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from the more-or-less-getting-more-done-with-less-people dept.
Having underemployed workers can lead to two outcomes that benefit an organization—creativity and commitment to the organization—according to a new study by management experts at Rice University, Chinese University of Hong Kong at Shenzhen and Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Statistics have shown that a significant proportion of workers worldwide are underemployed or working at jobs that are below their capacity. Researchers have estimated that underemployment ranges from 17 percent to two-thirds of the workforce in Asia, Europe and North America, according to the study.
"Our results have important implications for managers," said study co-author Jing Zhou, the Houston Endowment Professor of Management at Rice's Jones Graduate School of Business. "Managers should not assume that employees will always respond negatively to their perception of being underemployed. Our results suggest that managers need to be vigilant in detecting perceptions of underemployment among employees.
"When managers notice that their employees feel underemployed, they should support employees' efforts to proactively change the boundaries or formal descriptions of their work tasks, such as changing the sequencing of the tasks, increasing the number of tasks that they do or enlarging the scope of the tasks," she said. "Because the perception of underemployment may be experienced by many employees, managers should provide support to sustain positive outcomes in these situations."
Not getting enough hours to qualify for benefits is a good thing?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by julian on Wednesday September 21 2016, @08:18PM
Are they using the same definition for under employment that we typically hear in the USA? Here it means something like you aren't given the opportunity to work as many hours as you would like. This is usually done deliberately as a cost-saving measure; part-time workers don't qualify for benefits and have less protections.
They seem to be using under employed to mean working below one's capacity or ability. So you have a full-time job but a lot of it is spent idle. I guess that could provide opportunities if employees would show some initiative and use that free time to innovate but they'll probably just end up posting comments on a news aggregator ;-)
Having some people idle some of the time also means your organization can be more responsive since there are workers immediately available to pick up the slack if someone has to leave unexpectedly or if the workload suddenly increases. This is very much antithetical to the US way of doing business where workers are not seen as an investment but a cost and a liability that needs to be minimized as aggressively as possible. Every business owner dreams of not having to employ anyone at all and keeping everything for himself.
Let them see how well that works when every other business on the street "under employs" the few workers they haven't laid off entirely. We've automated our workforce, now if only we could automate our customers too!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday September 21 2016, @08:34PM
I live in the USA and it tends to mean different things depending on what your job is.
A programmer working on a help desk because there are no programming jobs available is underemployment. However it is hard to analyze. Maybe that programmer is fresh out of school and every company wants 5+ years experience. Maybe the programmer trained in a dead end language and couldn't make the shift. Maybe the programmer is crap and just couldn't cut it.
People like to ignore underemployment stats when calculating unemployment levels. Look at all these jobs! Yeah, they are all part time McDonalds jobs.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday September 24 2016, @02:23PM
I actually observed this shift, which occurred in the space of about ten years, where I used to live in the SoCal desert. As industry (discouraged away by overregulation and rising costs) and farming (which became untenable after the price of electric/diesel quadrupled and pumping water cost more than the crops were worth) died back, local jobs shifted from full-time and decent wages to part-time jobs at minimum wage with no benefits, entirely in service and retail. Meanwhile an influx of unskilled but willing immigrant labor further expanded the labor pool, and now there was not only underemployment, there was also much heavier competition for what jobs existed, and the cost of low-end housing skyrocketed due to demand pressure. Your choice as a worker became live in poverty, or commute to Los Angeles. Foreclosures on low-end real estate jumped, mainly because the buyer pool had evaporated. So now we had the paradox of newly-poor people trying to sell because they could no longer make their mortgage unable to find buyers because no one who'd want those fixer-uppers could afford them, and a big expansion of mid-range housing being sold to commuters... built where the low-end rental housing was being torn down, further reducing poor-affordable housing. But the subsequent small expansion of part-time and construction jobs was not enough to offset the major losses in industry and farming. The mall chain stores did all right but local businesses dried up. Small business had to let better, higher-paid workers go and hire less-skilled, lower-paid workers just to make ends meet.
Superficially the effect was to make the community appear more vibrant, but only if you ignored the now-higher proportion of poor and homeless and that something like half the working population of necessity commuted to Los Angeles (where they couldn't afford to live). I would have preferred less "vibrancy" and more steady full-time local work. Which ain't gonna happen in a service economy with a labor surplus.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by quintessence on Wednesday September 21 2016, @09:09PM
One of the aspects of underemployment is it allows your workers to train, get more education, etc. to better fulfill specific roles within the organization (anyone caught waiting for a specialized skill set to show up knows how difficult this can be). Not to mention having an ebb and flow of work can lead to better processes (that I've noticed you get overwhelmed and then have some slow times to reflect on what could be done more efficiently).
I've also noted a good portion of the hyperintelligent seem to seekout non-demanding roles where they can let their thoughts wander. The plus side being they often have novel solutions to problems where they've seen the circumstances first-hand.
And there is also the issue of stress, where someone who is fully engaged typically has a higher burnout rate than the slackers :)
It may be antithetical to businesses where labor cost are high, but for others having underemployment essentially means greater opportunities to innovate.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday September 21 2016, @09:34PM
Having some people idle some of the time also means your organization can be more responsive since there are workers immediately available to pick up the slack if someone has to leave unexpectedly or if the workload suddenly increases. This is very much antithetical to the US way of doing business where workers are not seen as an investment but a cost and a liability that needs to be minimized as aggressively as possible [italics mine]. Every business owner dreams of not having to employ anyone at all and keeping everything for himself.
You can also add in the management types that believe hours spent at the desk equal productivity, not the amount of work completed. If they can get you on salary, they want "free" labor above and beyond 40 hours. This sort of thinking is why telecommuting struggles to take off, despite the fact it would likely be a win-win for all.