The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want, Second Edition

3. Job Security

First, a caveat: the fact that we treat job security as basic for employee morale and performance does not mean that we advocate lifetime employment guarantees. That’s impossible for just about any organization. We do urge, however, that if an organization seeks to have enthusiastic workers, it must understand that those employees cannot be treated as fungible objects.

How do workers, in general, view their job security? The “norm” (or average) is 67 percent, which is not too bad, but the range across companies is enormous: 39 percent to 89 percent.

To be sure, the lowest scores are, in part, explainable by reality. For the most part, organizations with scores at the lower end of the range are, in fact, those that recently experienced ...