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Employees Are Racing Straight For A Wall. What Can Leaders Do?

Forbes Coaches Council

Dr. Chris Mullen, Ph.D., SPHR, SHRM-SCP, Kronos, which recently merged with Ultimate Software; Creating world-class employee experiences.

It’s hard to talk about topics like work-life negotiation and employee burnout without first acknowledging that there are literally millions of people right now who wish they had a job. Millions of people are feeling desperate, wishing they had to worry about the problems that I’m about to talk about.

There are economists, policy advisers and politicians trying to figure out how to get the United States’ workforce from our current 10.2% unemployment rate back to the 3.5% we enjoyed in February 2020. While sometimes hard to do, I can only trust that they’ll figure it out. Until then, my best contribution is to focus on my own area of expertise — and I’m becoming increasingly alarmed by what I’m seeing and hearing right now.

The big issue? Employees are racing straight at a brick wall. Those who are fortunate enough to still have a job are under immense pressure. It doesn’t matter if they work at a physical workplace, work remotely or have kids — everyone is under some sort of pressure — and, eventually, something is going to give.

Employees with kids are struggling.

Let’s start, somewhat selfishly, with working parents. I’m a dad. I’m also a consultant and coach. Before Covid-19, I would spend half my time on the road, away from my family, living out of a suitcase. For anyone who travels so much, you know it’s hard to be away for so long. A silver lining of the pandemic is all my travel has been canceled over the last five months, and I likely won’t be traveling for the foreseeable future either.

The opportunity to spend this time with my family has been a true blessing. Still, the spring was a struggle as my wife and I worked to navigate the kids’ remote schooling alongside work responsibilities. And like parents all over the U.S., we’re now trying to figure out what the fall semester will look like.

A new survey from The Workforce Institute at Kronos — of which I am fortunate to serve as executive director — found that 72% of employees with kids under 18 in their household are anxious about balancing the demands of work and childcare, including remote schooling, in the coming months.

At many organizations, there was a sense among parents that “we’re all in this together” and “it’s only for a few months,” so no one seemed to mind when one of our kiddos walked in during a Teams call or had a tantrum during a big pitch. Still, it was stressful, and the thought of returning to that situation for an entire school year is enough to make anyone’s heart race.

Employees without kids are struggling, too.

Parents get a lot of attention, but as leaders, we can’t lose sight of employees without kids. The truth of the matter is they’re in trouble as well.

The same Workforce Institute at Kronos survey found that only a third of employees (37%) without kids have taken time off to mentally and physically rest and recharge since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Take a minute to let that sink in. 

One out of every three employees without kids has yet to take a single day for themselves to rest and recharge over the last five months. There’s a lot of potential reasons for this. Many of my own colleagues without children threw themselves into their work as a coping strategy to handle the isolation of this spring’s lockdowns. Others have gone out of their way to try to help working parents, selflessly taking on extra responsibilities so that the mom or dad on their team can tend to the needs of their kids.

While working parents may be struggling with return-to-school anxiety, those without children are also, frankly, fatigued. They’re tired, physically and mentally, even if they don’t realize it.

What should leaders be doing?

Both parents and non-parents are racing straight for a brick wall. They’re stressed, anxious and tired. Odds are, their performance isn’t nearly as sharp as it was back in early March. Eventually, they’re going to reach the point of burnout. In a good economy, they’d likely find a new opportunity. In the current economy, they’ll probably just hang around, disengaged, coasting until someone notices that there’s a problem. For a previously high performer, operating on all the goodwill they’ve earned, that could be months or more. What’s a leader to do? Whether you manage a remote workforce or a present workforce:

• Make work-life negotiation a priority for everyone.

• Have candid discussions with your managers about the importance of time off.

• Focus on what an employee achieves, not when or how much they work

• Leverage technology to enable last-minute shift swaps and schedule updates.

• Consider alternative scheduling outside the typical two-week, 80-hour models most organizations use.

For managers of a remote workforce, encourage boundaries between work hours and family hours.

For those with a present workforce, don’t forget about ways to reinforce psychological safety, like augmenting your current safety strategy with an employer-led contact tracing program that ensures employee privacy but also provides quick notification of potential Covid-19 exposure.

At this stage in the game, everyone realizes it’s not business as usual. Everyone realizes the typical employee engagement playbook has been thrown out the window. But that doesn’t mean we should forget the most basic truth: Employees are the most valuable resource in our business. They are the difference between success and failure. If they hit a wall, the business hits a wall.

While it may seem like an expensive proposition to execute some of the above actions, trust that you’ll be repaid in spades in the form of higher engagement, better performance and enhanced productivity.


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