Surveys reveal that today’s American corporate worker is disengaged, overworked, stressed out and eager to change companies.

So our next step seems both urgent and fairly obvious: No more surveys.

When things are going badly and they’re mostly out of your control, it’s best not to know too much about the details. It’s like watching sausage being made, or knowing what your spouse is really thinking.

Right Management spent six months doing research into the current state of affairs in American business and found:

• Seventy-nine percent of workers report that their workloads have increased because of layoffs, and 57 percent pick “a lot” as the best way to describe that increase.

• Two out of three employees failed to take all of their allotted vacation time last year. The other one, we believe, dashed down to Branson at the last second.

• More than half of employees have been approached with a job offer from another employer in the last six months.

• About 60 percent of workers say they want to leave their jobs this year if possible.

• Nineteen percent of employees rarely trust their managers to make the best decisions.

Shocking, isn’t it? That 81 percent of employees do trust their managers? Perhaps they’ve never watched their managers try to assemble furniture.

And here’s more insightful information that we don’t really want:

First, a company called Modern Survey uncovered “a precipitous decline in the degree to which U.S. workers are psychologically invested in their work.” Rather than sitting back and shutting up – an option that doesn’t get the respect it deserves – this outfit went right out and did more research. Sure enough, “a new study focused specifically on the financial services industry shows the same trend of declining engagement, only magnified to a startling degree.”

Employee engagement was headed up in the U.S. financial services sector from 2008 to 2009, but “over the past year, the industry has experienced a tremendous decline. Most alarmingly, the number of disengaged employees has skyrocketed from 11 percent of the population in 2009 to 29 percent in 2010.”

When they manage to work both “startling” and “alarmingly” into one summary, it may be time to start thinking about moving to Costa Rica.

Modern Survey’s Employee Engagement Index tries to figure out if employees take pride in their company, believe they have a promising future there, recommend their company as a great place to work, go “above and beyond” their normal job duties to help their company succeed, and intend to stay with their company. “All five of these items saw steep declines from 2009 to 2010, including 20-plus percentage point drops in the degree to which employees take pride in their organization, and the degree to which they are willing to put forth extra effort on the job.”

It’s just too discouraging. So, no more surveys, no more bad news. Besides, do we really need scientific studies to grasp that this is not the Golden Age of Cubicle Life?

Just ask your information technology people, who are constantly reviving computer keyboards that have been soaked with tears.

Or look out the window during lunch hour and watch your employees flag down passing cars to ask for job interviews.

What we may have here is a case of national malaise. President Jimmy Carter pointed out this same problem and was rewarded with retirement. So you’d better not take that route.

You could try false confidence, which works unless your employees have access to the Internet or occasionally speak to one another.

But if we just impose a temporary moratorium on knowing what’s going on under our noses, we should be able to ride it out.

Eventually, we’ll do some surveys to see if it’s working.