Employee Engagement? Or Employee Entrapment?
Let’s think for a minute about so-called “stay-or-pay” arrangements for employees, where an employee agrees to stay with their employer for a certain period of time, or pay a penalty for early departure. Aside from the legal ramifications, (many courts have said these arrangements are illegal or unenforceable), do we really want people working with […]
Tightening the Connection with Remotely Based Teammates
Remotely based workers certainly CAN become detached from their teams and their organization’s culture. But they don’t HAVE to be. Leaders play in big part in tightening the connection.
Being a Harry Truman Boss
President Harry Truman was, according to his White House staff, a great boss. Let’s see what he did that we can emulate to get the same kind of Discretionary Effort and devotion from those we lead.
See Ya! Saying Goodbye in the Workplace… It’s About How You Make Them Feel
by Bill Catlette 4/4/23 • Memphis (2-minute read) Firing people is hard, but let’s not try to make it easy. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Reasonable, mature people understand that from time to time, company managements get blindsided by pandemics, misjudge the economic windage, future prospects, and/or their ability to perform in a given set […]
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. […]
People Need the Right Tools to do their Best Work
Southwest Airlines’ winter 2022 meltdown was a failure of tools, a failure of systems. And it was almost as bad for their employees as for their customers.
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? The last four reasons there don’t seem to be enough workers
In the first three installments of this series (July 12, Sept 12, and Oct 25), we tried to shine some light on the headscratcher of the year, “Where did everyone go?”, as the labor market certainly feels tighter than ever before, both to employers and consumers. And numbers don’t lie. We still have too many […]
Where Did All the Workers Go? Three More Reasons There Don’t Seem to be Enough Workers
The gap between labor supply and demand continues to vex US employers, even as talk of recession and high profile layoffs pepper the news. And yet as we move into the autumn of 2022, the glaring fact is that there are still many (as in millions) more jobs to be filled than there are people […]
Quiet Quitting – The Latest Thing (That’s Been Around Forever)
Maybe it’s the alliteration. The fact that it makes a catchy hashtag. Whatever it is, talk of #quietquitting just won’t seem to quit, quietly or otherwise. We’ve delayed our weighing in on it until some of the furor subsided, but the fact is that we (and many others) have been talking and writing about quiet […]