Business world pundits are turning out their interpretations of the 1990s, and those fat and happy years don't look so good under close inspection. There were long hours, enormous workloads, and no boundaries between work and personal life. All of which led to a wider than ever gap between the top of the corporate ladder and everyone below

According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO pay in 1989 was 56 times greater than average worker pay. By the decade's end, CEO pay was 107 times greater. The salary disparities, says former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, are in part a product of a market that has lost its rules for employment. Salaries are no longer based on wage norms, but on a highly calculated worth to the company. Meantime, compensation for workers - salaries, benefit packages, bonuses, vacation days - have withered, says Jill Andresky Fraser in White Collar Sweatshop, out this month.

A survey of human resources executives from more than 1,000 companies by law firm Jackson Lewis found that 44 percent said that absenteeism and tardiness had increased since the companies adopted a casual dress policy. Thirty percent reported an increase in flirtatious behavior.

American companies are not providing their employees with the feedback and rewards needed to guide them through their careers. While employees believe they have a clear understanding of performance standards, less than half feel their companies know how to motivate them, according to a survey of 250 U.S. employees conducted by The Nierenberg Group, a business relationship management consultancy in New York, in conjunction with New York University's Management lnstitute. The survey also found a significant difference between the sexes when it comes to evaluating feedback and rewards. More than 51 percent of women felt rewarded for a job well done, compared with 34 percent of men. Seventy-one per- cent of women felt they received enough feedback on job performance, compared with 48 percent of men. Andrea Nierenberg, founder of the consultancy, says, "Both are indications that despite some inequality in the workplace between men and women, women have a more positive attitude than men about work."

If production workers' pay raises had risen at the same rate as their CEOs' from 1990 to 1998, they would be earning (on average) more than $110,000 today. So concludes "A Decade of Executive Excess: The 1990's," a report from the Institute for Policy Studies (Washington, D.C.) and United for a Fair Economy (Boston), as published in HR Magazine (Alexandria, Va.; 703-548-3440). Instead, the report notes, such workers actually earn an average of about $29,267, while CEOs in major U.S. companies average $10.6 million.

Last fall, Boston-based WFD Consulting was called in by a large financial service firm to reduce turnover in two of the company's major call centers. Managers thought the problem was related to money, and that employees were going down the street for jobs that paid 50 cents more an hour. But individual interviews with employees revealed money wasn't the issue -- job stress was.

Employees complained of such things as inadequate training, frequent schedule changes, poor new-hire screening, lack of communication, a misguided reward system and a dingy work environment. But they didn't just complain; they also offered workable solutions. Why? "Because we asked," explains Christensen, who left Merck a year ago to work with WFD. By assigning employees to teams devoted to solving these problems, the company was able to identify and implement solutions to the most pressing issues within just three months. The first quarter after changes were implemented, turnover had slowed from 45 percent to 32 percent, and it continues to drop.

As this experience shows, work redesign doesn't have to take years and cost millions of dollars to be effective. Simply by asking employees about their specific stressors and how they might reduce them, HR professionals can go a long way toward alleviating the biggest source of productivity loss in Corporate America today.

But to be effective, HR must take the conversation farther than my college friends and I did. Instead of merely acknowledging that stress exists and whining about it you must also acknowledge that something can be done about it. Worklife programs were an excellent first step toward helping employees manage their personal lives. Now it's time to help them out at work and reap effective bottom-line benefits.