Is the Pendulum starting to swing?

Is the pendulum starting to swing back in favour of employers vs employees across the talent landscape?

This is the question, or, for some, a prediction following some significant layoffs across the tech industry, recruitment freezes, and some talent teams being asked to stand down, but is the shift real?

If it is, I would suggest that it will be short lived and would caution any Board and Senior Leadership Team from basing future strategies with this thought in mind, especially if they are customer centric.

For years, many businesses have believed employees were lucky to work for them, lucky to have a job, lucky to have such a fabulous ping pong table in their break room.

Times have changed…

I was at a conference just this week: The Customer Engage conference was to celebrate and build on CX thinking, yet every session I sat in, and every person I spoke too said the same thing, we are struggling to hire. For some, attrition has been the worst it has been since they can remember. Turnover of new hires is a challenge and productivity is poor, with performance not where we would want it to be. 

Outsourcing is growing at a significant pace, as is offshoring, as more brands and companies struggle to attract, hire and retain the right talent.

• Complaint levels are at an all time high, according to the (UKCSI report).
• Customer needs and behaviours continue to evolve in unpredictable ways (ICS).
• 70% of customers expect a conversational experience every time they engage with a brand. (Zendesk)
• Big business is having to switch off channels of contact due to overwhelming demand.
• CX is failing to deliver the expected value. With 54% of CX pros saying their teams are unable to prove ROI (Forrester Research).
• Customers desire simplicity speed and a connected experience. (ICS)

A recent article from Chief on ‘How to plan for recession’ points out that companies who take positive action versus a defensive or reactive stance tend to fare far better during recessions, compared to those who reacted defensively. According to research by Bain & Company, the businesses that were faster at capturing opportunities before the recession — by way of stress-testing the balance sheet, actively managing working capital and costs, and reinvesting for growth and acquisitions — grew at 17% compared to those who reacted defensively and thus showed no growth.

The same article also shares that ‘While redundancies are often a tempting option to conserve cash with economic turbulence on the horizon, businesses learned the hard way during the pandemic that this can be a short-sighted strategy. Those companies that did a pre-emptive staff reduction without needing to ended up in a lurch when the economy rebounded faster than expected and hiring became more difficult than ever. Many couldn’t find the staff to ramp up in time to capture the full opportunity and therefore missed revenue goals further down the year.’

They also point out that less support staff can leave others doing more work. 

We are already talking to so many leaders who are exhausted and have had enough. Whilst, they might hunker down in the short term, many were already considering a move. 41% of workers globally are thinking about handing in their notice, according to a Microsoft survey, this figure rose to 54% for GenZ workers and a UK survey found that 38% of employees were planning to leave their jobs in the next 6 months.

If employers are not valuing, communicating and investing in their employees, the quiet quitting will continue, until the employee will eventually quit altogether.

Simply put, quiet quitting is where an employee puts no more effort into their job than is absolutely necessary.

When most employers will be considering their new hires more deeply in terms of quality and perfomance to ensure when they do hire they get it right, hiring talent that stays longer and is more successful and looking internally for talent that can help bridge the gap, quiet quitting is a serious often unconsidered problem.

For most employees the tide has already turned. We have lost large numbers of talented people who have already left the workforce altogether. We have seen a rise of 43% for long-term sickness in 25–34-year-olds. There are significant gaps appearing across talent pipelines.

How we meet our people’s values, how we engage and develop them matters now more than ever.

Whatever your business strategy, it is your people who will deliver it. Be careful with them, as if you don’t others will come calling and you may find the shelves bare when you need to restock, your customers meantime may have already left for pastures new.