The Fear Factor: How Scared Are People?

By Jim Clifton, Gallup Chairman and CEO, and Deepak Chopra, M.D.

Over the past decade the word “fear” has become all too familiar. After 9/11, critics of the war on terror called it fear-mongering. After the financial crash in 2008, living in a climate of fear became the lot of millions of people who lost their jobs, retirement accounts, and homes. But what about the most basic fear, which undermines society itself, the fear of bodily harm, either through crime or terrorism?

Walking the streets in countries around the world carries a real risk. The incidence of kidnapping has skyrocketed in Mexico and South America. Recently, the shocking rate of rape in India has come to light. Religious factions in the Islamic world wreak havoc and death for ordinary citizens.

In the face of such violence, the prevalence of fear can have a profound effect on the health, wellbeing, and economic development; if a society is in a constant state of fear, it won’t produce anything good.

Since this issue has such strong implications, Gallup’s World Poll set out to quantify fear of bodily harm. The usual measure, police reports and crime statistics, aren’t particularly reliable, since what they report is how many criminals were pursued or caught. If a city has a lousy police force, it won’t catch many criminals, and thus it may appear that there isn’t much crime. (Ironically, if a reform-minded mayor brings in an effective police chief, and the chief does a great job at arresting more criminals, it can present the appearance of an increase in crime.) Another contributing factor is non-reporting. Statistics can’t reveal the large number of victims who don’t go to the police after being robbed, raped, or assaulted on the streets. Sad to say, unreported crime is a major factor globally.

In trying to give governments a more accurate picture of crime and fear in a community, Gallup scientists found one survey question that gets to the heart of the matter: “Do you feel safe walking alone at night in the city or area where you live?” The answer to that single question tells leaders almost everything they need to know about their citizens’ sense of safety. People who feel unsafe are preoccupied to the point that their wellbeing deteriorates. Over time, fear worsens how their entire lives will turn out.

The results of our research are stark. We found that women in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, don’t feel safe walking just 100 meters from their villages, possibly because they fear being raped or beaten. As a result, they can’t walk to markets to buy or sell goods. In the event that their fear is lifted, these women would increase Africa’s GDP a little or a lot with their lost economic activity.

The same effect can strike closer to home. One of us, Jim Clifton, lives in Georgetown, an affluent neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Several years ago, Georgetown had a serious crime spree, and people started going home directly after work -- once home, they tended to stay in. As fear spread about walking alone after dark, spending on everyday things like shopping and dining out decreased significantly. The neighborhood’s economy suffered until law and order was restored through an ambitious effort by local law enforcement.

These are just two examples of fear’s pernicious reach. Leaders who want to dramatically reduce fear among their citizens would be wise to make the Gallup fear metric central to their strategies -- our findings are as important, we feel, as police reports and crime rates. Here are some of the basic findings:

% AFRAID (to walk alone in their neighborhood at night)
Venezuela 74%  
Afghanistan 60%  
Russia 50%
Congo 50%
Mexico 44%
India 35%
United States 25%
Canada 16%
China 16%
Hong Kong 11%

Americans deserve to be shocked to find that a quarter of their fellow citizens are afraid to walk the streets. Gallup tracks the fear score of U.S. citizens nightly and finds huge variance by city. For instance, in the U.S., the three big metro areas with the least fear are Minneapolis, Denver, and Raleigh -- with about 20% of their citizens reporting they have fear walking alone at night. At the other end are Memphis and New Orleans, where more than a whopping 40% of citizens say they fear walking alone at night.

Fear is sometimes linked with actual danger, but that’s not the real point. Fear is personal and subjective. Fear gains its power, as terrorists well know, through the perception that one is in danger.

We feel any government that believes in open communication should publish the fear index for their city or nation, to start a dialogue about how to reduce the causes of fear. Closing the gap between perception and reality, as far as risks are concerned, is equally important. That 25% of Americans who are afraid to walk alone doesn’t mean that one out of four of us is in danger of bodily harm on any given night.

Gallup doesn’t conduct research with the goal of endorsing specific solutions. A rigid law and order society like Singapore is very different than life in the United States, as is the enforced conformity of China. On the other hand, the perception of fear, as it arises in the individual, has known causes. People become more afraid when:

• They feel isolated and alone.
• Their surroundings undergo rapid change.
• Minorities and outsiders are labeled “them,” who are totally unlike “us.”
• Support structures begin to deteriorate, including police, fire departments, churches, and designated services for the poor and elderly.

In other words, a negative result on the fear index calls for better solutions than clamping down on civil liberties and sending the police out on random stop-and-search patrols. For any leader who cares about this issue, we’ve built consistent sampling frames across 160 countries that represent the vast majority of the world’s population, and Gallup analysts again found huge variance in the hearts and minds of citizens by region.

Globally, the implications of these data are fascinating. Imagine how much different a person’s peace of mind is in Venezuela, where 74% are afraid to walk alone at night, or in Afghanistan, where nearly 60% are afraid, versus Canada (16%) or Hong Kong (10%). Think about how much more psychological energy a society has when people don’t live with chronic anxiety. In countries like the U.S., under conditions many would consider a climate of fear, one only has to witness how a relatively low anxiety level can impact entrepreneurship, innovation, health, and wellbeing -- all the things that make human development possible.

This post originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Is America in Permanent Decline?

During a recent interview with a big Los Angeles-area newspaper, a reporter asked me, “Is America now in permanent decline?”

My answer was, “No.” Our country is not in permanent decline. But I’m concerned that our leadership is.

Actually, our leadership in Washington is failing miserably, and there’s little evidence they’re turning it around. Unemployment remains high and is basically stuck there, and GDP is growing at a pathetic 1% -- so the country is failing on two of the most important economic metrics. The number of new business startups is alarmingly low, and the pace of startups is the one metric that foretells the rise or fall of America.

Here’s the problem: The very survival of America depends on job growth and GDP. But what are the White House, Congress, and all of the media and talking heads focusing on? Guns, immigration reform, and foreign affairs. Bluntly, none of these issues have much to do with the core drivers or root causes of America’s potential decline.

Worse, Washington and the media are totally out of touch with the public: When Gallup asked U.S. citizens to name the country’s most important problem, the top-of-mind answers were overwhelmingly either the economy in general or unemployment and jobs -- 42% between the two responses. Just a paltry 4% named guns as the top problem, and another 4% said immigration. You read that right. And foreign affairs, namely concerns about North Korea, foreign aid, and “focus overseas” came in at 6% total.

What’s more, the vast majority of Americans want Congress and the president to prioritize jobs and the economy.

It’s no wonder. Nearly 20% of U.S. workers say it is "very likely" or "fairly likely" they will lose their job or be laid off in the next year, more than said so prior to the 2008 economic downturn. And more than two in five U.S. workers say that if they were to lose their job, they could go no more than one month before experiencing significant financial hardship.

Interestingly, the third-most important problem was “dissatisfaction with government” (16%). There’s a message in that finding. Our leaders are spending their time on the wrong things. When leaders have their priorities and basic assumptions wrong about what needs to be fixed, the more they lead, the worse things get.

Our founder, Dr. George Gallup, a man with a great sense of mission about democracy, understood this. He said, “If democracy is about the will of the people -- then somebody should go find out what that will is.” While he didn’t say, “…and leaders should vote that will in Congress,” he did believe that leaders should be in touch with what 300 million American citizens want and need.

I’m worried right now. On a recent plane trip, I had time to read The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post in more depth than usual. This was an eye-opening experience. Turning page after page of all three great papers, I could barely find an article that addressed the current will of the people: jobs and the economy. There was plenty to read about immigration, even though as many Mexicans are now crossing the border back to home as are coming into the U.S. Plenty of articles on guns, even though the homicide rate in America is at a staggering 50-year low. And, of course, much on North Korea and Syria, neither of which has to do with America’s most pressing problems right now.

Washington politicians and media: We have a problem. The country’s citizens are on one page and you’re on another. You all had better get back fast to jobs, jobs, jobs, because if you don’t, the answer to the question, “Is America now in permanent decline?” will become a deadly “Yes.”

Americans Can’t Handle the Truth

David Stockman’s new book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, is getting a lot of attention these days. I recommend you don’t buy it. It’s much better to ignore the book and continue to listen to the White House and Wall Street, both of which tell us everything will work out just fine.

Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s first budget director, confronts us head-on with blunt truths we simply can’t handle. He argues that our current economy -- and recent prosperity -- aren’t real. Instead, they’ve been fueled by a series of artificial bubbles created by runaway deficit spending and reckless money-printing at the Federal Reserve. This is all going to lead to an epic crash, Stockman predicts, and next time around, there won’t be any bailouts.

I hate to say it, but most of us would rather the president and our representatives in Congress don’t cause us any pain. That means don’t touch my Social Security in any way, don’t do anything to cap the runaway growth in Medicare and Medicaid, and don’t raise my taxes either. And keep printing money. We elect our officials to create no discomfort for us, and they deliver.

Inspired by Stockman’s blunt assessment, I’d like to focus on three areas where all of us -- the White House, Congress, and citizens, too -- need a heavy dose of truth-telling: the unemployment rate, the unsustainability of healthcare, and the reality of America’s economic growth.

The unemployment rate in the U.S. is stagnant at best. Yes, the U.S. Department of Labor says the rate has dropped from 7.8% to 7.6%, but it’s actually frozen when you apply a more accurate measure. In simple terms, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey of 60,000 households per month doesn’t count you as “unemployed” unless you looked for a job in the past four weeks.

I think it’s better to turn the number upside down and ask, “What percentage of the population does have a good job?” According to Gallup’s monthly payroll to population (P2P) survey of 30,000 adults, the employment situation has failed to improve recently and has remained relatively little changed year-over-year. Workers haven’t found the full-time jobs they’ve been seeking, and the labor force and unadjusted unemployment rates are flat.

Healthcare costs are out of control. We must confront this problem now -- it cannot wait any longer. At $2.5 trillion annually, the U.S. healthcare tab is three times the size of the defense budget and nearly two times the whole Russian economy. It’s also roughly twice the size of the whole Indian economy, and India has a billion-plus population.

The fact is, healthcare is breaking America faster than Social Security and other pension benefits. And healthcare is growing at an average of 6% per year, which means the new costs over the next decade will be a staggering $10 trillion over and above where we currently are.

We need authentic economic growth. While I agree with Stockman that the current booming stock market is an illusion driven by money-printing and deficit spending -- namely, that it doesn’t reflect real prosperity -- many of his solutions are more political in nature: abolish the electoral college, impose term limits on the president and Congress, and so on. I have a more straightforward fix: Restore and encourage the spirit of American free enterprise. Get the engine of business roaring again.

Whatever anyone in the White House or on Wall Street says, don’t forget that our economy is currently growing at a pathetic 1%, where we need a minimum of 2.5% GDP growth just to tread water, in my view. That being said, I think we need GDP growth of about 4.5% to get the economy humming again. We’re not going to get there with more deficit spending and with the Federal Reserve handing out more free money to investors.

What will get us to authentic economic growth and job creation is for federal, state, and local governments to do everything in their power to help America’s 6 million small businesses succeed. That means restoring their confidence in the future -- 30% of small-business owners are worried they may not be in business in 12 months, according to a Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index survey -- and removing any barriers they may face. What most people probably don’t know is that small businesses -- not large enterprises -- create most of the good jobs in America.

Maybe Stockman’s political reforms are the right way to go, but whatever the case, I think that restoring the spirit of robust, free-market capitalism will cure most of our ills and put the country on a sustainable path for the future.

But first, we need to start telling ourselves the truth about what really drives prosperity and what’s just an illusion. David Stockman has done us all a favor by getting us to confront reality. Of course, I actually do recommend his book.

Beware of Managers From Hell

Here’s something they’ll probably never teach you in business school: The single biggest decision you make in your job -- bigger than all of the rest -- is who you name manager. When you name the right people to manage your company’s workplace, everything goes well. People love their jobs, your customers are engaged, and life is great.

When you name the wrong person manager, nothing fixes that bad decision. Not compensation, not benefits -- nothing.

Gallup just updated our global database of employee surveys, which includes a sample of 1,390,941 employees in 192 organizations, which covered 49 industries in 34 countries. This is our Q12 database, and it is the biggest of its kind. And what we found out about managers and employees has serious implications for the future of the American economy.

Of the approximately 100 million people in America who hold full-time jobs, 30 million (30%) are engaged and inspired at work, so we can assume they have a great boss. At the other end of the spectrum are roughly 20 million (20%) employees who are actively disengaged. These employees, who have bosses from hell that make them miserable, roam the halls spreading discontent. The other 50 million (50%) American workers are not engaged. They’re just kind of present, but not inspired by their work or their managers.

Here is my big conclusion: A workforce of 100 million employees in America requires a 10-1 ratio of managers to teams. So, for the U.S. to be perfectly managed, it requires 10 million great supervisors and then 1 million great managers of those supervisors. Pick the right people for these roles, the ones who know best how to engage their people, and the country will rise up economically like never before.

But the problem is, given my 10-1 ratio, there are, in my estimate, only about 3 million great managers inspiring and motivating those 30 million engaged employees. That’s just not enough great leadership.

Here’s why: Gallup research has found that the top 25% of teams -- the best-managed -- versus the bottom 25% in any workplace -- the worst-managed -- have nearly 50% fewer accidents and have 41% fewer quality defects. What’s more, teams in the top 25% versus the bottom 25% incur far less in healthcare costs. So having too few engaged employees means our workplaces are less safe, employees have more quality defects, and disengagement -- which results from managers from hell -- is driving up the country’s health costs.

But on the positive side, Gallup research concludes that the 30 million engaged employees come up with most of the innovative ideas, create most of a company’s new customers, and have the most entrepreneurial energy. Now, given all of this, imagine if America doubled the number of great managers and engaged employees. Is it asking too much that 60 million employees in the U.S. be engaged at work?

This isn’t impossible. It’s doable. Let me tell you why.

I recently had a conversation with Jim Harter, Ph.D., Gallup’s lead analyst for workplaces, and one of the top psychologists in the world. He probably knows more than anyone about the behavioral economics of the world’s workplaces. I asked Jim, “Of the 12 items in Gallup’s Q12 employee engagement survey, which are the three that matter most in terms of building workplace engagement?”

Jim rank-ordered the top three items this way:

1. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. This is the single-best survey item you can ask an employee. If they score high on this, it means they have been assigned a job for which they have the talent to excel. Mastering this begins with companies identifying employees’ strengths and putting them in the right roles.
2. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
3. At work, my opinions seem to count.

When the United States of America -- or any country for that matter -- wakes up one morning and says collectively, “Let’s get rid of managers from hell, double the number of great managers and engaged employees, and have those managers lead based upon these three employee demands,” everything will change. The country’s employees will be twice as effective, they’ll create far more customers, they’ll drive down spiraling healthcare costs, and desperately needed GDP will boom like never before.

China Has a Serious Workplace Problem

China will become the global economic leader sometime in the next 10 to 25 years, according to many economists. This means China -- and not the United States -- will have the largest GDP in the world, which will, of course, be a global game changer. She who has the gold makes the geopolitical rules.

But China faces some serious challenges on its road to dominance. Some obvious ones are enormous environmental problems that will require billions of dollars to fix; economic uncertainty, if China's GDP -- which has been increasing at about 8% -- continues to grow, but at a decreasing rate; fast-rising factory wages, which may cause China to lose its huge competitive advantage over other countries, some that may offer labor at a lower cost; and growing political and social instability, as is evident in the increasing demonstrations and protests throughout the country.

To this list of well-known woes and concerns, let me add one more, and it's perhaps the most serious of all: low workforce engagement.

I know that sounds soft. But human beings spend at least one-third of their lives at work. And because of this, I could argue that a person's quality of life is driven by his or her life at work. And the working citizens of China are doing horribly; 6% of the people who work for an organization report being engaged at their jobs. In addition, about 26% are flat-out miserable -- what Gallup researchers call actively disengaged. To put that into perspective, the U.S. workforce is about 30% engaged and just under 20% actively disengaged.

If you were to ask me what the most dangerous state of mind in China is right now, I'd say that it's active disengagement in the workplace, because it's so widespread. The cause of disengagement in China is the same as it is in every workplace around the world: The workers despise their immediate boss. And the reason they hate their boss is because the wrong person was hired to be the boss. It's that simple.

How does this happen? Well, I know just enough about the Chinese workplace to know that control is of enormous cultural importance. The type of people who are named "boss" in China command and control their "underlings," and those underlings do as they're told. People are not named manager for their ability to engage and develop employees.

But this command-and-control approach doesn't work in the new global workplace, where employees demand more autonomy, want more freedom of thought and action, and want to be more empowered and engaged. Old top-down management, the type that's entrenched in China, just doesn't work anymore.
What employees really want is reflected in the 12 items that Gallup developed to measure employee engagement through decades of research studying companies and organizations around the world. This is a global standard, one that cuts across all cultures. China's national workforce will be transformed -- becoming highly productive and engaged -- when its organizations hire and develop managers who inspire employees to give high scores on these items.

These are the 12 most important, and most predictive, workplace elements Gallup has discovered. China's societal advancement -- or collapse -- lies within these elements, as employee engagement boosts productivity, quality, customer engagement, retention, safety, and profitability.

1. I know what’s expected of me at work.
2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
3. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
4. In the last seven days, I received recognition or praise for doing good work.
5. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
6. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
7. At work, my opinions seem to count.
8. The mission and purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.
9. My associates are committed to doing quality work.
10. I have a best friend at work.
11. In the last six months, someone at work talked to me about my progress.
12. In the last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

It would be wise for all Chinese executives and managers to consider how they can deliver on these simple, yet transformational, demands of the workplace. If Chinese leaders were to change their current spectacularly bad nationwide score of 6% engaged workers to 20% engaged workers, the country would be a completely different place -- one with a much brighter, more stable future.

A version of this article originally appeared in China Daily.