Career Advice & News Center

Even as analysts are saying the U.S. economy is beginning to creep out of the recession, a wavering and consistently high unemployment rate has left many workers apprehensive about the future in the job market.
Although the national unemployment rate dropped to 10 percent during November 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. businesses cut approximately 85,000 jobs during December, despite predictions for another month of gains.

As Americans continue to question their job security, the results of a survey, which were released today by employment expert and author Lynn Taylor, show that U.S. employees spend an average of 19.2 hours each week worrying about what their boss says or does.

The figure includes an average of 6.2 hours of worrying spent on the weekends.

Taylor commented, "The study illustrates the tremendous drain that a manager's words and actions can have on the minds and work product of its most valued asset - people - at a time when companies can least afford the loss."

She added, "Particularly during this period of high unemployment, bad boss behavior can go into overdrive, distracting employees from the work at hand."

The career expert recommends that employers increase efforts to show interest in their team's success and that employees develop their own human relations skills and quickly approach troublesome topics with diplomacy.

Another career strategist, author Lyle Sussman, takes a completely different approach, advising workers to tune out their boss and remain focused on work, Troy Media reports.

This approach, according to Sussman, entails turning the boss into an irrelevant issue and concentrating, rather, on the specific tasks the worker is retained to do.