Your employees have seen your ‘True colours, and that’s why I love you’…or will they…
Will your team be singing this to you in a few month’s time? Well we wonder! I won’t use the ‘at these challenging times’ line but let’s face it, our idea of ‘normal’ has changed forever and when we return to ‘normal’ it’s unlikely to be the ‘normal’ that we have been normally used to. The recent virus crisis has changed business, employee engagement and employee motivators as we know them and all the traditional accepted rules of business are likely to have changed when we return to work. In order to work out where we are going we need to look at where we have been!
3 months ago Coronavirus was a far off issue, at Fleet Evolution I was still planning my Easter snowboarding holiday but concerned about how much snowboarding I could do, as we were just so insanely busy. On a wider basis good talent was in demand and HR professionals were looking for innovative schemes such as ours to attract and retain skilled colleagues. Loyalty was generally a 2 way street. Then mid March everything changed and the rules have changed forever.
In March everything changed, in a way no business continuity plan could ever have forecast. Many of us were told to go home and the government effectively funded the mothballing of hundreds of thousands of us. We stopped driving, stopped using public transport, had to engage with our kids and stopped engaging with our colleagues, face to face anyway. New enquiries largely dried up, invoicing fell and workforces were slashed or furloughed on a wholesale basis.
So fast forward to the end of this and what will the future look like for employers looking to re-engage with talent? Well I think some will be looking to replace quicker than others! Some employers decided to furlough employees but paid the additional salary to furlough on full pay, many did not. How do you think employees will value an employer who didn’t value them enough to pay 20% when they return? Of course some will just be grateful to have a job, but not typically those whose skillset may be more in demand.
The maths alone reflects the shortsighted strategy, if you pay the additional 20% you’ll pay a maximum of ￡600 per month, compare that with the ￡27,000 the CIPD estimate it costs to recruit new talent and you’ll see how the figures are skewed. Then there is work life balance, employees have proved that they can work from home, around their other commitments and be productive in the most stressful circumstances. Some will have hated it, but those that enjoyed it will see no valid reason to return to the 9-5 office environment every day.
On motoring your team will start to question the need to drive to go to meetings, after all we have survived a few months using Zoom and life has carried on, with no stress. Increasingly environmentally aware colleagues will also loathe creating the pollution to clog our skies and look to reduce car use and adopt electric where possible.
Employees will also be less gung ho about finance, credit will probably decline, savings increase and your team will look to cut expense to support this, employers who maximise salary sacrifice and financial education will reap big rewards.
Ultimately nobody knows for certain what it will be like in a few months, these are just my ideas but if employees with the right skillset are still required then your colleagues will not forget those that took care of them, and those who did the bare minimum! Valuing your team and having great reward strategies will always pay dividends, through this crisis and the air quality environmental crisis that will follow, in fact through all times, as Cyndi Lauper said ‘time after time’.