When you look at the survey results, you see things like this numerically. What people want from work and how they have decided work should fit into their lives is not only different than it was 2 years ago, but it’s different for each of us as individuals. “The tragedies of the last two years…
I’m not sure that these companies have done the math. If enough experienced workers in an industry do more than switch between competing offers but step away from the industry into a different career path, there will not be enough experienced workers to go around.
What are you going to do about that? Sit around with unfilled positions and cry about it, or get serious about raising up the next generation of cybersecurity talent?
One of the bigger management issues surrounding the remote work model is how and when to communicate. I’m an advocate of more communication, always. I’m a huge advocate of a lot more communication with a remote team.
But, we also have to think about the best way to work together. There are lots, and lots, of meetings that are designed to create better communication but aren’t necessary. Most of them are recurring meetings that no one ever cancels, even when there’s nothing urgent to discuss. Just because we’ve always had this meeting, and we always will.
That’s not a good reason to meet. At the end of the day, if your check-ins or project status meetings are nothing more than a “here’s where we are this week,” we might consider whether it makes more sense for people to send an email instead. Or even a Teams/Slack chat? It’s the same information, but no one has to plan their day around it.
What they argue for instead is a decentralization of our work. That rather than being the center of our lives and our time, work is simply a transaction. We give you output, you pay us. That’s it. It’s all there is.
That’s the revolution they are looking for. It might seem like a simple change, but it’s actually quite a different way to look at the world of work. Go read more and listen to the episode. It’s interesting to consider.
There is more at the link that you may want to read and consider, but the big point is that what workers want is sort of all over the place. As we all stop and consider what role or work should play in our lives, we are making a number of different choices. Leaders who simply assume they can make everyone do the same thing are going to appear out of touch, and that is also exactly what we are seeing. Flexibility sells when it comes to hiring and retaining talent, lack of it just makes you look callous and distant.
What Sherri talks about in regards to the security industry is something I’m seeing over and over again when reading about diversity. The child care question.
Let me share another resource on the topic with you. In December, there was an episode of People I Mostly Admire with Claudia Goldin, where she talked about the concept of “Greedy work”.
The topic she was chatting about was the gender pay gap and how much child care contributes to it, and one of the reasons we have a gender pay cap, aside from the percentage that is actually discrimination, is that greedy work doesn’t account for child care, but it pays more. So in many families, they have to make a choice between less pay and the flexibility to equally share the child care. The economics of that don’t usually make sense, so one parent takes on the greedy work to maximize the family income while the other steps back to a more flexible role in order to provide the majority of child care. With social norms being what they are, and the other issues that contribute to a gender pay gap, that most often means the man in a heterosexual couple, and here we are with women being vastly underrepresented in these types of positions.