Not surprisingly, employee morale and
commitment has worsened during the recession — and in response to
company actions to cope with the downturn. A recent survey finds that
high-performing employees have been substantially more affected than
the rank-and-file.

                                                                                    Lin Grensing-Pophal

                                         Human Resource Executive Online, October 2009

… the creative class: a fast-growing, highly educated, and well-paid
segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and
economic growth increasingly depend. Members of the creative class do a
wide variety of work in a wide variety of industries—from technology
to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the
arts. They do not consciously think of themselves as a class. Yet they
share a common ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference,
and merit.

                                                                                           Richard Florida

                                                                   Washington Monthly, May 2002

Watson Wyatt and WorldatWork just released a survey that tracks, among other things, employee engagement, and Lin Grensing-Pophal explains how companies can do a better job of engagement in a recent article.  But that may not be enough, going forward out of the recession.  The survey's results inspire a look back to an issue economist Richard Florida raised several years ago:  how the drivers of employee performance are changing.  

Today, the combination of networking tools, with a power burst from social technology, and a recession that now appears to be the result of an infrastructure crashing under its own incongruities — foreseen by folks like Florida — is forcing companies to look not just at compensation methods but at how they categorize employee positions from the get-go.  It's no longer the distinction between management and rank-and-file that makes sense in a service-dominated economy, if it ever did in a manufacturing dominated world, but the quality of performance along the scale of creativity and actual contribution.  We're in the midst of another major industrial shift that is exciting at the same time it is mind boggling.  And its impact will be felt not just inside corporations but around the cities and towns they populate. 

… the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply
making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and
transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the
highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative
people, the highest rate of metabolism.

                                                                                           Richard Florida

                                                                                       The Atlantic, March 2009     

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