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Too many employers are poorly equipped to weather the recession because they use workers’ skills and talents poorly, tie them up in rules and procedures, and give them little say over how they do their work, The Work Foundation says today.A major new survey of the work-lives of 2011 workers found that:• 40 per cent of employees have more skills than their jobs require.• 65 per cent of workers said the primary characteristic of the organisations they worked for was ‘rule and policy bound’ – though just five per cent said this was their preference. • 40 per cent said they had little or no flexibility over the hours they worked.• 20 per cent of graduates are in ‘low knowledge content’ jobs.

‘So far in this recession employers have been reluctant to lose the skills, talents and experience of their workforces. Yet at the same time they seem to be failing to make the most of them. Many people could be doing more, but are denied the chance to do so.‘To keep job losses to a minimum, organisations should be taking full advantage of widespread opportunities to give people more responsibility, move away from rules and procedure-based workplace cultures, and re-organise work and use new technologies to give individuals more flexibility over hours. More autonomy for people and less intensive management should be the order of the day – in other words greater use of the principles of good work. Trapping so many workers in roles in which their skills and abilities are poorly matched with their jobs is a waste both of economic potential and human possibility.’