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A new study from the venerable Pew Research Center provides interesting insights on how the ongoing recession is affecting hopes, dreams, and fears in the U.S.

The study goes beyond the markers we typically look at (unemployment, for example) to try to gauge the overall impact of the recession, and the results are striking. For example, more than half - 55% - of adults in the labor force say they’ve felt some effect, from layoffs to wage or hour cuts, far more than the number captured by the official unemployment rate. Almost the same number, 54%, say the country is still in a recession. Two thirds have cut back on their spending, and a third say they’ll continue this new frugality even after the recession ends.

The surge in long-term unemployment and the meltdown in household wealth are the two things that make this recession different from other twentieth-century recessions, and both will have long term effects.

Why is this important? I believe those of us who spend time thinking about how to engage employees need to understand the larger forces that shape their hopes and expectations. “A Balance Sheet at 30 Months: How the Great Recession has Changed Life in America” is a thought-provoking starting point.

A provocative Harvard Business Review blog post says trust is dead. Well, not completely. But in her recent post Tammy Erickson offers a new equation to replace the old (dead) “You be loyal, we’ll take care of you” contract between employers and employees. She suggests:

“The organization will provide interesting and challenging work. The individual will invest discretionary effort in the task and produce relevant results. When one or both sides of this equation are no longer possible (for whatever reasons) the relationship will end. So if the organization no longer has interesting or challenging work for the individual to do, or if the individual is no longer willing or able to engage in the work — to invest the levels of discretionary effort required for excellent results — it is in everyone’s best interest to part ways.”

Read the whole post here - it’s worth a few minutes.

According to the study The Road to an Engaged Workforce, the four areas that most affect employee engagement are reduced role conflict, appropriate training, personal autonomy, and personal power.

Interestingly, as Paul Hebert, managing director at influency consultancy i2i notes, these are all controlled by managers, NOT by employees.

Hebert suggests that employers could save money and increase engagement by focusing not on convincing frontline employees that they’re engaged, but on motivating managers to engage them and rewarding them for doing so. His suggestions include rewarding managers for seeking input, for changing work processes to maximize employee autonomy and power, for prioritizing training, and for communicating openly and frequently with their teams.

It’s a truism in employee communications that employees prefer to receive most information from their direct manager. Why wouldn’t engagement follow the same path?

In early December 2008, some 240 workers at a Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago electrified the U.S. and the world when, instead of leaving quietly, they sat in to protest being laid off with no notice. At the time, the story seemed the embodiment of the times – housing crisis leads to falling demand leads to factory shutdown, with the credit crisis invoked to explain why the company was not able to pay workers what they were owed.

But a speech that Ron Bender, one of the workers involved, recently gave to a labor group in Buffalo, New York, suggests there are other lessons to be learned.

Workers suspected management was preparing to shut down the plant, Bender told the crowd, because “The machinery started to disappear.” When the company shut down a production line, the workers – many of whom did not believe management’s story that the equipment was being sold off to keep a credit line open – began to work on a contingency plan. When the workers received their paperwork that fateful Friday, instead of leaving, they spread out to different parts of the plant as pre-arranged, making it impossible for management to round them up and kick them out.

It’s important to remember that particularly in a recessionary environment, everything management does or says will be dissected and parsed out within an inch of its life and within moments of happening. The key realities that define the environment in which we are communicating are:

• Everyone’s antennae are fine-tuned—any change to your usual behavior (shutting a door when you usually keep it open; coming in earlier than usual) will be analyzed for significance.
• The grapevine will function at warp speed—if a team of investment bankers shows up for due diligence, the news that there are “suits on three” will circulate before they’ve had time to loosen their ties.
• Everything you say “inside” will end up “outside”—the memo you give to your employees will end up in the local paper or on a blog; the speech the CEO gives at the all-employee meeting will end up on YouTube.

Full transparency is not always possible, I know. But it’s better to choose transparency than to have it thrust upon you.