The 5 biggest people challenges for employers
As I write and reflect back on the last few years, the challenges in the working world when it comes to people seem oddly familiar. It’s the same but different. It goes without saying that the impact of the pandemic is still being felt, far and wide, depending on your sector. Some industries are thriving, some are limping a little while others have been obliterated entirely. As we take stock of where we are in amongst the rubble of wars, inflation, rising living costs, energy fuel crises and a government in flux, one thing remains constant. People are still turning up for work, and workplaces have jobs to do.
“The five biggest people challenges as I see them are not really strangers to us. Some have come into sharp focus because of the economic environment, but for many people professionals, these are mostly all areas we are familiar with. ”
These are things we have been waving our hands in the air about for years. If COVID has gifted us anything, it is the opportunity for others to share in our passion to place the individual at the very heart of business.
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The ‘great resignation’, the ‘great rethink’, and employee retention
Let’s get straight to it. Recruiting at the moment is a nightmare. The media has given a lot of attention to the “great resignation” or perhaps the “great rethink” due to the number of people moving jobs being much higher than normal. Attitudes around working life and role expectations have caused swathes of people to take career breaks, change careers entirely, monetise what was a hobby or craft or generally feel a need to turn the treadmill speed down a notch or two. That leaves almost half of employers(1) in a tight labour market facing huge recruitment challenges.
The fact that employees are holding the cards and are currently feeling that they can walk into a comparable job elsewhere, the onus is on the employer to focus on retention. We have always wanted to retain our best people but more than ever businesses need to think about how they can improve the quality of jobs and create thriving and positive work environments. If you aren’t sure how to do this, start by asking your people. Some people are motivated by money but it’s not the only reason to stay somewhere. In fact, I’ve worked in some businesses where the pay was slightly lower than market rate, but the payoff was a supportive working environment and a fantastic culture with opportunities there for creating and developing into something wonderful. If you can’t afford pay increases, there are other ways to improve job quality.
Which brings us nicely onto…
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Rethinking engagement
Employee engagement. The thing that we all agree we need, but can’t agree on what it actually is. Or what the magic combination of things are. Not to worry. In my opinion, if you are a business that considers employee engagement and are willing to do what you can to up the ante in this area, then forget about the textbooks. Speak to your people, find out what they need. Consider the culture you have – is it working for you?
As we see in the “great rethink”, people are considering their options around work. There is a need for people to feel more connected to the purpose of the business. This is particularly prevalent in our generation Z (currently aged up to their mid-20’s) who are deeply purpose driven. Do you have core values in your business? Do you know what your mission and purpose is? Your people need to feel truly connected to this and importantly, understand how their contribution directly makes an impact on the business. Keeping an eye on engagement – an element of business that can directly impact on business growth - getting people to work with their hearts as well as their heads is a key component to improving workplace culture, increases productivity and motivation, and will improve retention.
The Wyre Forest
Wellbeing
While we are on the subject of engagement, we need a whole new section on wellbeing. We aren’t talking about lunch time massages or joss sticks here. We are talking about how your people are. The sad fact coming out of the data is that it is quite likely that your people are not ok.
We all flirted with mental health and wellbeing when the pandemic was at its peak. In fact, COVID can be patted on the back for bringing mental health into the foreground. In their 2021 Health and Wellbeing report, the CIPD found that wellbeing was a top priority for HR and business leaders. Remember those heady days? Well further data has since suggested that in the 2022 survey of the same name, wellbeing is slipping down the Boardrooms priority list. Hey, there was already a downward trend in wellbeing before the pandemic began. In 2022, the CIPD reported that almost two in ten workers said their general mental health was poor and just over a quarter of workers say work has a negative impact on their mental health(2). These kinds of numbers simply cannot be ignored by employers – and it isn’t about just sending a fancy soap to homeworkers or putting beanbags in the meeting room that has no windows. What we need is a cultural shift in workplaces where mental health is talked about like physical health.
There is no health without mental health. Let’s say that again – there is no health without mental health. But again, reading the numbers given by the CIPD(2), workplaces simply aren’t doing a good enough job at being safe spaces for people to hold a mental health conversation. 55% of CIPD respondents have experienced depression in the past 12 months, they said that work was a contributing factor, but only 36% discussed this with their boss or employer.
We need to support mental health in the workplace as much as we support physical health and we do this by giving managers and employers the knowledge and confidence they need to hold conversations when they are concerned, put reasonable adjustments in place where needed and to signpost appropriately when required.
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Supporting line management capability
Where to start with line managers? They don’t have an easy time of it. More often than not they got put in charge of a bunch of people because they were good at something else. If they were lucky, they may have received some training on how to look after that bunch of people, but in my experience that’s a luxury received by few. My experience is echoed by the CIPD (2), who found that close to a quarter of managers they spoke to said they don’t receive the training they need or have the time to manage staff well. (I think those are generous numbers; I suspect the real picture is far worse).
And then HR went all weird and started asking them to do ‘personnel’-type stuff, like appraising people, having regular meetings with their team, asking people if they were ok when they came back from sick leave, you know, “fluffy” stuff. Yikes.
Line managers are KEY to your business. They have such an important role to play in the lives of their teams; the work that gets done, the motivation and engagement behind it, whether Sanjay is off sick with stress for 3 months – they have the power to create empowering and positive workplace experiences or they can make people feel like they want to curl into a ball and die. Manager relationships should be one of your number one people priorities. If you ignore this one, you may as well not worry about the other four areas in this article because everyone will eventually get up and leave anyway.
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Workplace flexibility expectations
Ah, working from home where once it was not a thing. In some businesses, remote working, hybrid working, working from home, has been a thing for yonks. And guess what? The world didn’t blow up. Work, would you believe it, got done.
The problem we face is that the ways of working that were office based that were forced to move to remote working, that are now being challenged by the people who found they could actually do their job from home and were happier and more productive there, has everyone in a flap because we can’t see what they’re doing any more! We’re not used to working this way. And it’s not fair on the people who come in and do crazy things like pay for petrol.
Workplace flexibility is a tricky one for businesses, and I get that. For a lot of us it is just a step too far outside of where we are comfortable when it comes to managing our people. Now we can, lets just get everyone back into the office, because we were comfortable in that place, seeing people everyday with our own actual eyes (and seeing definitely means productively working, right?). But because of the retention issues and because its so hard finding good people and because all these good people seem to enjoy working from home, at least some of the time, now with an arm forced behind our back and a grimace on our face we now have to advertise roles through gritted teeth as “flexible” because people won’t want to work for us otherwise.
There’s no easy answer to the workplace flexibility question – at least its easier for some than others. For those who are struggling, it’s time to re-examine the other four areas of this article and consider how you want your culture to be. How are jobs going to be designed to engage the human being doing the work rather than simply being part of an organisational structure that has possibly had its day but no one wanted to or thought they could change it? How are you going to get your line managers to figure out how to connect, engage and encourage people? How can you protect your people’s wellbeing and foster an empowering and productive workplace? What happens when that workplace has no actual place?
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The world has changed since the pandemic arrived and it will continue to change. With such a huge loss of life we have remembered that life is precious, a timely and stark reminder perhaps that we needed to take another look at the parts of our lives where we spend a lot of our time.
We have a huge opportunity here to align our corporate values with what it means to be human. To focus on building workplaces where people can do their best and be their best.
It won’t happen overnight, but it’s worth doing, because as we say all the time at Human Everything, life is too short and too important to be having a terrible time at work.
If you want to have a chat with the team at Human Everything about anything in this article, please get in touch. Simply email: lucy@humaneverything.co.uk
References:
2022; CIPD: Labour Market Outlook.
June 2022; CIPD: Good Work Index and UK Working Lives Survey.