Hyped-up trends and common-sense solutions at work
What’s up in the work environment? Everything! Inflation is high and costs are rising. Interest rates are going up. Demand for talent isn’t abating alongside high rates of job vacancies and attrition. While about 800,000 new people entered the workforce in July, the share of adults in the workforce is still slightly lagging behind pre-pandemic numbers. Everyone today is talking about talent – most specifically how to get it and how to keep it. Buzz-trends like great resignation, ghosting, quiet quitting, no-shows, intent to change jobs are littering the workplace-related news and it's not just HR people that are talking about it. According to recent Conference Board research, CEO confidence and the organization’s ability to hire and keep qualified talent across the board is plunging – a major concern, not just for CEOs but for all stakeholders.
Where did all the employees go? To best understand how to address the “labor challenge” organizations are facing, we need to understand the drivers of today’s labor force volatility. Women and parents left the workforce at record pace due to the need to balance work / life, and to accommodate homeschooling / childcare, particularly during the pandemic. While women are starting to return, fewer than 30% of them feel included in the workplace. Near-retirement / older workers changed jobs for occupations more aligned with their goals; took early retirements; or gave up looking for work (ageism persists). Mass-migration away from urban centers for a better quality of life, shorter or no commute, or to be closer to family, changed the distribution and proximity of labor supply. Our country’s immigration policies have affected the availability of needed talent at all levels. We are simply short of talent!
“During the pandemic the workforce formed new habits and expectations, reassessed priorities, and lifestyle choices, realized they can be as productive in alternative working environments.”
What do employees want? With five generations in the workforce, we’re seeing shifts in what the workforce expects. In BC (Before COVID) workplace the workaholism was cherished, individuals felt disposable, and the vocabulary contained phrases like “rat-race” or “back-stabbing grind”, This “cultural norm” is slowly being replaced by a more humane, empathetic workplace narrative (not to say that there are no attempts to go “back to normal”) that include phrases like “mental and financial wellness”, “work/life integration”, “friendly and caring”, “accommodating”, etc. During the pandemic the workforce formed new habits and expectations, reassessed priorities, and lifestyle choices, realized they can be as productive in alternative working environments, and oppressive or demeaning workplace practices would no longer be tolerated. Organizations are realizing that if they want to attract qualified talent, they must listen, adapt, innovate, and experiment.
Power, power, who’s got the power? The only way you’ve missed the emerging shift in the power dynamics between the employer and the workforce is if you’ve been asleep! Just note the trend to unionization in non-traditional industries – like Starbucks, Amazon and hospitals. This is an overt example of the shift in power and voice. The aforementioned great resignation, quiet quitting, refusal to come back into the office, demand for remote work when workers have relocated to other lower-cost areas are examples of workers’ growing power. Organizations that aren’t seeing this trend and appropriately adapting to this shift in power will not survive for long without talent! Workers demand their effort and time and energy to be valued, their work to be meaningful and impactful, and that they are appropriately acknowledged and rewarded.
What can be done? Progressive organizations are anticipating these changes in the social contract and looking for ways to reframe the relationship with their workforce to generate longer tenure and higher levels of individual productivity. When outdated practices and processes related to performance goals, rewards structures, decision making flow, systems, and other HR enablers persist, workers will flee to organizations that have changed their human capital management approaches to reflect the new reality.
Experiment? But how? If we look at the digital world for inspiration on how to change the way we orchestrate work, we can learn a lot. Cloud technology brought a whole swath of apps, technical services, disruption to incumbents, and created new sectors and market leaders. Perhaps the notion of cloud, or offerings-as-a-service can also be applied to the world of work. Here are a few alternatives:
· Talent-as-a-service: A.Team is an invite-only network of top software builders who left cushy jobs at tech giants and traditional corporations to team up with their peers to work on problems that matter to them. These “A-teamers” who do product management, design, engineering, and data science are reclaiming flexibility, autonomy and choice and refusing the shackles of traditional employment. Such a model can be attractive for organizations to get talent-as-a-service to augment their current staff. This model is also compelling for those seeking flexibility, meaningful projects, and independence, and alternative ways to earn a living without being stymied by corporate politics or jobs with no career progression. It can also be compelling to retirees who have the skills/maturity/wisdom but are no longer interested in pursuing a traditional career.
· Space-as-a-service: Gable enables workers to work from anywhere with a network of flex and dedicated spaces and provides companies a unified management platform to deploy policies, insights and visibility over their distributed workforce usage and budget spent. With employees no longer wanting to do long commutes to an office, these satellite offices address the employee’s need to not commute, while still wanting to experience co-located work. Pods of employees or teams can convene in these satellite work spaces, and everyone wins.
· Mentoring-as-a-service: TenThousandCoffees matches individuals to have a “chat” over a cup of coffee (not always literal and oftentimes virtual) based on explicitly stated “wants” and “haves.” Such a solution can be effective in emulating the serendipity of the office “watercooler”, can enable those infamous digital natives to reverse mentor their superiors, and of course - support networking, allyship, and career development in the traditional sense.
· Accessibility-as-a-service: Ayra is a visual interpreting service where actual humans provide live, on-demand visual information. Stark enables designers to make software and websites more accessible for people with disabilities. Both are solutions that support the growing needs of about 1.5 billion people in the world who report having at least one disability. Accessibility and ability to navigate the physical and digital worlds is a matter of fairness but also compliance. Providing such offerings in the workplace will diversify the talent and create better working conditions for everyone.
Organizations that adapt their workplace practices, experiment with new tech-enabled solutions that address root causes of human capital challenges, quantify the financial impact on enterprise performance and create a better workplace experience for everyone will ultimately win the hearts, minds, and energy of great talent. And maybe, just maybe, we can reach new heights in workplace inclusion and keep our economy on track.
Authors: Stela Lupushor and Dr. Solange Charas. Read about these concepts and more in their recently released book: Humanizing Human Capital: Invest in Your People for Optimal Business Returns
