Page 8 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

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B PREFACE

Bumbling leaders and grumbling workers
Dropping stocks and drooping dividends
Crumbling morale and stumbling managers
Fleeting jobs and retreating markets
Helpless Boomers and hapless Millennials

ound familiar? For many, these are now everyday workplace re-
alities. Whether we like it or not, they are, in a sense, the “new
S normal.”
Consider the tumultuous times facing us:

: Significant financial stresses, not seen in a century, have
caused record unemployment, with the realization that many
of those jobs are never coming back.
: Thousands of workers have seen their retirement accounts
wither, and many are forced to stay in the workforce beyond
their intended retirement dates.
: We have a health-care crisis where the skyrocketing costs
of care are rising much faster than salary increases, leaving
more people with a fool’s choice—taking care of their health
or paying for other basic needs.
: The public’s trust of company leaders continues to erode, fu-
eled by greed, mismanagement, and the financial collapse
that began in 2008 and that many blame on the “corrupt cor-
poration,” a disease that has stricken nearly every industry.

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