The New Age of Our Workforce

BY RON PAINTER

IT’S A NEW ERA in workforce development and workforce management. The pandemic has taught many lessons that some companies will learn and some companies sadly won’t. The tactic some companies use(d) of bringing them in, working them hard, and letting them leave is meeting several factors that should cause radical changes.

The first factor is that of demographics. Lightcast tells us that by 2030, the Boomers will have retired, leaving a huge gap in the numbers of working-age adults. In their report, Bridging the Gap in our Labor Force, they make the observation that, “…fifty years of birth rates below replacement levels, combined with a recent precipitous drop in immigration, has left us with fewer and fewer young, working-age people.” To me, this says if you’re waiting out the changes in the behavior of job seekers, you might have a long wait. Quite possibly longer than your business can survive.

Secondly, Pew Research writes that job seekers younger than 30 are far more likely than older adults to have voluntarily left their job last year: 37 percent of young adults say they did this, compared with 17 percent of those ages 30 to 49, nine percent of those ages 50 to 64, and five percent of those ages 65 and older.

Thirdly, Clay Scroggins, CEO of How to Lead, writes in a LinkedIn article that 73 percent of professionals say they take an organization’s values into account and would not apply to a company unless its values aligned with their own.

The pandemic changed how we work, and at the same time, a new generation of workers began to enter the labor force and our employee ranks. Many of us have spent time in research trying to understand this new worker and absorbing frustration over quit rates that we think are sudden and higher than we’ve known.

I’m a Boomer and I would suggest the things that motivated my generation are not the same motivators today. I worried about salary, advancement, and maybe the company’s 401(k) plan. Work-life balance might have been something I wondered about, but there were plenty of holidays that my generation worked to beat a deadline or to appear eager to take on more work and hopefully critical work to my company’s bottom-line. My boss was my boss, mostly to be tolerated. I never stopped to think about how much support my boss received and whether the company valued them—or me—enough to provide them training to offer me a supportive work environment.

Today, companies providing support to front-line facing managers isn’t a “nice to provide” but a business necessity. Jim Clifton of Gallup once observed in the State of the American Workplace report, “The single biggest decision you make in your job—bigger than all the rest—is who you name manager. When you name the wrong person manager, nothing fixes that bad decision. Not compensation, not benefits—nothing.” It could be the single most important action companies can take today to find and retain the talent they need.

Do you have a plan?

Ron Painter is the president and chief executive officer of the National Association of Workforce Boards.