Disgruntled employees
I caught a bit of this morning's Forum on KQED (Download (MP3)) which was mostly about some civil servant in SF who sabotaged the City's computer systems, and what that means for employers and "health and security of the workplace."
The interesting bit for me was a Towers Perrin survey of 90,000 employees across 18 countries indicating "widespread disengagement".
- 21% "engaged with their work"
- 38% "partly or fully disengaged"
Also cited was a Gallup survey saying that
- 19% of employees are "actively disengaged" i.e. trying to sabotage the workforce
I bring this up because as XP evangelists we run into people who we want to see succeed and excel, but who might be dealing with the own demons. And a much-cited antidote mentioned on the show was "job rotation" and "employees training each other". So pair programming is not just good for the code, good for the dev, good for the team, good for the enterprise, but it might just stop you from going postal. ;-)
Those numbers also tell us that there is a vast amount of waste. Large numbers of people punch clocks and little else. Again, as XPers, we talk about productivity, but what does that really mean for someone who is comfortably numb?
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