If you have any doubts about that, take a look at how often employees job hop these days. Employee turnover is the highest it's been in decades, with workers spending only an average of 3.6 years at a company, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics.
The answer to attracting and retaining quality workers? For some companies, including Oracle and Sun Microsystems, it's letting workers perform personal tasks at their desks: shopping, checking their financial portfolio, even buying or selling a house.
Just ask Abilizer Solutions. The company, formerly known as perksatwork.com, has attracted 70 companies with more than 2 million employees as clients by helping employees balance their business and personal lives.
On Monday, Abilizer will launch a new version of its employee portal, a Web site where workers can do everything from check stock quotes to plan family reunions and birthdays. The portal consists of five major channels: life at work, family, shopping, personal finance, and home and garden.
Part concierge, part errand boy, part personal ads, portals such as Abilizer and RewardsPlus strike deals with shopping and service sites, and then deliver them to employees.
Trusting employees, not monitoring
The portals are bucking the employee-monitoring trend, in this day of
whopping option packages and other benefits constantly dangled before the
dot-com crowd. Instead of installing software that spies on employees' every
move and then punishes them for non-work-related activities -- a crackdown
that could send valuable workers packing -- many companies are shelling out
US$500 to US$3,500 per employee for software such as Abilizer's, hoping to
keep quality employees by helping them keep their personal lives in check.
It may seem strange, given that companies should want their employees to spend their work time, well, working. And two-year-old Abilizer has yet to turn a profit. But with company loyalty at an all-time low among workers, Abilizer expects more and more firms to seek out ways to make their companies attractive to busy knowledge workers.
For one thing, Abilizer founder Rishabh Mehrotra says, employees already are making decisions about their personal lives at work, as many as one every 15 minutes. That's why sites such as Amazon and eBay rank among the most-visited during work hours. But employees also are spending more time than ever on the job, meaning they have less time to perform personal tasks.
"If I can trust an employee to make a multimillion-dollar decision, can't they be trusted to use their time wisely?" Mehrotra asks.
What's more, providing a forum for workers to exchange information about child care, relocating or transportation can actually prevent them from wasting time by randomly surfing the Web. It's already helped an employee at Oracle, who shaved 45 minutes off the daily commute by finding a car-pool partner.
"I would personally trust that more than just going out on the Internet," Mehrotra said. "These are the people I work with."
