But Are You Better Than An Unemployment Check?

We’re having a moment right now. A moment called the Great Resignation. Four million (2.7%) of US workers resigned from their jobs in April, which is a record you must go back to 2000 to beat.

If you’re sitting around waiting for extended unemployment benefits to dry up so you can get your workers back, you’re missing the point. Because if the job you have to offer, if the environment you invite people to work in, if your treatment of employees, isn’t better than receiving an unemployment check, then it’s not your staffing at stake – it’s your competitiveness.

Like so many other trends, this is a trend that was in motion before the pandemic, but the pandemic highlighted it and sped it up.

Before the pandemic, workers who didn’t like their jobs, who were treated disrespectfully and dismissively by managers, or who worked in toxic cultures were finding it easier and easier to self-employ in the gig economy. The pandemic accelerated that trend perhaps as much as 10X. As both B2B and B2C moved online, entrepreneurs launched new businesses and new pockets of freelance work opened up everywhere.

In many industries, savvy intermediaries are coming up with ways to put individuals in business — setting up solo-preneurs with the systems and inventories to make a living. It's like affiliate marketing on steroids. The jewelry industry has several new services that make it possible for a knowledgeable jewelry salesperson with good contacts to open their own business overnight with no inventory requirements — including the ability to offer custom jewelry designs. Without inventory overhead and with franchise-level marketing, the risks are almost non-existent, and the potential rewards are immense.

Not everyone wants to go into business for themselves, and a significant percentage of these new ventures will fail sometime in the next two to three years. But this issue is not going away. The gig economy is here to stay, and every business owner – including the ones who are opening new businesses right now and will be dealing with employment issues of their own some time in the near future – must learn to elevate selling themselves to employees right up there with selling themselves to customers.

Because raising wages alone isn’t sufficient to stop the bleed.

According to a survey from Microsoft, it’s projected that 41% of workers globally are considering leaving their current employer this year (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/hybrid-work?). Workers plan to go where their talents and commitment will be appreciated and rewarded, which could mean to another company or working for themselves. If you are concerned about being left without a chair when the music stops, here are some things to evaluate in your business.

Take a Hard Look at Your Business Culture

Culture, defined as a system of meaning and shared beliefs, provides the framework for behavior within a group. Any time two or more people assemble to get something done, a culture evolves, so if you haven't set out to build a specific culture for your company, then the culture is likely to mirror the strongest personalities in the group or to be defined by the subgroups and their relationships with one another.?

If your culture does not promote the values and behaviors of respect, personal accountability (even – especially! – for the bosses), commitment to professional and personal development for all, creativity, openness to everyone’s ideas, and the ability to grow and change, you won’t be able to attract or keep the best talent.

Start With Yourself

To assess the attractiveness of your business to employees (this includes the ones you have already), start with yourself. How do you behave? What do you value? Can you recognize the merit of ideas that conflict with your own beliefs? Are you confident enough to learn from everyone in the room, regardless of relative education or experience? The good news is that leadership skills can be learned. But it does require personal discipline – which requires motivation. Perhaps the motivation of not being able hire sufficient staff is the motivation that was missing in the past.

Spoiler alert: This can’t be faked. Employees are the ultimate authenticity barometers. Your leadership sets the tone for the rest of your company, so start with you.

Management Style and Competence

Life is just too short to work for a bad manager, and yet bad managers abound. Take a hard look at your your managers. Make sure your management team is conscious of what it means to be effective leaders and that all are held accountable to those behaviors. Base pay, bonuses, and company recognition for managers should be rewarded based on their group’s performance (not their individual deliverables) and the innovation, motivation, and retention of their staff.

Rethink Work

Employers serious about competing for talent are figuring out just how much flexibility they can provide – flexibility in where they work, how they work, and when they work. For nearly 20 years we’ve been coaching business owners to stop monitoring who is at their desk and what they are doing while sitting there, and focus instead on deliverables. If the deliverables are met – on time and at the required quality – that’s what matters. The pandemic has turned this suggestion into a mandate.

Making work more flexible requires a lot of moving parts to come together. According to the Microsoft survey and accompanying article, “every organization will need a plan that encompasses policy, physical space, and technology.” By analyzing what kind of work people are doing, what tools they need to do the work, and where that work must be done, companies can develop policies that are as flexible as possible relative to the nature of the work.

Make Achievement More Transparent

Some people are micromanagers by nature. Others hate micromanaging, but don't know the alternative. The alternative is to implement a Management Framework – an integrated system of metrics that makes expectations clear, aligns teams and mitigates intra-team sub-optimization, and facilitates comparison of actual results to plans. Management Frameworks don’t have to be complicated (though too many are); they just require thoughtful planning. But the effort is worth it, because once you have a Management Framework in place, you will begin to see the benefits of having all your people on the same page, running in the same direction, regardless of schedules, physical workspace, your ability to directly monitor what they are doing, or even your ability to understand what they are doing.

An added benefit? A sound Management Framework will inspire teams to collaborate and innovate together in ways you or your individual managers may not ever have thought of.

Provide Better Onboarding and Training

Even before the rate of employee turnover shot through the roof, the cost of finding and assimilating new employees to the point of full contribution was calculated at two years of their full starting salary. This is about much more than task and skill training. So much of learning to do a job well is learning the culture and practices of the company, including the acronyms. Once you do the hard work of finding and closing the right people, it is essential to have an onboarding and training program in place to ensure they reach their potential, find success and happiness, and stay.

Increase Your DQ

You know about IQ and EQ. Now there’s DQ: Digital Intelligence. Facilitating all this flexibility, transparency, innovation, and measurement requires comfort with and commitment to using technology throughout your organization.

But it’s not enough to simply adopt technology. Corporations are now looking at the ways they have implemented technology and the associated disconnects that have led to employee exhaustion and loss of collaboration. It is entirely possible to use technology in ways that make you more efficient while improving quality of life for employees and quality of output for the company. Note to small business owners: Do not fear this. The tech available today is affordable, fast-to-implement, and well within your ability to learn.

Companies are fighting the employee squeeze with salary, sign-on bonuses, benefits, and perks, raising the stakes for everyone. Most SMEs can’t compete with major corporations on money. But that’s OK, because many people prefer to work for SMEs. If you have the right culture, respectful and capable management, and are bringing all the innovation and flexibility you can to the ways and places work can be done, you can compete for talent.

Or, you can just wait for the extended unemployment benefits to end. But ultimately that’s not going to work out well for you.