Consider “too many openings”, “too few candidates”, or perhaps “applicants too picky”…but the best description I heard came from a CEO of a manufacturing company who said this about today’s recruiting: Doom Loop…defined by Jim Collins in Good to Great as “a painful cycle of decline”.
If I asked SHRM why engagement and retention are not on their list, I suspect they would tell me the primary tools for engagement and retention are surveys and SHRM has stayed away from the survey business.
Exit interviews have the appearance of leading to a solution because logically if we know why employees leave and we can fix that, then we can cut turnover and employees will stay. That logic breaks down, though, in practice.
I’ve read over a hundred surveys on this subject and promise to not quote any of them because so much of the data is in conflict. Times change, moods change, and one day employees like working from home while managers don’t…and then the opposite becomes true.
Let’s be direct. U.S workers are quitters. And a recent experience put that into full perspective when a client company executive said, “Let’s just work on cutting turnover in the U.S. Our Canadian plants always have low turnover”. Other executives have said similar things over the years so this time I looked it up.
An HR executive just told me his company raised their starting pay for all jobs because their main plant was surrounded by Amazon sites. That sentence is pretty standard.
Let’s start with the common belief that workers are collecting unemployment, waiting until September, and are receiving more than they were earning in their prior jobs. “Not so fast, my friend” is one college football commentator’s catchphrase for disagreeing with his Saturday morning colleagues…
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.