Transcripts

Terry Bacon, author of the book What People Want…

And so, you know micro-managers beware because that's exactly what micro-managers don't do. Then I also discovered that people want to feel excited about what they're doing and what's going on. Eighty-two percent of the people I surveyed said that feeling excited about what's going on is very important to them.

Although workers may want all of these things what if they don't get them?

When people don't feel good about themselves and what they do or they don't feel good about the boss - they are absolutely going to tune out, or cut out, or walk out - but they're not going to be engaged, so you have lost productivity. And when you lose somebody, the cost of replacing that person is about six times that person's annual salary. So it's a very serious impact on the bottom line when you lose people you don't want to lose.

Terry says, employees today are not looking for their manager to be their friend.

The research that I did shows that only about seven percent of people want to have a friendship from their manager - people aren't looking for that. What they're looking for, in fact, are managers who have a strong work ethic and are professional and are fair and are honest.

Tomorrow, would people rather work for a competent jerk or a lovable fool - I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.