Credit: Huffington Post

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Teenagers in America are resorting to sex work because they cannot afford food, according to a study that suggests widespread hunger in the world’s wealthiest country.

Focus groups in all 10 communities analysed by the Urban Institute, a Washington-based thinktank, described girls “selling their body” or “sex for money” as a strategy to make ends meet. Boys desperate for food were said to go to extremes such as shoplifting and selling drugs.(Emphasis added)

The findings raise questions over the legacy of Bill Clinton’s landmark welfare-reform legislation 20 years ago as well as the spending priorities of Congress and the impact of slow wage growth. Evidence of teenage girls turning to “transactional dating” with older men is likely to cause particular alarm.

“I’ve been doing research in low-income communities for a long time, and I’ve written extensively about the experiences of women in high poverty communities and the risk of sexual exploitation, but this was new,” said Susan Popkin, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and lead […]

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Just 23% of U.S. employees strongly agree that they can apply their organization’s values to their work every day, according to Gallup, and only 27% strongly agree that they “believe in” their organization’s values.

These findings should be alarming to leaders, as they raise fundamental questions about whether workers buy into their company’s values and culture — or what leaders say their company’s values and culture are.

Gaps Between Desired Culture and Real Culture

Part of the problem is that “organizational culture” isn’t easy to define. It has been defined in myriad ways, from broad descriptions of employee behavior to academic philosophies and perspectives.

Gallup has found that the most useful definitions of culture are simple and actionable. We define culture as how employees interact and how work gets done. Our research also shows that the ways that work gets done vary across companies — and this variance affects organizational performance.

Unfortunately, our research also shows that in many companies, gaps exist between the desired culture — the one leaders envision and strive to realize — and the culture that employees experience.

These gaps create inconsistency and confusion for employees and customers. The most successful companies identify these gaps and implement strategies, systems and processes […]

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