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Dan Rodricks hosts a mid-day radio program on WYPR in Baltimore called … Midday with Dan Rodricks.

Yesterday, Dan’s topic was what makes a great workplace. His panel included Adam Seth Litwin, assistant professor of management at the Carey Business School of the Johns Hopkins University; Eliot Wagonheim autthor of a CEO Magazine monthly column and me, Doug Claffey, CEO of WorkplaceDynamics.

Here is a link to the program: http://www.wypr.org/podcast/wednesday-may-9-12-1-pm-great-good-workplace.

I recall one of the callers in particular who left a great job for more money. She regretted this change so much that she left the second job and formed her own company. The money may be greener, but in this case, the grass was not!

Another caller was very proud of his workplace, and in particular how they listened to his ideas and had gone so far as to implement some of them.

Dan did a great job of moderating, and the other two panel members had some very helpful insights. Have a listen if you have some time. I believe you can dowload it as a podcast, also.

I heard back from Dan and they had “plenty of positive listener feedback”.

Employee Confidence trends lower in Q1 2012

After steadily moving higher in 2011, we have seen employee confidence trend lower again in 2012. Our surveys of 90,000 employees per month show that 53% of employees are confident in their future at their company. This is down from 58% in November 2011.

For 5 years WorkplaceDynamics has been helping companies improve their workplaces. In this time we have surveyed thousands of organizations. Many have become and remain Top Workplaces in 29 regions across the country.

We’d like to celebrate with a heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone who has made a contribution to our success!  With sincere gratitude we’d like to recognize our excellent, dedicated WPD Family, our publishing partners, our customers, and the employees who took the time to give their honest feedback – you’ve made it all possible.  Thank you for believing in us during these early years! 

We look forward to what lies ahead! 

I really enjoyed this article in the McKinsey Quarterly. It’s about the role leaders play in giving meaning to employees at work.

We’re seeing very similar themes in our survey. The best run companies are the ones where leaders realize a crucial part of their role is to build buy-in within the workplace.

Employee confidence in December 2011 was at 56.5% - which is up significantly from the lows of December 2010 when the index was at 49.4%.

The number reflects the percentage of employees surveyed that said they were confident about their future with their company.

While levels of confidence are lower than when we started the index in 2009, overall 2011 saw a gradual and significant improvement:

The WDi is based upon approximately 1.25 million survey responses in the US, with an average of 47,000 employees responding each month. It represents opinions across more than 4,000 organizations that have carried out the WorkplaceDynamics employee survey.  The level of employee confidence is a 3-month moving average.