How to Secure the Workforce You Need
Workforce Troubles
Planning ahead to secure your ideal workforce often leads to more questions than answers, now more than ever before. Here are a few of those questions:
How are we going to pay people enough when inflation is so high?
Where are we going to find the people we need in such a tight labour market?
What do people expect from their employer now we’re coming out of the pandemic?
One way I’ve been thinking about these big questions is to decipher which conditions are likely to be here for the long term and which are better off considered from a short-to-medium term perspective.
Short Term Pain
Let’s start with the shorter term view. The economic conditions we’re experiencing, although painful, are likely to be relatively short-term. Inflationary pressure and a tight labour market have shifted bargaining power towards the employee. According to Professor Jarrod Haar, as little as 9% of our workforce have no plans to look for a new job, so most people could at least be tempted to move on. However, Haar points out that most kiwis are feeling less than optimistic about their future earnings, which he puts down to the collective trauma of the pandemic experience. He encourages employees to make the most of the conditions while they last. The economic cycle will continue to turn and the balance is likely to shift again within the next year or two.
Long Term Gain
What then are the longer-term shifts that might be more reliable to consider when thinking about how to sure-up the workforce you need?
The pandemic experience, as widely reported in 2021, led most of us to reconsider our entire relationship with work. This was a deep level of reflection and introspection, which has created new expectations and hopes about what people want from their employer. People are seeking:
Purpose and meaning through their work
Connection with colleagues and community
Flexibility and choice about where and when they work
I’d suggest that these changes are more permanent, when compared with the economic conditions we see today.
One organisation I’m working with have realised that they need to double down and make their employee experience their number one priority. It’s not that their customers or services aren’t important, far from it. They've realised that if they don’t keep up with this deeper shift happening in the workforce, they won’t have anyone there to deliver to the customers in the first place.
Top Priorities
If you want to to secure a workforce based on the long view, where do you put your attention. Here are my top three suggestions.
Connected Culture
Create a habit of connecting people with each other, as well as to the purpose and positive impact of the work they do. We know that people are seeking more meaning in their work. If we don’t respond and support them to find it, we will ultimately lose out to an employer who will. People have also become more lonely, especially if they have been working remotely, so connecting people to each other and their immediate community is worth investing in now.
Flexibility - now
People want more choices about the hours, days and place of work. We know that around three in four people haven’t yet got their ideal flexible work arrangement, according to surveys done here in Aotearoa as well as overseas by the Wall Street Journal. There is so much more that’s immediately possible. Having regular, proactive, team-based conversations gives people the opportunity to explore what’s possible and front foot some flex experiments right now.
Flexibility - later
Many jobs have constraints in place which curtail the choices available for people to determine their own work schedule and workplace. I’m working with some organisations at the moment who want to explore what can be unfrozen, by exploring new types of job design, different rostering practices or investing in new systems, that will present much bolder flexible work options in the future. This is where the next frontier of flex lies and I’d encourage you to think about what you could offer later and what it would take to get there. The sooner you start thinking about creating more flex for the future, the further ahead you’ll be in securing your ideal workforce.