If 2020 has been the year of the Great Resignation, it has also been a wake-up call to industries that have grown too used to working their employees too hard.
From bus drivers and long-haul truckers to architects and other white-collar professions, workers of many stripes are hard to find.
In a few cases, this can be explained by extended federal unemployment benefits making it more lucrative for those who lost their jobs in fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic to stay on the sidelines. But, as the natural experiment conducted by many Republican governors and state legislatures who cut off these benefits early or declined them altogether shows, most of these worker shortages are caused by something else – reassessments of life choices.
As Steve Adams reports in this week’s cover story, that is largely what’s going on in the design field right now. Some architects are reconsidering whether an industry that has historically glorified long hours and high-stress working conditions is really where they want to spend the rest of their professional lives. This is compounded by a shortage of mid-level staff created by the long Great Recession, when entry-level job opportunities were few and far between, and a jump in work for firms amid record levels of investment in real estate development.
As firms struggle to hire in this environment, they can certainly try to throw money at the problem by bidding up wages and benefits. But managers should consider something else, as well: improving workplace culture and management skills.
The overwhelming lesson of survey after recent survey of office workers is that flexibility and work-life balance is in high demand. The widespread preference for remote work that headlines many of these surveys is being driven in large part by a need for shorter commutes and more freedom to juggle childcare and personal or family appointments.
Flexible remote work policies are part of this, but managers’ behavior plays a key role and can be a relatively low-cost way to keep and attract talent. Senior managers can rein in workaholic subordinates who might be setting a bad example for their direct reports, and take a hard line towards toxic behavior. Simple, strongly enforced rules like not sending emails after close-of-business can reduce agita companywide by helping prevent work stress from creeping into and harming employees’ personal lives.
There is no escaping the Great Resignation. As the pandemic caused millions of Millennials to reassess their lives and Baby Boomers to seek an early retirement, so too has it served as a “clarifying event” for Americans in many other ways. Hopefully it will also help managers at all levels clarify how their firms need to adapt to what their workers really need.
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