Long Read: What do we want from work?
01/04/2022
“Workers are using the pandemic-induced job disruption as an opportunity to reevaluate what they want from their work,” says a recent report from management consultant Bain & Co, as quoted by Bloomberg. So are there any surprises in the list of what these disaffected workers are looking for?
The findings, compiled from 20,000 workers in ten countries, came at a time “when Americans are quitting their jobs at a record clip”. (More than one in four American workers changed employers during the first year of the pandemic).
We’re told by Bain & Co. that Americans and Japanese demand a good salary and benefits above all else, but that pay matters less to the French, who want interesting work. It’s also true that French law prevents a manager to require a response outside working hours; in fact, if you're a French company of fifty or more employees, you cannot email an employee after typical work hours. That suggests that workers value “switch-off-ability” in addition to the other considerations.
The ten countries surveyed for this report did not include the UK, so we are left to fill in the blanks. We would like to suggest that “being helpful to society” is a real motivation in the leasing and asset finance sector. Every Deal of the Month we’ve published in the last twenty-three issues of BrokerWorld, for example, is an example of a small business being helped out in an exceptionally difficult time, and of course companies are keen to share those stories with us; these deals are the reason to get out of bed in the morning.
When we talk about moving from one job to another, the circumstances of doing so have been, on the one hand, very complex (building up new working practices and partnerships with people you’ve rarely or never seen) and on the other hand, extraordinarily straightforward (when working from home, your office space and commute are precisely the same whichever company name appears in your business e-mail address).
One way in which a company could yet alienate its staff - and prompt them to sniff the fresh-mown grass on the other side of the fence - is how it chooses to handle a gradual return to the shared office space. Technology entrepreneur Chris Herd believes that the phrase “return to work” has been used in cases where “return to the office” would have been much better.
“People are genuinely offended about being told they’re returning to work,” he said, “when they’ve been working their socks off for the last eighteen months.”
For a recruitment perspective, we turned to Sean Toms, of Robinson Toms Recruitment, and asked how much employees are looking to move around right now, and what they’re really looking for. Sean told us, “As an employer, you’d probably be reluctant to start digging into terms and conditions in your existing contracts. We’re not seeing wholesale closure of offices, so if an employee has traditionally been office-based, chances are that’s going to continue. New candidates want to clarify up front that they’ll be able to work from home.”
Sean adds that a company’s attitude towards continued WFH in 2022 is likely to start right at the top: “The CEO’s perspective shapes the culture, and will usually seep down through the organisation.
“The more flexible employers are, the more they make themselves employers of choice. So it’s not so much a question of how your WFH policy will affect staff retention, more a question of how you’re going to attract the next wave of industry professionals.”
This is a shortened version of the Back in the Office column first published in Leasing World issue 168
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