Amid tough times, these 5 industries show how to raise worker confidence

Never mind the U.S. economy’s supply shortages, a nasty upturn in inflation or the continuing burdens of coping with COVID-19. Is it possible to create workplaces where people’s outlooks are actually getting brighter? The surprising answer is: Yes.

A new analysis by LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence team highlights a cluster of industries where workers’ confidence is on the rise. Examples range from management consulting to energy. Findings are based on regular surveys of roughly 5,000 LinkedIn members every two weeks.

What unites these standouts is that they don’t just impress Wall Street with financial wins. They also are stepping up in ways that personally matter to employees: hiring boldly, boosting pay,? improving working conditions — and rallying people to their missions.?

The chart below highlights five industries where confidence in their employers’ outlook six months from now has surged the fastest in the past year, as well as the five with the biggest declines. Confidence levels are expressed on scale from -100 to +100; further details are in the methodology section below. In total, 42 sectors were analyzed.

For now, management consulting is a citadel of optimism, with a confidence reading of +59 in 2021’s fourth quarter. That’s up 31 points from the same measure a year earlier — marking both the fastest gain and the highest absolute level for any of the 42 sectors tracked in this analysis.

Julie Sweet, chief executive of Accenture, last month shared three key factors that have been brightening the mood at the consulting company she runs.?

First, she told investors, there’s booming demand for Accenture’s core service: helping clients master the digital transformations that are needed as new remote habits take hold. Revenue in the latest fiscal quarter surged 27%. Bookings for future work climbed even faster.?

Second, people’s careers at Accenture are thriving. In the latest quarter, Accenture hired 50,000 people worldwide and announced 90,000 internal promotions. No stagnation here! More than 20% of Accenture’s total workforce (674,000 people) either joined or got a bigger job during that 90-day period.

Third — and perhaps most important — Sweet connected the company’s success with her employees’ efforts. That starts with spending $250 million a quarter on training to enhance employees skills. It also includes Sweet’s public salutes to employees’ “extraordinary work” and their commitment “to deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity.”

The rhetoric isn’t as ambitious at restaurants, hotels and other parts of the hospitality sector — but a newfound commitment to boost pay is making a difference there, too. Darden Restaurants — which runs Olive Garden and other chains – recently sped up a series of targeted pay increases so they fully take hold by the end of this month, rather than the originally targeted January 2023.

Hospitality employees’ confidence levels have climbed 30 points since late 2020, and are now at +47. The general reopening of in-person dining has surely helped, too.

The mood is brighter in entertainment, too, where even partial reopenings have made a difference. And for a handful of commodity-based industries, such as energy, higher inflation brings more opportunities than problems.

Meanwhile, the higher education sector’s confidence level (+15) is still well below the national average for all industries, but it’s rallied 20 points from the dismal levels of a year ago (-5), when many campuses were largely closed.?

Schools such as the University of Wyoming have switched their anti-COVID strategies from containment to management — looking for ways to balance medical caution with a desire to resume normal life. “We have to learn to live differently,” Cornell University president Martha Pollack recently told The New York Times.

For a few of the 42 sectors covered by the Workforce Confidence surveys, workers in the past year have become more worried about their employers’ outlook. Some of that skepticism, in fields such as electronics or medical devices, may reflect supply-chain snarls that are making it hard to manufacture and ship products on time.

The biggest decline (12 points year over year) is occurring in the staffing and recruiting sector, where confidence in employers’ outlook now stands at +25. Ironically this sector showed great optimism last spring (+55), when an economic rebound was creating a nationwide hiring surge.?

Lately, though, high levels of worker frustration and a rise in job quits have been making it a lot harder for staffing and recruiting specialists to find — and win over — the job candidates they need in order to satisfy the economy’s hiring needs.

Methodology

LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index is based on a quantitative online survey distributed to members via email every two weeks. Roughly 5,000 U.S.-based members respond to each wave. Members are randomly sampled and must be opted into research to participate. Students, stay-at-home partners and retirees are excluded from analysis so we can get an accurate representation of those currently active in the workforce. Confidence in employer reflects the percentage of members expecting conditions to improve, minus the percentage expecting the environment to worsen. We analyze data in aggregate and will always respect member privacy. Data is weighted by engagement level, to ensure fair representation of various activity levels on the platform. The results represent the world as seen through the lens of LinkedIn’s membership; variances between LinkedIn’s membership & overall market population are not accounted for.

Alexandra Gunther and Adam Cohen? from LinkedIn Market Research contributed to this article.