Are You Ready for the New World of Work?

All Cows Will Please Report to the Barn

Recently, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy gave notice that all AMZN corporate staff were to be back in the barn working in January 2025. (Before anyone sends any inflammatory emails, we’ve used the Cows metaphor for better than 25 years and have gone to great lengths to be clear that we are NOT comparing people to […]

Can We Resume the Beatings Yet?

The war for talent is far from over. Employers who relax measures to attract and retain the best talent will fall behind their competitors for talent.

RTO Mandates: How to Make Recruiting and Retention Even Harder

Let’s get right to the point. Consider two groups, A and B. Group A: Knowledge workers who want the option to work remotely, or hybrid. Group B: Managers who want them to come back to the office, issuing Return to Office Mandates. In today’s labor market, Group A outweighs Group B by a staggering margin. […]

What Elon Musk is Proving About Leading People

OK, I know Elon Musk is as easy a target as we’ve ever had. But if you will, please allow me this irony-laced observation: The person with more access than anyone else on earth to real-time news about social and economic trends apparently missed all of the tweets about workers being in the labor supply-demand […]

Where Did All the Workers Go? A Lot Retired.

Where did all the workers go? Answer #3 in the series: People retired in droves. Way more than anyone expected. More than half the people who voluntarily withdrew themselves from the labor force between March of 2020 and July of 2021 did so through retirement.

Where Did All the Workers Go?

The severe labor shortage of 2022 has most of us vexed. The question I keep hearing is “Where did everyone go?” If you look deep enough (and I have), the answers present themselves. And it’s not just one thing. Or even two or three. It takes a lot of converging factors to tighten the labor […]