Your customers and clients may be your business’s lifeblood, but your employees are at the heart of your company–working every day to bring in more sales and help your business thrive.
As such, it’s safe to say that your business is only as strong as your employees. So, if those employees lack the necessary talents and skills, it’s easy for your company to fall behind. In fact, statistics show that around 58% of today’s workforce needs new skills to improve their job and productivity.
That said, how can you measure and assess team members’ talents and skills? This article shares insights into talent and skill assessments and six methods to try.
Understanding Talent And Skill Assessment In The Workplace
Employee talent and skill assessment refer to various strategies that help measure your workforce’s readiness and capabilities to excel at their jobs. Generally, talent and skill assessments come in multiple forms and ranges and may be conducted within the context of a larger HR strategy.
With a robust talent and skill assessment program, your company can assess the strengths and weaknesses of existing employees while also identifying a potential candidate’s suitability for a role.
6 Ways To Assess Talents And Skills In The Workplace
1. Take Advantage of Technology
Technology has helped advance and streamline a lot of business operations. Regarding talents and skills assessments, talent analytics software allows you to utilize employee data to provide valuable insights into current skill situations and promote intelligent workforce planning.
HR managers can also use it to help screen candidates for new hires with the best talent and skill fit and generate employee surveys and skill tests to gauge team member engagement and current job proficiency and competence.
2. Look At The Information You Already Have
Your business’s existing data on your employees can provide a starting point for understanding the basic skill sets you already have. Everything from their LinkedIn profile and resumes when they first applied to feedback and regular performance reviews from the managers can provide valuable insights you can use to assess your current workforce’s talents.
The same goes for assessing potential candidates. You can ask the applicant more about the skills and credentials they indicated in their resume.
3. Use Self-Assessments
Once you’ve scoured the information you already have, the next thing you can do to assess your employees’ competence is to ask them. Such activity allows team members to self-reflect on their skill sets, giving you an idea of which roles they feel confident in and areas in which they would need support.
That said, self-assessments may provide imperfect information as some employees may not give you honest self-evaluations. Some employees may exaggerate, while others may underestimate themselves.
Some team members may also consider it a way to identify their weaknesses, which may be seen as liabilities to the company. So, explain clearly to your staff that these evaluations can help you identify potential investment opportunities to improve their skills.
Self-assessments can be done with one-on-one meetings, providing questionnaires, or both to obtain a more objective assessment. In particular, a one-on-one meeting is beneficial to keeping employees engaged. A study shows that employees who regularly meet with their managers are likely to be three times to be engaged.
4. Do A 360-Degree Review
Once you’re done collecting self-assessments, you should also get feedback from the people around each employee. The 360 reviews allow you to assess employees by asking their peers, managers, and subordinates. This can help you get a detailed, in-depth picture you can use when evaluating an employee’s skills and proficiency in the future.
Managers can help identify strengths and weaknesses related to specific skills, while co-workers are better positioned to assess a team member’s everyday work and engagement levels. Although, keep in mind that co-worker reviews may come with subjective opinions, so look at general trends and compare individual assessments.
5. Ask Customers
Customer feedback is another great way to assess employees’ skills, primarily if they work closely with customers and clients. A simple customer satisfaction survey can provide additional insights into an employee’s skills and competence while also helping you measure customer satisfaction levels.
6. Conduct Assessment Tests
Conducting an assessment test is one of the most effective ways to collect data on employees’ skills. Regular tests can objectively overview your employees’ expertise and proficiency.
For highly technical jobs, a written test can help determine an employee’s knowledge and proficiency in their current position. That said, it also makes sense to use business simulations to help you understand how they would act and work in specific situations. Doing so can give you valuable insights into how your team members will handle the task and adapt. This can help you measure their soft skills, including critical thinking, negotiation, communication, and problem-solving skills.
Takeaway
As the skill gaps widen and the excellent talent shortage continues to plague the business world, businesses need to prepare for jobs in the future. As such, mapping out existing talents and skill sets will become invaluable. With the right employee talent and skills assessment strategies, you can gain critical data on your workforce’s weaknesses and strengths and help you make sound decisions for a more competitive company moving forward.
Following the COVID pandemic, as many states navigate from red zone to yellow zone, many will re-assimilate to their previous office space, warehouse, restaurant, etc. While some will return (thankfully) with a new attitude and positive outlook on life, there will be others who will bring their same-old negative traits. What to do?
NOW is a great time to ‘nip those issues in the bud,’ as the saying goes. Face them head-on, without hesitation. To be sure, it would be kind to give folks an opportunity to, once again, become members of your team. But keep in mind that it’s also a disservice (to those who are the opposite of negativity) when you don’t exercise your right to properly discipline those who cause friction in the workplace. In fact, it’s an affront to all who bide by the rules.
This puts the responsibility squarely on those in leadership positions. It is management’s duty to make certain that the workplace is both safe and tolerable; otherwise, the workplace suffers, good employees leave – and you’ll be stuck with what’s left. Ask yourself: is that the workplace I want to be a part of?
So let’s say (for argument’s sake) that you’re ready to speak up, take charge and assure the workplace IS a safe and tolerable space for you and your staff members. Where should you start, and how? Below are four recommendations that The Cohesive Workplace suggest you implement immediately. These will serve as reminders to your staff as to why they decided to work with you in the first place:
1. Welcome back your staff members OFFICIALLY. Use your ‘welcome’ to acknowledge that we’ve all gone through a challenging time and you’re looking forward to overcoming those challenges together… as a team. To not address ‘the pink elephant in the room’ would be insensitive, particularly if any of your staff members were affected in any way during the pandemic.
2. Begin on a positive note. Let’s not rehash any negative incidences of the workplace prior to COVID. Make it official: we’re starting with a clean slate! While major infractions cannot (and should not) be ignored, let your staff know you’re ‘not sweating the small stuff.’ Life’s too short to be undone by minor irritants. Your business, as well as your employees, are worth more.
3. Keep an open door policy (to a degree). Trust us: your staff members are still afraid… of COVID, their future with the company, and other issues they might be facing at home. Remind them that you’re in their corner. While you may not be able to solve all their problems, you’re a trustworthy advocate and a listening ear who can offer, perhaps, a positive word (or two) of advice. Your door is open, should they need to vent.
4. Create opportunities for advancement. To be sure, next to salary, the opportunity for advancement within your company is top priority! It sends a clear signal where one stands within the company when that company looks outside of its own ranks for a candidate – especially when its own employees are qualified! That ‘signal’ is a negative one. It screams, “We do not value you as an employee!” Once that message permeates the air, it’s difficult to reel it back in. Often protests follow (however silent) and eventually everyone in the workplace is miserable. If you haven’t already implemented a program for in-house promotions, NOW is a great time to start.
These are just FOUR benchmarks to consider – if you haven’t already done so – which, in turn, will create a positive and lasting effect on your employees while also increasing productivity. (Can you say “win-win”?)
There are more topics to follow, such as: the need for autonomy in the workplace; revisiting your pay scale; offering a healthy dietary lifestyle in the workplace; and many others. And we’re looking forward to covering each and more.
Be sure to subscribe to our website at thecohesiveworkplace.com so you don’t miss a thing.
Telecommuting offers a lot of benefits to both the employer and employees. For the company, the set up means a more cost-effective way of operating business functions because less energy is consumed for the performance of daily tasks. There is also little need to manage a huge workspace when most of the workers are accomplishing their assigned tasks from outside the office. For employees, working from home allows them to save from the expenses incurred commuting to and from the office. It also gives them an opportunity to spend more time with their families, as in the case of WAHM (work at home mom), and reduce work-related stress.
Developing a work-at-home policy: A guide for HR managers
Managing telecommuting programs is different from supervising actual workers in person. To maximize the benefit of telecommuting, it’s important for supervisors to learn how to work with remote teams from a virtual office.
Before anything else, however, you need to devise a policy that covers flexible work options and managing virtual workers. Such concepts as maintaining workplace flexibility and wage and hour laws must be taken into consideration.
Here are top ten tips in developing a telecommuting policy.
Identify your business needs.
It’s important to list how having people work from outside the office would benefit your business, and assess if the benefits outweigh the consequences. Your policy needs to sufficiently address the expectations of your company as far as work output and human resources are concerned.
Identify who can telecommute.
Understand that not everyone in your company can and should be allowed to work from home. Managing telecommuting arrangements means overseeing to the productivity of people who are not within shouting distance so you wouldn’t be able check on the quality of their output until the work is actually submitted to you. As such, developing a telecommuting policy needs to include creating requirements for those who want to telecommute. For instance, you need teleworkers who are organized, exhibit strong problem solving abilities, and have excellent communication skills, among other skill sets. Your policy should constitute a clear criterion for determining who can work from home so you can easily defend your decisions later on.
Beyond the individual’s skill sets, you must also look into which positions in your organization lend themselves to telecommuting. Some positions will not be affected at all if the worker becomes a teleworker; others may be impossible to fill with a remote worker.
Implement guidelines for dependent care.
While working from home does have the added benefit of being able to spend more time with one’s family, it should not be taken as an alternative to making arrangements for dependent care. Work productivity will be compromised if the teleworker has to attend to the children while drafting documents for the virtual office.
Formalize agreements on equipment
Your policies should also consider the types of equipment that a telecommuter would need to be able to work efficiently out of the office. The agreement has to stipulate who will provide the equipment for the worker. Some companies provide computers and allowances for internet services to their remote teams while there are those who don’t. In the latter case, flexible work options are usually provided as alternatives to working in the office. Employees still have the choice to show up and finish their work in the conventional workspace provided for them.
Ensure employee safety.
It’s also important to make sure that your agreement clarifies who is responsible for employee safety when the worker is accomplishing his tasks from home. You can hold your workers accountable for maintaining the safety of their home workplace. In addition, you can provide a clause that allows you, the employer, to inspect the home workspace to make sure that it follows the guidelines stipulated in the agreement.
Ensure confidentiality.
Company information is another consideration when managing virtual workers. Business data may be compromised since workers are accessing them from outside the office. As such, it’s important to stipulate in the agreement ownership of information and company documents in case the employee leaves your company. This should be clearly spelled out and confidentiality of work information should also be underlined.
Make sure that technology is available.
If you’re going to hire virtual employees, you need to also include a technology checklist of what you require the applicant to have to qualify as a telecommuter. Technology is important when maintaining a virtual workspace, so new hires should have devices such as a dedicated phone line for business, three-way calling systems, high-speed internet access and fax machine among others.
Wage and hour laws
If unprepared, a human resource manager may be forced to face a minefield of issues on wage and hour laws. You need to navigate this carefully in order to avoid liability.
Record and track all hours worked by employees who telecommute. You may consider installing timekeeping software for the equipment / computers given to employees, as punching the usual timeclock is not possible.
Determine a system of properly compensating telecommuting workers for all hours worked, plus overtime (if they are not exempt). The biggest problem here is how to compensate telecommuting employees who sit idly, waiting for instructions. Keep in mind that telecommuters may be considered “on call” 24/7. Make sure that it is clear to the employees whether they “engaged to be waiting” (as in firemen, for whom the waiting time is working time) or “waiting to be engaged” (which means they can do what they like as long as they are available by email, cell, etc.)
Quality metrics
To gauge the effectiveness of a telecommuting program, you need to devise certain metrics for quality of service. It’s important for you to make sure that your employees are still performing according to your expectations. Just like in any work situation, quality, quantity, cost-effectiveness, and timeliness ate the four main measures to review. Once you have established performance measures, you need to establish a feedback system, which helps maintain good performance. Additionally, telecommuting employees need a channel with which to keep their managers informed about their work progress.
Communication
Finally, one important detail that you need to consider when developing a telecommuting policy is communication. The policies should include information on how often you expect your workers to check their e-mails, for instance, so they’re kept updated. Communication should never be one-way; thus, you also need to establish and follow guidelines on how employees can reach their supervisors – who may also be telecommuting.
Officevibe is loved by managers and HR teams worldwide. But more and more, C-Level executives are taking notice (and advantage) of the tool. We sat down with Martin Gourdeau, President and General Manager at GSoft, who shares how Officevibe has become an integral part of his daily reality — informing decisions at all levels, delivering true business value, and benefiting the company’s bottom line.
Here’s what we spoke about:
The golden rule for great leaders
[Officevibe] We’re stoked to chat with you today, thanks for taking the time! Officevibe has been successfully adopted by thousands of managers and employees worldwide, and we’re excited to have an inside look into the business value it has highlighted for GSoft from your executive perspective.
Before we jump into things, we want to better understand you as a leader and businessperson. So, what’s your golden rule when it comes to leadership?
[Martin] Well, right off the bat, everything I’m going to say is linked to one of my core beliefs, which is that people are the most important part of any business. I’ve never heard any rational argument stand up against that notion, ever, so I have to put that out there before we get started because it plays into everything that’s great about Officevibe.
Having a good read on your people and how they feel is key if you’re looking to have any real, honest visibility on your business’s health. I’ve always believed that, but this is especially true in distributed environments, where visibility becomes five, probably ten times more important. And that’s why Officevibe is now part of my everyday workflow.
How to use Officevibe for optimal visibility on employee insights
Considering so many businesses, including GSoft, now operate with hybrid or distributed teams, that’s more relevant than ever. So can you walk us through your relationship with Officevibe and how you use it to gain better visibility on the business and its people?
In general, and I think most executives will relate here, my morning routine starts by looking at a bunch of data — business metrics, like products and value delivered, roadmaps, and so on. One of the first things I do is open Officevibe to get a sense of the state of affairs of our teams.
I look at engagement trends — especially the eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score). I also take a quick look at employeefeedback as it gives me information on how the business can be improved at different levels and from different perspectives.
Another feature I look at almost every day is the comparison report. I mainly look for discrepancies — that’s usually when I’ll look into an issue further or flag it at the right level.
Example of a comparison report on Officevibe
There’s also the goals feature which, in my opinion, is one of the most valuable and underused features of Officevibe. I use the “tree view”, so I can drill down to understand every single OKR and how they connect back to top-level objectives. In my professional experience, I haven’t found any other tool that helps with strategic planning as well. For me, those features help me make correlations between how things are going in terms of delivery, sales, retention, and churn, across all other product, business, or finance metrics.
OKR tree view example on Officevibe
“Engagement metrics can be considered predictive indicators for business metrics. They point towards a confidence level of how things are going now and how they’re going to be going over the next few months.”
What’s super interesting is that engagement metrics can also be considered predictive indicators for business metrics. They point towards a confidence level of how things are going now and how they’re going to be going over the next few months.
For example, let’s say an event occurs that causes engagement metrics to start dropping. You could expect that to have an impact on business metrics, although there’s usually a delayed effect. If engagement starts going down, it’s almost inevitable that business metrics will follow at some level — this could mean sales, retention, or product metrics.
Like I said, people are the most important part of a business, so being able to visualize the state of a company from the perspective of its employees is incredibly helpful to run your operations. Sort of like a strategic looking-glass from the inside-out… with a bit of foretelling.
There are many engagement metrics executives can consider, and each one plays a role within the big picture of an organization. Officevibe also offers a sub-metrics view, which contributes to the employee experience. Discover our top 10 engagement metrics.
We love the predictive aspect and how you use Officevibe day-to-day. Was it a natural adoption process for you when you first got access to the tool?
Ha! As one of our products, you’d expect I was using it since day one! But the truth is, I wasn’t spending much time using it in the beginning. Don’t get me wrong — I had heard a lot about Officevibe. But I had no idea of the powerful business insights that could come from it.
It was once I had a sit-down with Simon [De Baene, Co-Founder & CEO], where we talked about the tool, that things really clicked for me. Simon shared how he was using Officevibe and that got me curious. Once I started playing around with it and experiencing its value myself, I was hooked.
For someone in my position, a tool that can give you business insights that help with your decision-making process is incredibly valuable. So, I’ll admit — I didn’t give Officevibe much love the first few weeks. But once I saw I could chase real business value through the tool, it naturally became a part of my reality.
Improving daily operations with an employee experience platform
As a leader, in what other ways has Officevibe helped improve your daily operations? How would you say it helps the specific realities of an executive?
Officevibe gives you a good understanding of a team or an employee’s capacity, and that can provide very useful knowledge. If I need to talk to a team leader about something, I check the general state of how their team is feeling beforehand to get some context.
“Knowing how specific teams are doing helps me manage conversations more effectively.”
A team’s state reflects on the person leading it, always — it’s human nature. So, I tie these insights into my interactions with that leader. Since I look at Officevibe every day, I’m able to keep a general sense of awareness of how things are going, which is just as important for planned conversations as unplanned ones. Knowing how specific teams are doing helps me manage conversations more effectively.
Thinking of a time before we had a tool like Officevibe, you wonder how executives ever managed to have a good understanding of their teams.
Martin laughs. Around a whole lot of water cooler conversations!
Even then, those insights aren’t as in-depth or data-driven, wouldn’t you say?
Agreed. These types of insights are biased to how a person is feeling at a specific point in time. A more anecdotal type of feedback — nowhere close to the quality of information you get from Officevibe. Not to mention the ability to look at trends over time.
Facing business challenges with confidence
You spoke about how you’re using the tool to predict things. How does that help you face business challenges?
In terms of forward-looking, if I see a business opportunity that requires putting specific teams under more pressure for a certain amount of time, I’ll look at different engagement metrics — like culture, equity, or happiness — to evaluate how much they can take on in terms of mental bandwidth or stress.
The other part of it is the retro-looking capabilities, which are actually built into the platform and help us face business challenges with confidence. We did this for our company restructuring — a massive change, which is usually stressful for everyone.
My hypothesis was that the business was going to come out happier and more engaged, so we built this hypothesis into the design of the project, rolled it out, and communicated it.
As predicted, metrics started going up. People were able to perform better with the clearer roles and responsibilities that came from the restructuring. The hypothesis that engagement metrics were going to improve after a stressful event is a bit counterintuitive, but everything was measured and that’s exactly what happened.
If the opposite effect happened, where the restructuring didn’t go well, you would probably see metrics drop and be able to devise a new action plan, correct?
Exactly. We’d use that in our retrospection, to see what we could have done better.
GSoft has been going through periods of high growth, which naturally comes with its own set of challenges. How do you feel Officevibe can help businesses navigate changes?
Growth is great. Although you have to be aware of the honeymoon period. I don’t love that term, but it’s a real phenomenon, where everything seems to be going great when new people first join, and where engagement is high. The data tends to skew the state of affairs more positively. But as long as you keep that in mind, you can use data to your advantage and have a good understanding of how the business is absorbing new talent.
In that sense, I find that the best way to determine the success of onboarding is by observing how engaged teams are over time — not just during or immediately.
Growth phases add a load at all levels of management, so the state of a team is also reflected through the manager of that team — that’s another great insight to pull from Officevibe.
Do you find that using Officevibe facilitates reaching milestones for every level of management, even all the way down to the employee level?
At the management level, for sure — if it’s used properly. At worst, it’ll derisk how you’re managing your team. And at best, it’ll optimize how you’re managing your team.
There’s a distinction between risk management and optimization for managers and executives. If I look back at my Officevibe journey, I started looking at data from a risk management perspective. Eventually, I understood its insights and moved towards using it to get the best out of people.
The cost of not using Officevibe
You cover the benefits of using Officevibe. How would you describe the cost of inaction — in other words, what companies might lose out on not using Officevibe?
Not using Officevibe is like driving without insurance — the biggest cost is whatever could come out of flying blind. That’s how I would put it. Although, if you’re immature with the product, as in you don’t learn how to leverage its full potential, then of course it’s difficult to understand how it could contribute to your visibility and overall business success.
”Not using Officevibe is like driving without insurance. If you’re immature with a product that provides visibility, the biggest cost is whatever could come out of flying blind.”
That’s the case with any tool. But Officevibe is, in my opinion, so easy to use and integrate into existing processes. Now that I use Officevibe, it blows my mind how many businesses miss out on using this kind of technology. Every business is different, but one thing is certain: You need visibility on your people to manage them well.
Are there any KPI improvements you’ve been able to tie back to Officevibe?
You can tie engagement back to the product execution of the teams.Engagement promotes better performance. When you cross reference performance with engagement, you have your business case. As a product company, it’s one of our most important metrics.
“Engagement promotes better performance. When you cross reference performance with engagement, you have your business case. As a product company, it’s one of our most important metrics.”
Team dynamics can truly dictate how quickly we can turn big projects and decisions around. There’s trust and there’s alignment when people work well together and have good communication.
You mentioned, at the very beginning, that you check the employee Net Promoter score often. On a final note, can you share what that metric looks like for GSoft today?
Right now, we’re scoring 60 for eNPS across the whole company, which is a very good score. Our overall engagement is between 60% and 66%, and our participation rate is at 90%.
Realistically, we’re not going to stay at 60 forever. We will experience normal business cycles where there will be harder times than others, which will impact engagement.
“What’s most important, as an executive, is that the numbers fit with your perception of what’s going on. If there’s a disconnect, it means you have a blind spot and you need to look into that.”
But, to me, the score itself isn’t everything: what’s most important, as an executive, is that the numbers fit with your perception of what’s going on. If there’s a disconnect, it means you have a blind spot with your business and you need to look into that.That’s why tools that give you visibility are so important. And that’s why Officevibe isn’t just ideal for mid-level management — there’s a big potential for leadership members and executives there.
20 years ago, Philip Ross and Jeremy Myerson launched WORKTECH at the British Library as the first organisation to bring together representatives of people, place, and technology into the same room to discuss the future of work and the workplace. Now two decades later, WORKTECH has expanded to over forty cities around the globe and continues to bring together forward-thinking, industry professionals from Fortune 500 companies to share their cutting-edge ideas and inspiration to the workplace community.
“Don’t count the days; make the days count.” ― Muhammed Ali, American boxer.
We’d all like to work less, wouldn’t we? It would be nice to take our retirement in installments, like John D. McDonald’s sleuth Travis Magee, but that’s not an option for most of us.
One thing many of us try to do is arrange to work fewer days. This usually involves cramming the same 40 hours into fewer days, such as working four ten-hour days while taking Fridays off. But with “flex-time,” as it’s generally called, you still end up working 40-hour weeks, minimum.
But how about shorter workweeks, period? Study after study has shown that workweeks of 32-36 hours tend to be more fruitful than their 40-hour counterparts. Here are four reasons why:
Productivity increases. Obviously, there’s a point of diminishing returns, but salaried people who’ve tested workweeks of 32-36 hours tend to perform better and accomplish more than their colleagues who work a traditional eight-hour day, five days a week. And they do better than those who work longer than 40 hours per week. They’re more efficient and productive, with less wasted time — possibly because they’re quite aware they have less time they can
Workers are happier. Happier, healthier workers more easily embrace their jobs and perform better. Pretty much self-explanatory. With shorter weeks, workers experience less job-related stress, get more rest, often have more pleasant commutes, and, for parents, experience less worry about childcare. They also have more time for themselves, their families, and their favorite pursuits. Add it all up, and it results in greater happiness.
Workers are healthie We know that healthier people are more productive, even if they work fewer hours per week than the average bear. They experience fewer stress-related illnesses, take fewer sick days, feel better rested, display more flexibility, and are less likely to experience burnout. In the end, this results in less time lost to illness, which, again, can resulted in a greater percentage of productive hours than longer, stressful workweeks.
Workers are more loyal. Happier, healthier employees are less likely to leave for greener pastures. Employees of the Millennial and Gen-Z cohorts don’t have the baked-in company loyalty their parents and grandparents had, probably because they’ve seen how corporate loyalty toward employees melted away after the dotcom bubble popped, especially during the Great Recession. Amazon just announced it is dumping 16,000 employees. Hence the lack of loyalty on the employee side of the aisle. A shorter workweek would be very attractive and make them not as apt to leave.
Positive Feedback
All four of these factors reinforce each other in the best productive sense. Workers prove happier and healthier when they work fewer than 40 hours per week; happiness breeds greater health and vice versa; loyal workers work harder for you because they’re happier and feel better, increasing the happiness and productivity all around… you get the picture. It’s a kind of positive feedback loop.
We’ll never cut our work hours back to George Jetson’s three hours a day, three days a week, or Tim Ferriss’s optimistic four-hour workweek. But we can easily cut back our regular workweeks by four to eight hours, and according to the science, still get all our work done.
It’s happening again. One of the perverse hallmarks of the Great Recession ten years ago was the expulsion of many older workers from the workforce. A significant amount of experienced employees found themselves forced into sudden unemployment or premature retirement. Many never fully recovered financially or emotionally and their careers were left scarred and lacking in dignified closure. The current Covid-induced recession is again presenting similar employment hardship for mature workers. Since March the labor market has shed many senior-aged men and women, who possess both high and low skill levels. In other words, this elder layoff is widespread.
Unfortunately, this is not turning out to be simply a temporary furlough for these workers, but rather a longer-termed separation marked by an acceleration of egregious trends. Again, as during the last recession, newly trending labor shifts are weakening older workers’ employment security. Previous examples included labor-saving technologies and increased work loads for younger and less expensive staff, which combined to lessen the management need to restore previous personnel levels. Once again, mature employees find their bargaining power diminished when facing dismissal and rehiring. Weak or non-existent unions, the rise of the gig economy, and continued lenient enforcement of age-discrimination laws, not to mention the harmful economic disruption from Covid, leave senior workers feeling increasingly insecure and inadequate.
The New School’s Retirement Equity Lab studies the factors impacting the quality of retirement, which necessitates an examination of when a retreat from work is chosen or forced. Their assessment of the plight of older workers is sobering. Even for those older workers who haven’t yet been laid off there is considerable incertitude about their futures. This cohort more and more knows they are less employable than younger workers. Those over age 55 often realize that if they were to quit their current jobs the chances of transitioning to one that is comparable or better is doubtful. For many, it becomes prudent to stick with a less than satisfying job, then to risk unemployment.
Relatively robust earnings have traditionally been an expectation for long-term commitment to a profession and/or an employer. Seems fair, right? However, these days when an older worker is rehired after a job loss hourly wages are typically lower than with the former job. Workers aged 50-61 receive 20% less pay with their new job while workers 62 and older see a decrease of 27%. In addition, once a worker hits their fifties periods of unemployment after a lay off are longer than for workers aged less than 50.
The growth in uncertainty and low confidence older workers face add to the weakness of their bargaining power. Employers know in most cases that they have the upper hand with older workers, except for those situations in which the worker possesses a unique or hard to find skill. This is unfortunate. A lifetime of work deserves value and respect. Retirement in the modern era should be a reward for the toil, dedication, and achievement for decades of work, not an imposed isolation or banishment due to the vicissitudes of employment economics.
As the Retirement Equity Lab points out, policy makers may need to intervene with schemes designed to lessen the hardships for prematurely laid off older workers. For example, employers could offer rainy day or emergency savings plans through payroll deductions, which become available when needed to augment unemployment benefits or the federal government could step in with a guaranteed retirement account savings option to supplement what retirees receive from Social Security. Of course, more stringent enforcement of The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 would help immensely.
Careers are a vocation and a calling to develop mastery and contribute to society. For others, work is simply a means to a paycheck. Either way, growing old should not be viewed as a liability or a deficiency to take advantage of.
Workplace Trends is delighted to announce a new partnership with workplace experience analytics platform Audiem.
Audiem joins our list of current sponsors, EMCOR UK, MillerKnoll, Saint-Gobain Ecophon and Workplace Unlimited.
Directors Ian Ellison and Chris Moriarty also host the Workplace Geeks Podcast, which has come on board as a media partner. They join our existing media partners including FMJ, the Journal of Biophilic Design, Workplace Insight, and Work&Place.
Co-founder Chris Moriarty said, “We’re delighted to be supporting this event, one that we have enjoyed over the years as part of the workplace community. Workplace Trends’ appeal to diverse workplace professionals fits perfectly with our aim to share holistic workplace knowledge and increase industry capabilities. We look forward to an insightful partnership with the team at Workplace Trends.”
We can use the art of “why” to work more meaningfully and we can utilize it to also exit constructively. In this video, Frankie Russo, author of “Breaking Why”, shares some useful tips on how one can exit or quit a job/company positively.
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While women are now more often in leadership positions still make up only 5% of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies according to Pew Research Center. Despite numerous studies showing that women leadership is fruitful for organizations, what are the existing barriers preventing a more equitable and inclusive workplace?
Gloria Feldt, Co-founder and president of Take The Lead, provides some handy tips on how to develop a culture of inclusivity in the 21st workplaces.
To watch the full podcast of Gloria Feldt follow us on: https://work2.org/workpod-building-equitable-workforce-with-intentioning/
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As an experienced Retiree/Post-Career Advisor, I've witnessed countless technological revolutions and their impact on the workforce. Today, we stand on the brink of another...
