforce negative bias. Because big data often relies on historical data or at least the status quo, it can easily reproduce discrimination against disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities. The propensity models used in many algorithms can bake in a bias against someone who lived in the zip code of a low-income neighborhood at any point in his or her life. If an algorithm used by human resources companies queries your social graph and positively weighs candidates with the most existing connections to a workforce, it makes it more difficult to break in in the first place. In effect, these algorithms can hide bias behind a curtain of code. Big data is, by its nature, soulless and uncreative. It nudges us this way and that for reasons we are not meant to understand. It strips us of our privacy and puts our mistakes, secrets, and scandals on public display. It reinforces stereotypes and historical bias. And it is largely unregulated because we need it for economic growth and because efforts to try to regulate it have tended not to work; the technologies are too far-reaching and are not built to recognize the national boundaries of our world

Correlations made by big data are likely to reinforce negative bias. Because big data often relies on historical data or at least the status quo, it can easily reproduce discrimination against disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities. The propensity models used in many algorithms can bake in a bias against someone who lived in the zip code of a low-income neighborhood at any point in his or her life. If an algorithm used by human resources companies queries your social graph and positively weighs candidates with the most existing connections to a workforce, it makes it more difficult to break in in the first place. In effect, these algorithms can hide bias behind a curtain of code. Big data is, by its nature, soulless and uncreative. It nudges us this way and that for reasons we are not meant to understand. It strips us of our privacy and puts our mistakes, secrets, and scandals on public display. It reinforces stereotypes and historical bias. And it is largely unregulated because we need it for economic growth and because efforts to try to regulate it have tended not to work; the technologies are too far-reaching and are not built to recognize the national boundaries of our world’s 196 sovereign nation-states. Yet would it be best to try to shut down these technologies entirely if we could? No. Big data simultaneously helps solve global challenges while creating an entirely new set of challenges. It’s our best chance at feeding 9 billion people, and it will help solve the problem of linguistic division that is so old its explanation dates back to the Old Testament and the Tower of Babel. Big data technologies will enable us to discover cancerous cells at 1 percent the size of what can be detected using today’s technologies, saving tens of millions of lives. The best approach to big data might be one put forward by the Obama campaign’s chief technology officer, Michael Slaby, who said, “There’s going to be a constant mix between your qualitative experience and your quantitative experience. And at times, they’re going to be at odds with each other, and at times they’re going to be in line. And I think it’s all about the blend. It’s kind of like you have a mixing board, and you have to turn one up sometimes, and turn down the other. And you never want to be just one or the other, because if it’s just one, then you lose some of the soul.” Slaby has made an impressive career out of developing big data tools, but even he recognizes that these tools work best when governed by human judgment. The choices we make about how we manage data will be as important as the decisions about managing land during the agricultural age and managing industry during the industrial age. We have a short window of time—just a few years, I think—before a set of norms set in that will be nearly impossible to reverse. Let’s hope humans accept the responsibility for making these decisions and don’t leave it to the machines.

The more satisfied a person is with her position, the less likely she is to leave.3 So the irony—and, to me, the tragedy—is that women wind up leaving the workforce precisely because of things they did to stay in the workforce. With the best of intentions, they end up in a job that is less fulfilling and less engaging. When they finally have a child, the choice—for those who have one—is between becoming a stay-at-home mother or returning to a less-than-appealing professional situation. Joanna

When low skilled immigrants flood a labor market, it makes high-skilled workers rarer as a share of the total workforce, increasing the ratio of low skill to high skill workers. This benefits high-skilled workers by improving their relative position in the marketplace, increasing their bargaining position and raising their incomes.

By and large, America’s white-collar corporate workforce drank the Kool-Aid, as the expression goes, and accepted positive thinking as a substitute for their former affluence and security. They did not take to the streets, shift their political allegiance in large numbers, or show up at work with automatic weapons in hand. As one laid-off executive told me with quiet pride, “I’ve gotten over my negative feelings, which were so dysfunctional.

Elites successfully used professional credentials to maintain their positions of power. This certainly reflected some degree of skill and expertise, or human capital, but not exclusively. Rather, sociologists have shown how the top of the educational hierarchy was a key arena for strategies of stratification that effectively perpetuated class distinctions.22 Rather than seeing education as an indicator of productive skills, Marxist scholars have stressed its role in socializing a compliant, capitalist workforce.

MY DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH makes it crystal clear that emerging countries, outside of China and a few others like Thailand, will dominate demographic growth in the next global boom. But the even more powerful factor is the urbanization process, with the typical emerging country only 50 percent urbanized, as compared with 85 percent in the typical developed country. In emerging countries, urbanization increases household income as much as three times from its level in rural areas. As people move into the cities, they also climb the social and economic ladder into the middle class. With the cycles swirling around us for the next several years and the force of revolution reshaping our world, emerging markets are in the best position to come booming out the other side. That’s why investors and businesses should be investing more in emerging countries when this crash likely sees its worst, by early 2020. My research is unique when it comes to projecting urbanization, GDP per capita gains from it, and demographic workforce growth trends and peaks in emerging countries. It’s not what I’m most known for, but it’s the most strategic factor in the next global boom, which emerging countries will dominate. As a general guideline, those in South and Southeast Asia, from the Philippines to India and Pakistan, have strong demographic growth, urbanization trends, and productivity gains ahead. This is not the case for China, though. Latin America has mostly strong demographic growth, but limited continued urbanization and productivity gains. Much of the Middle East and Africa have not joined the democratic-capitalism party, but those regions otherwise have the most extreme urbanization and demographic potential. One day they’ll be the best places to invest, but not yet.

Feminist scholarship has documented that the positive benefits masses of women have gained by entering the workforce have more to do with increased self-esteem and positive participation in community. No matter her class the woman who stayed at home working as a housewife was often isolated, lonely, and depressed.

always look at the bright side of things to maintain a good mood and a positive mindset.

In recent decades, as the economy has shifted and large companies promising lifelong employment have given way to freelance jobs and migratory careers, understanding motivation has become increasingly important. In 1980, more than 90 percent of the American workforce reported to a boss. Today more than a third of working Americans are freelancers, contractors, or in otherwise transitory positions. The workers who have succeeded in this new economy are those who know how to decide for themselves how to spend their time and allocate their energy. They understand how to set goals, prioritize tasks, and make choices about which projects to pursue. People who know how to self-motivate, according to studies, earn more money than their peers, report higher levels of happiness, and say they are more satisfied with their families, jobs, and lives.

From a logical standpoint, it’s more likely that the future will be “protopian.” The world won’t be perfect and happy, but it won’t be an abysmal dystopia either. This means there will be positives and negatives, but overall, it will be a better world. Digital marketing consultant Marcus Wong writes, “Protopia defines a state where we’re no longer fighting for survival (Dystopia), nor are we accepting perfection (Utopia…. Every opportunity to create something new, something faster, something ‘better’—creates a new world of problems that we would have never initially created. This is not a bad thing; some problems are good to have.”[29] In short, we can’t eliminate problems without introducing new ones. This is why we will see progress, but not perfection.[30] Will robots take some workers’ jobs? Yes. There will be automation, but automation will also generate new jobs.

CHAPTER 4 SUMMARY: BEST WAYS 71–80 71. When it comes to ensuring your family’s financial well-being, and securing a meaningful and rewarding job, you need to create a written action plan or a MAP (Meticulous Action Plan). 72. When you create a MAP, you are actually programming your own “employment GPS” so you can go from where you are to where you want to be. 73. When you’re done developing your action plan, you’ll have a highly structured schedule of activities for each day of the week. This includes your job transition campaign as well as your personal, social, and fitness activities. 74. If you are unemployed, you should invest 50, 60, or 70 hours a week on your job campaign. If you have a full-time job, you need to set aside a defined number of hours every week as your investment in your future. 75. Whether you are employed and looking for a better job or out of work seeking a new one, you must hold yourself fully accountable for putting in as many hours as possible and getting the most out of every hour you put in. 76. The first question you will need to address is, how many hours a week will you commit to your job transition campaign? Then, based on the number of weekly hours you’ll invest in getting a new job, your next step is to break weekly hours down into daily hours. 77. There are 13 primary job transition strategies for landing a job in troubled economic times. Your job is to determine which 4 to 6 strategies will be most effective for you. a. Networking and contact development b. Target marketing (identifying companies you want to work for) c. Internet searches and postings d. Federal jobs e. Search firms and employment agencies f. Blogs with job listings g. Classified advertisements in newspapers and trade journals h. Job fairs i. College placement departments and alumni associations j. Workforce System and One-Stops k. Volunteer work l. Job transition strategists m. Creative self-marketing 78. Once you have identified which job transition strategies will work best for your campaign, determine when, during the week, you will work on each. You want to create a structured weekly schedule. When you create a structured weekly schedule, you will have a detailed plan with specific daily tasks both for your job campaign and for personal and social activities. 79. Once you have a structured weekly schedule, you must set goals that you want to achieve from your weekly activities. A MAP without specific goals is not an effective plan. You will want to set specific goals for each strategy so you can track your success or modify the MAP if you are not achieving your weekly goals. 80. Prepare for the worst-case scenario. It is vitally important to remain in a positive, optimistic, and enthusiastic state of mind. But sometimes your plan won’t come to fruition as quickly as you’d like. So expect the best, but plan for the worst. This would include looking at your long- and short-term finances and health and other issues that need to be addressed to free you up to concentrate on getting your next job.

sects, making it almost impossible to create a one law fits all when it comes to women’s rights. Still, women are gaining ground with over 50 percent of college graduates female while 27 percent of the workforce is female. Women in Qatar have made many remarkable advances, mainly due to the royal family of Qatar who established various women’s committees charged with proposing programs to upgrade the potential of women. Women in Qatar are allowed to vote and even run as government candidates. Women have even held positions in the cabinet. There are more female students at university than male students and women hold 52% of the jobs in the Ministry of Education. Women even outnumber men in the healthcare field. Of course, the society itself is very conservative, but the government is working to ensure that women are encouraged to pursue their private goals. Over the past few years women’s lives have greatly changed in