Separations in the US hit an all-time record of 4.9 million a year ago, November. Although many of the COVID related arguments are no longer relevant, there continue to be millions of workers who remain on the sidelines waiting for their potential employers to offer them a reason to make the leap.
Thousands more workers continue to vote with their feet.
The question for us as both Entrepreneurs and Businesses, is “how will our organizations compete against not only our direct competition, but any business that can make use our people’s skill sets?
The answer our potential employees are looking is actually quite simple: “what are the working conditions we are going to provide?”
As we begin to delve into our planning for next year, we are likely able to extract many better values from our budgets, not in our reductions of expenses, but from significant, well-placed investments in our company cultures and our workforce well-beings.
The Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) has some important reminders to well worth
• Toxic workplace cultures cost U.S. employers $223 billion in turnover over a five-year period, according to a report by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM. 2019).
• When an organization has a strong culture, three things happen: Employees know how top management wants them to respond to any situation, employees believe that the expected response is the proper one, and employees know that they will be rewarded for demonstrating the organization's values
• Organizational culture can manifest itself in a variety of ways, including leadership behaviors, communication styles, internally distributed messages and corporate celebrations. Given that culture comprises so many elements, it is not surprising that terms for describing specific cultures vary widely. Some commonly used terms for describing cultures include aggressive, customer-focused, innovative, fun, ethical, research-driven, technology-driven, process-oriented, hierarchical, family-friendly, and risk-taking.
If during our planning we begin to anticipate that we are likely going to struggle with building the bench that we will need to support the growth that we want, it may be time to ask:
1) Is it now time for our company to redefine our values and our culture to be relevant in our post-pandemic world of work?
2) How can we best invest in the people we have to help them feel more secure in their futures here instead of looking for that comfort elsewhere?
3) Am I as a business owner willing to give up some shorter-term monetary profits for far larger long-term returns on those investments?
Employment doesn’t have to be consistent shift in balance of power from employer to employee and vice versa.
It can simply be a series of formalized agreements that place the BURDENS AND BENEFITS of skin-in-the game on both sides.
___________
For a related article, see https://www.slcadvisorygroup.com/post/the-social-contract-