The report is in. Microsoft has released “The New Future of Work, Research from Microsoft Into the Pandemic’s Impact on Work Practices”. All 65 pages of it. Here are three leap-out parts for me...
"I totally get what you mean when you say what matters is what employees talk about over dinner. My husband and I work for the same company though he works in a different division and a different location. Each night he complains to me about his boss over dinner. At some point I switched from being an HR person to being his wife, and I asked when he was going to quit. He said he knew the date, and during his exit interview he wouldn’t say a thing, just wanted to get out."
Rebuilding our infrastructure is just a matter of time, measured in months. I wonder, though, if anyone in Washington is wondering where the needed workers will come from because I can’t find an electrician now. But “The American Jobs Plan” is about more than electricians. It’s about 19 million Americans with various work histories getting new jobs.
How hard is it to understand that employees do want recognition, communication, and career coaching…but they want it from their boss? Yet we persist to believe one-size-fits-all programs are worthy substitutes for our managers performing their jobs. So there is no mystery why employee engagement has been stuck for 20 years.
SHRM, the global Society for Human Resource Management, asked me to be a guest on a recent episode of the All Things Work podcast regarding the unique challenges of engaging employees effectively during the pandemic. You can listen to the ideas I shared with host Tony Lee.
We learned a new trick at home this past weekend, that when we turned on the captions the shows got better. It cleared up jumbled dialogue and we paid more attention to the background notes. Things didn’t notice before that add to the experience but still don’t compete with the primary story line, the continuously-developing plot, and the stars of the show. And the stars of your must-cut-turnover show are your first line supervisors.
So now comes new information in the past seven days that drives home that this wacky idea of 3.2% unemployment by year end is real. And as hard as it is to retain your best current workers, retaining is a better strategy than recruiting…against the headwinds of all that is listed above. How does one recruit better when unemployment is becoming 3.2%? And maybe even worse in your local market?
Working From Home is hardly new so any predictions about its strengths and weaknesses have already been proven, just not the grand scale that we might soon see. But having said that, WFH during the pandemic is not the same as regular, organized, we-all-buy-into-this WFH that we will see in the future.
In their weekly member newsletter yesterday, SHRM predicted a turnover “tsunami” once the pandemic ends, re-surfacing that employee retention is at major risk regardless of today’s unemployment rate.
The best and most comprehensive study on how U.S. companies are doing, specifically with retaining and advancing Black workers, was recently released. And the outcome says we have work to do.