Could worker re-think over their careers herald a longer-term change way beyond Covid?

OPINION PIECE - In this blog, Customer Faithful founder Rick Harris considers whether the current wave of resignations and job switching is a relatively temporary hiccup in the labour market, or the beginning of a longer term change - one which may herald permanent benefits for employee and employer alike.

In previous blogs, I’ve already described the current labour shortages - from resignations sometimes without another job to go to, to opportunistic job-hopping from one employer to a nearby competitor, to downshifting from full-time to part-time, sometimes to launch a side gig, or simply to find a better work-life balance.

But could this current trend be more than a reaction to Covid uncertainty and a short-term contraction of the global economy? What if the collective impact of such job shifts lead to more permanent adjustments in working conditions like more flexible hours, employment law and remuneration policy?

As art historian Abigail Susik recently wrote in the New York Times, such inflection points have happened before. After World War I in France, labour shortages and a 1918-1920 flu pandemic(!) drove Parliament to incentivise immigration as well as encourage women into jobs, all at enduringly low wages. The response from workers was an orchestrated, nationwide series of “big quits” in the form of factory walkouts, assembly line slowdowns, union-organized strikes and other actions designed to put pressure on employers. Voluntary unemployment was also an effective, if less commonly used, strategy. Eventually, these large-scale acts of protest and work refusal led to meaningful change in labour law and in some cases, higher wages.

Today, circumstances are different. For many salaried staff, enforced state furlough schemes providing much of their salary but with fewer monthly costs left some with unexpected savings, giving them the financial space to be choosier about their next job, perhaps bolder in their negotiating to return to their existing employer and unwilling to simply ‘get back on the treadmill’ they never really loved that much in the first place.

From my own experience working with a client in the veterinary sector, even those workers intending to stay in their role can be influenced by job quitters around them to re-evaluate their own circumstances too - a domino effect that makes employer rotas and commitments to out-of-hours cover even harder.

In the financial services sector, we’ve heard from employees working in provincial cities describing a re-willingness to return to premium-salaried but high-cost London locations, now that work-from-home was becoming not just a temporary Covid feature, but a permanent change in company culture.

Across many industry sectors, employers are realising that to bringing their workforce back to full strength again is going to take more than just a competitive salary and more flexitime. It’s an opportunity to re-evaluate the entire employee value proposition, drawing upon whatever existing insight from internal surveys and supplementing it with up-to-date qualitative feedback about what their staff truly love and hate about their jobs, what motivates them in their career and ultimately what would make them stay.

Much can be gained from polling employees that have been working from home in recent months and comparing their responses today to earlier staff surveys to see where change in attitude has occurred. As the graphic above illustrates, this can help pinpoint some specific areas to explore, potentially co-designing new initiatives directly with employees themselves.

More flexible working (including work from home) is now seen as so central to employee needs that the UK Government is currently consulting on employee rights to request flexible working from their employer from day 1 of their job. But that State review need not delay organisations themselves from pro-actively exploring such contractual offers with their staff - after all there may be ‘first-mover advantage’ in recruitment and retention for firms that demonstrate their brand as a leader in flexible working rather than a reluctant follower.

In this respect then, the current pain for employers in recruiting and retaining their workforce in the face of a global talent squeeze may actually turn out to be a long overdue adjustment - a realisation that the best retention factor of all for staff is a job role that they love within an organisation that they feel respect their efforts and is committed to their career progression. Such a reawakening for employer and employee may turn out to be something that was inspired by crisis but that was actually needed all along…