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 FirecrackerLeadership.com

First, The Great Resignation. Now, The Great Adaptation

The Great Adaptation has begun. It is a direct result of The Great Resignation.

According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, 68.9 million employees were separated from their jobs in 2021. Of those separations, 47.4 million, or 68.8%, were voluntary.

The graph below illustrates employee separations, by industry, since February 2020.

 

 

You can read more about The Great Resignation here, as well as in many other blogs and news outlets. What you have not read about — until now! — is The Great Adaptation.

The unprecedented number of people leaving their jobs has led to an unprecedented war for talent. The Great Adaptation is how businesses are adapting to win the war for talent and secure the future, for themselves, for their employees, for their ecosystems.

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The Fundamentals: Wages

 

More and more companies are offering higher wages or sign-on bonuses and even paying down student debt in an effort to recruit and retain talent.

The graph below illustrates how hires have begun to increase in all sectors, but hires and quits (also known as “turnover” or “churn”) remain higher in jobs with low wages.

 

Companies that pay competitive wages are hiring more and experiencing less turnover or churn.

Beyond Wages: Culture

But it’s not only about wages. Wages are “table stakes” — the cost of being in the game of talent acquisition. The winning hand is the culture you create.

The pandemic has made many people more aware of the importance of things outside of wages — things like professional development.

According to HR Dive, a news site covering human resources issues:

• U.S. workers rank professional development and training opportunities highly among their list of criteria for evaluating prospective employers, yet only 39% say their current employers were doing so.
• 80% of U.S. employees surveyed consider professional development and training offerings to be important when accepting a new job.
• 91% of survey respondents wanted more training opportunities.
• 75% of employees said their employers placed more focus on attracting new talent than investing in current talent.

In short, if you don’t provide professional development, your workers will find another employer who will.

The U.S. job market remains unable to fill 2.9 million jobs from where it was in February 2020.  The employee shortage is not over and will not end anytime soon.

 

 

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How Are You Adapting?

 

What is your organization doing to adapt to these current realities? Specifically:

• What are you doing to attract talent from the national (or international) talent pool?
• What are you doing to embrace a hybrid workforce?
• What traditions and rituals in your culture have you maintained during this pandemic?
• How will you teach your culture to hybrid and remote employees?
• What type of professional development are you offering to you employees to ensure they have opportunities to grow their skillsets inside your organization?

If you can’t answer these questions now, I offer them so that you and your leadership team can work on the answers and begin the work of adapting to secure the future — for your organization, its employees and the ecosystem of which you are a part.

I’d love to hear your questions and comments. If you would like to discuss this topic further, just drop me a note.

Until then, let’s keep cultivating our culture, together!

Would you benefit from CEO coaching?

 

 FirecrackerLeadership.com

Would you benefit from CEO coaching?

 

 FirecrackerLeadership.com

Wharton management professor Lindsey Cameron was so committed to her research on gig workers that she became one, driving part-time for Uber for three years as she studied how people in the sharing economy give meaning to their work.

Her time spent as both a driver and a passenger helped Cameron forge a deeper understanding with the 63 ride-hailing drivers she interviewed over five years for her formal study. Questioning them, she drew out intimate details about their experiences and learned about the mental games they play to find satisfaction in jobs that are transactional, temporary, and downright lonely at times.

“There’s a cultural narrative that the gig economy is so terrible and so exploitive,” Cameron said. “I honestly came into the research thinking that was true, but that’s not what many of the drivers told me. They really liked it.”

Her paper, “Making Out While Driving: Relational and Efficiency Games in the Gig Economy,” which was recently published in the journal Organization Science, adds to a growing body of research into what is quickly becoming the new normal for many — workplaces without walls, bosses, co-workers, or any of the traditional structures that keep employees engaged and socially connected. As many as 55 million Americans were gig workers in 2017, a figure that has risen during the COVID-19 pandemic. And policy debates continue over whether those workers should be classified as employees who deserve benefits.

“We’re going into a world where there are weaker organization and occupational mechanisms for socialization. You can get hired by a company and work there and never talk to a single person face to face,” Cameron said. “It raises the question of what keeps people in the work game? Hopefully, this paper is helping you understand what it’s like to be literally in the driver’s seat.”

“Hopefully, this paper is helping you understand what it’s like to be literally in the driver’s seat.”–Lindsey Cameron

In her analysis, Cameron found that ride-hailing drivers played two different games to keep themselves engaged. She classified them as:

• The relational game — Drivers bond with their passengers and provide excellent customer service in order to get a great review on the company’s app, which uses an algorithm-based rating system. They develop a mutually beneficial, amicable relationship with the app as they constantly track their ratings and get positive feedback.
• The efficiency game — Drivers complete work quickly at the highest pay rate and manage passengers by minimizing personal contact. Unable to accurately track their efforts through the app, drivers develop an adversarial relationship with it. They often create their own tracking tools and sometimes resort to manipulating the platform’s algorithm to “win.”

The study is filled with eye-opening anecdotes from Cameron’s interviews that show how drivers play the relational game by going the extra mile to engage their customers. One spoke about consoling a despondent, suicidal passenger until the man felt calm (“It was a good ride for me”). Another described how providing free water and snacks to hungry riders after a football game made them so grateful that they called him the greatest driver ever (“It made their day”). Others decorated their car interior with unicorn decals or played music that would deliberately spark friendly conversation with their passengers.

These drivers didn’t report getting more tips because of their efforts, Cameron said. Instead, what motivated them to provide a higher level of service was a sense of professionalism and purpose. Many of the relational-game drivers described themselves as tour guides, counselors, and sounding boards for passengers who just needed a friendly ear. Sometimes their actions paid off in non-monetary ways, leading them to new friends, hobbies, or job contacts.

Cameron noted that these drivers often pulled out their smartphones while she interviewed them to show her the positive comments left by appreciative riders. For them, the app was a “benevolent algorithm” that offered support and guidance, much like a good co-worker.

“The app is a tangible reminder of a job well done… allowing for an instant emotional boost,” she wrote in the paper. “Many drivers reported checking their apps constantly, even outside of work shifts.”

In contrast, drivers who played the efficiency game had no interest in anything beyond getter their fares from one destination to another. They enforced social boundaries by not offering to help with luggage, for example, or complying with requests for a quick detour to McDonald’s (“I don’t want to make 17 cents a minute and… have you sitting back, eating fries, making my car smell like French fries”).

“The app is a tangible reminder of a job well done… allowing for an instant emotional boost.”–Lindsey Cameron

Many efficiency-game drivers were suspicious and distrustful of customers. So, they didn’t offer extra services, such as carrying luggage, to protect themselves from liabilities — for instance, being accused of theft. That distrust extended to the algorithm, which they saw as unhelpful in matching them to the best fares, inaccurate in calculating their pay, and even unholy. One driver told Cameron, “I know exactly who’s behind the algorithm’s decisions, and it’s not God.”

Not surprisingly, efficiency-game drivers were more likely to view gig work as a low-paying trap they wanted to escape from. One even compared ride-hailing to prostitution, where the company is the “pimp” and the riders are “the johns.”

“Overall, when playing the efficiency game, drivers were not able to see themselves as skillful or successful in the work, as they were painfully aware of the control wielded by [the company] and its algorithms,” Cameron wrote. “This led drivers to describe their relationship with [the company] as antagonistic and, at times, even destructive.”

One important takeaway from the study is that all gig workers didn’t always play one game or another; some changed their approach based on the circumstances. Another takeaway, although not explicit in the study, is the need for tech-based firms to put more consideration into their apps, which serve as the only link between the gig worker and the larger organization, she said.

“This tool is going out in the world, so the user interaction experience is very important,” Cameron said. “What’s more important is to recognize that people will have different motives, so how do you create the right tech infrastructure and give them enough scaffolding to play the game they want to play?”

Cameron said what surprised her most about her study was the contrasting perspectives she found among ride-hail drivers.

“I didn’t like driving because of the heavy congestion. I thought everybody was not going to like it, too. And lo and behold, a lot of people like it,” she said. “This paper is about trying to make sense of that, and it shows the value of qualitative research. One of the hallmarks of good, qualitative research is that you can get into the participants’ shoes.”

https://content.leadquizzes.com/lp/pFQc1F_NjQ

The “Great Resignation” is a signal that the balance of power is shifting toward employees, and the pendulum won’t be swinging back any time soon. Americans are increasingly prioritizing personal happiness and the search for purposeful work over jobs that simply pay the bills. As a result, employers like you must adapt to survive.

Job openings were at a record high in 2021. This trend started in 2019, but it persists into 2022. In the wake of the pandemic and the accompanying shift to remote work, many employees have experienced newfound freedom that they’d rather not give up. Now, employers around the country are hoping to lure them back to the office while scrambling to fill vacant positions and keep top talent from jumping ship.

If you hope to retain top talent — and attract the right candidates — you’ll have to ensure employees are happy and fulfilled in their current roles whether they’re remote or in the office. The best way to do that is through developing their strengths. Rather than focusing on eliminating weaknesses, find activities that challenge employees without draining them to create the right conditions for optimal performance and intrinsic satisfaction.

Strengths-based management is a proven approach to ensuring your employees grow along with your business, but it’s just one approach. With that in mind, here are three more tips for keeping your workforce intact during the ongoing workplace exodus:

1. Take a personalized approach to employee engagement.
   No matter your company’s overarching objective, your employees will have their own personal goals that are just as important to them. The only way you can identify these goals is by getting to know team members on a personal level. It takes time, but the upside is worth the investment.
   Dr. Dan Harrison, founder and CEO of Harrison Assessments, explains that understanding employees as individuals allows you to align their goals with your own. “If you want to learn how to improve employee engagement, evaluate employees on an individual basis,” says Harrison. “One-size-fits-all solutions will only work for a percentage of your workforce. However, an individual approach will ensure workers have what they need to feel connected and important to your company as a whole.”By drawing a connection between what employees need and what your business hopes to achieve, you can make individuals feel seen and heard — and that’s invaluable to both employee satisfaction and performance. According to an O.C. Tanner survey, 37% of respondents believe recognition is the most effective mechanism for supporting employees. By understanding what matters most to each member of your team, you’re showing that you recognize and care about their personal development.
2. Provide transparent feedback.
   Feedback is a gift that allows the recipient to leverage an outside perspective to identify their own strengths and weaknesses. Leaders who give transparent feedback can help their employees grow and promote a culture of effective communication. This approach has been deployed at some of the world’s most successful companies. (Netflix mentions feedback 11 times on its recruitment page.)
   Leaders should help employees set clear goals and create conditions that allow them to achieve those goals. Visionary leaders don’t fear failure. If an employee does fall short of a target, they diagnose the problems, provide feedback on performance, and help identify new solutions. In the process, they keep employees fully engaged in the challenges at hand. In fact, 43% of employees who are highly engaged at work receive feedback at least once a week.
   Elon Musk, product architect and CEO of Tesla, understands the power of feedback. “I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better,” he says. “I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.”
3. Conduct stay interviews.
   According to Work Institute’s “2020 Retention Report,” the vast majority of reasons employees cite for leaving a job are preventable. If you want to keep employees, you have to know what they’re thinking. And to know what they’re thinking, you must interview them. The tricky part is that this tool requires a critical skill that not all leaders have mastered: the art of listening.
   Dick Finnegan, CEO of C-Suite Analytics, works with executives to refine their employee engagement approaches and their listening skills. “We find that a high percentage of workers are willing to be open, but only after their leader has been trained to ask the right questions, to listen to answers, to probe to learn more, and to take detailed notes,” he says. “When we train leaders, we say, ‘It’s not about you; it’s about them. The more you listen, probe to learn more, and write things down, the more they’re going to tell you.’”

These three tips will help you understand your employees and uncover what goals they want to accomplish. If you can eliminate sources of dissatisfaction for them and pave the way toward success, they’ll be more inclined to stick around and help you succeed, too.

https://content.leadquizzes.com/lp/pFQc1F_NjQ

WARNING: Ted Lasso season 2 spoilers ahead. Reader beware.

“You can tell a lot about someone by what they do with their pain…do they transform it, or do they transmit it.”- Richard Rohr

Yesterday I was a guest on an upcoming episode of the Ted Lasso Richmond Till We Die podcast. (Do check them out – conversations with cast members and more!) I love TV and I love religion (well, kinda) and so an opportunity to discuss the religious imagery in Ted Lasso season 2? I’ll just say what Ted would say if Diane Sawyer ever asked him on a date: “yes, please!”

The final question they posed to me was this: what storyline do you hope is played out more in season 3. It took me no time at all to answer: I want Nate (that little shit) to get a redemption story. The podcast hosts then regaled me with how much hate there is for Nate in the on-line Ted Lasso community.

But woven throughout Ted Lasso, there has been a strong thread of forgiveness and mercy, so I’d like to make the case, if you haven’t already, to give Ted Lasso a second watch with a special eye to Nate’s story.

Early on we see him mousily avoid everyone’s gaze, and no one even asks his name and when someone gets his name wrong he doesn’t even correct them. He shuffles meekly around the locker room, taking everyone’s abuse. His massive insecurity masks his massive talent, and no one ever suspects how brilliant he is.

Nate’s sense of himself is painfully diminished by having a bully for a father. He even spits at his own reflection in the mirror, because the only thing he sees when he looks at himself is the disappointment of a shitty dad, which breaks my heart.

And so when Ted comes along, asks his name and his opinion, we see him bloom under the sunlight of Ted’s attention. Which is lovely. But here’s the thing: IT WAS NOT ENOUGH.

And it never could be.

Your wounds are not your fault, but their healing is your opportunity.

If one person (parent, pastor, teacher, friend, lover, etc…) hurts us, we cannot hand over the responsibility of healing that wound to someone who is a nicer version of them. If you have church wounds and go to a different kind of church where you are more welcomed and the pastor is nicer to you, that wound will likely resurface as soon as someone newer than you joins and the pastor moves on to showing them special attention now.

Every time a substitute disappoints me, the wound comes back. Because it wasn’t actually healed. I just slathered the Lidocaine of someone else’s acceptance on it. But that shit wears off. What am I gonna do then? Hate the lidocaine for not being an actual cure? Betray the Lidocaine? Talk shit about the Lidocaine to anyone who will listen? Or do my fucking personal work?

Healing can START in a more loving community, it can START by having a father figure who is not a bully pay attention to you, but it can never be completed by them. That shit is OUR work.

(Nate was not healed by the attention and acceptance of Ted, or else he would have turned and offered the same kindness to the new locker room attendant, instead of offering him abuse.)

The first time I saw that scene in the locker room office where Nate finally tells Ted why he is so mad at him, I remember thinking, huh?

Often when a character finally gets told off I am like, finally! But not with this. Nate’s list of complaints against Ted made no sense to me, so much so that I wondered if I had missed something.

But when I watched again, I realized that Nate was not healed enough to stop taking everything personally. He viewed anything that was said to him or done to him as evidence he was being rejected.

EXAMPLE:

He suggested they run the “false nine” play.

Ted says “great idea Nate. let’s do it”

Nate says to Beard “it is a great idea so he will never say it’s mine. he will take credit”

Later, Ted (proving him wrong) says “we are gonna run Nate’s false nine”

Nate says to Beard “of course he’s calling it “Nate’s” – that’s so when it fails – and it will – he can blame it on me”.

I want to say that I have never done this. But the fact is, I DO THIS SHIT ALL THE TIME. I attribute motive and meaning to everything others say and do – not based in facts but based in how it confirms whatever negative thing I already believe to be true about myself or them. It’s gross. But it’s also human.

So . . . what do I want for Nate?

Healing.

I want to see Nate’s pain transformed. I want to see him be forgiven. And for sure I want to see him forgive himself.

OK, ok. I really just want all of this for me. And I want it for you. Imagine if we could all just transform the shit that has happened to us and stopped transmitting it everywhere, blaming the people who love us, and being dicks to the people we could be helping instead.

I want to see Ted stand outside Nate’s door at Christmas with a big flip-chart that says:

You hurt me.

And unless you make some meaningful amends you’ll always be a little shit.

And I forgive You. Merry Christmas.

So, to me and to you and to everyone else: Please do your work.

You’ll find you’re already worthy of love and appreciation.

You can stop trying to prove yourself to your dads.

https://content.leadquizzes.com/lp/pFQc1F_NjQ

https://content.leadquizzes.com/lp/pFQc1F_NjQ

Although organizations have been obsessing over the “war for talent” for two decades, it is surprising how often they will end up losing valuable employees for avoidable reasons, such as not knowing they are disengaged and open to other opportunities. A familiar outcome of this cycle has employers trying to match or improve their competitor’s offer to retain the employee, only to realize it is too little, too late. Current concerns about the Great Resignation have no doubt increased managers’ fear of losing valuable employees in a tight talent market.

A powerful, yet underutilized tool to avoid finding yourself in this situation is to conduct a “stay” interview. This is a brief, individual conversation with your employees aimed at knowing what makes them want to stay, and what may actually cause them to leave. Think about it as the reverse of the exit interview, in which the goal is to construct a post-mortem explanation of why someone left, and what you could have done to avoid it.

One reason stay interviews are useful is that they provide some structure and a formal process for checking in with your employees. This helps organizations nurture manager-employee conversations, and reduce the probability that a boss is unaware of their employee’s plans, thoughts, and motivation. While organizations often try to address this with employee engagement surveys, these are generally anonymous at the individual level, so only useful to identify collective trends. Besides, the correlation between engagement and turnover is much lower than people tend to assume, according to the best meta-analytic study.

Even if organizations do not impose it, it’s extremely advantageous for managers to conduct stay interviews. These may not always deter someone from leaving, but they will likely improve managers’ understanding of what their teams like and dislike, which should help them retain other valuable people.

While there are no clear-cut rules on how to conduct a perfect stay interview, data-driven recommendations tend to agree on the following points:

They should be private, one-on-one meetings, which state very clearly that the intention is to discuss an employee’s reason for staying, and therefore different from regular, task-related, work meetings.

They should be conducted with all team members, in order to avoid the perception that managers care only about certain employees, and that not being interviewed means not being valued.

Questions should always be clearly related to exploring the aspects of the job, role, and career that drive employees’ decision to stay. This means framing the discussion around positive talking points: “I would like to get a better sense of what excites you/keeps you interested/motivates you to stay with us.” Examples of questions to ask can include:

1. What do you like most like about working here?
2. What do you look forward to when you are getting ready for work?
3. What do you like most about our culture?
4. What would make a long-term career with us enticing for you?

They should explore opportunities for improving even if positive themes on staying dominate the conversation. This will require a minimum degree of psychological safety, so employees feel free to speak openly, without fearing negative repercussions. This also means managers should be grateful rather than defensive when they receive constructive feedback from employees. Examples of questions may include:

• What could make your job better?
• What could I do as a manager so you enjoy your work more?
• What would you do in my role to motivate the team more?
• Say, hypothetically, you decided to leave in the next two years—what would have caused you to leave?

Perhaps the most important recommendation to remember: Whatever insights you gather will be useless unless you are determined to act on them. This requires you to not just digest the findings of your stay interview, but also make an effort to reinforce what works, change what doesn’t, and assess how your efforts are working out. Importantly, you don’t need to do everything people tell you, but prioritize the requests from those you deem more valuable.

Last but not least, getting into the habit of conducting stay interviews will also improve your general communication with the team. Few things are more important for effective management than the ability to create open communication channels and candid and meaningful dialogue with employees. Most work problems—like most relationship problems—are caused by a failure to understand others. There’s no better antidote to this than great communication.

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