Workers Facing a "Great Detachment" at Work

[bjl584]

Why Americans are facing a 'Great Detachment' at work, according to researchers

[ua_guy]

Leadership and equitable compensation practices really are lost arts. Attract and retain the best talent and the rest follows. The article only briefly touches on leadership. But then goes on to say connecting each person's role to the company's mission and clarifying expectations can really help. What about pay? I've seen attempts at the former with miserable results. People don't care about the "mission" unless you're paying them. Missions don't pay the bills, dollars do.

[disneysteve]

A friend was recently hired by a major home improvement store to do kitchen and bath design work for them. He's older (60s) and has years of independent experience in the field. His body is beaten up to the point that he just felt he couldn't keep doing the hard physical labor of demo and installation work himself but still wanted to utilize his skills and knowledge so the design job seemed like a perfect fit.

He started the job a couple of weeks ago. They gave him essentially zero training and just put him on the sales floor to help customers. No involvement at all in design work. No direction regarding what he was supposed to be doing. No reference to the job he was actually hired for. Needless to say, he is no longer there. I don't think he lasted two weeks.

Workers are "detached" from their jobs because management sucks. All they care about is their weekly and quarterly numbers. If work is getting done and money is being made, they are satisfied. They couldn't care less about whether or not employees feel valued or engaged or are being adequately compensated. As soon as an opportunity comes along to make an extra 50 cents an hour, people jump ship. Why should they stay? There's nothing in it for them. Nothing has been done to make them feel they are an integral part of the team.

In contrast, our daughter applied for a receptionist job at a small company 2-1/2 years ago. After the initial interview, they told her she was too good for that position. They had her come back for 3 more interviews with various members of the team before finally hiring her for a newly-created position that they felt was perfect for her. She loved it. They loved her. At her 90-day review, they offered her a promotion to a completely different role as a department manager in Operations (she was hired in the Sales department). Of course, there was a nice raise to go with it. Since then, they've expanded her duties a few times, each time increasing her salary to reflect the added workload. She got approval to hire one assistant, and then a second one, as their role expanded and more work needed to be done. The company has periodic off-site fun events like a field day/picnic (on the clock) or a holiday party (just held last night) as well as paying a nice holiday bonus. And the usual things like health insurance, 401k, etc. She regularly interacts both with her immediate supervisor and all 3 of the co-owners of the company and is definitely made to feel that her contributions matter and do not go unrecognized. Numerous suggestions she has brought to the table have been implemented. Other employees are treated the same way and quite a few people have been working there since the company started.

I sell china to Replacements, Ltd in North Carolina and have visited their facility twice now. In one area, they have a wall recognizing years of service - 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30+ years. There is a significant number of employees on that 30+ list. On another wall, is a family tree with photos of every employee (nearly 300 of them) and branches holding two or more photos because the individuals are related. Either spouses or parents and children or whatever. Some of those branches have 5 or 6 or 7 photos because multiple family members work there. The company does all sorts of things to take care of their team and instill loyalty.

A lot of employers could be doing so much better financially if they would take better care of their employees. Better morale and better compensation leads to higher productivity, higher retention, and lower costs.

Remote work is another biggie which really exploded due to COVID. My daughter doesn't work remotely but she can and has on numerous occasions when she wasn't feeling well enough to go in but was okay to work on the computer. Some places (and the president-elect) want to force everyone back to work in person. It won't work. It will backfire and they'll lose dozens or hundreds or in the case of the Fed, potentially thousands of great employees. The government says it's because of the cost of maintaining all of the vacant office space. So sell off the real estate. You'll save millions. Putting people back in those offices won't save a penny. It will actually increase costs because it costs even more to run an occupied building.