Sometimes, things happen. Circumstances change, what we want from our careers changes, and what the current employer can offer us changes. There’s no shame in it, and there shouldn’t be any hard, or awkward feelings about it.
I’d love to see companies get on board with that, but that’s going to require we see our people as people first, and labor inputs second. I’m not so sure some managers are capable of that.
Use your vacation days, encourage the people who work for you to use their vacation days. Putting anything work-related above the need we all have for time away from work, is surely one road to burnout. There are many others, some of which you can’t do anything about by yourself, but this is one you control. And it’s easy enough to do and to allow your people to do.
“Would you rather make $100k at a boring, meaningless job, or $50k doing something meaningful?”
Apparently, the correct answer to this question is the latter, according to most of my LinkedIn connections.
I disagree. I think people who take $50k might just be suckers.
You are getting paid half of what you could be making elsewhere, which means your employer is simply underpaying you, by taking advantage of your need to find meaning in your work.
Nothing about those numbers sounds like a diverse, welcoming, workplace for women, and minority groups. Leaders, you need to be better than this.
How do you think your industry would fair in a survey like this?
The first thing that jumped out at me is that I am very glad to see people taking learning into their own hands instead of waiting for their company to train them. I have always been a big fan of that. Your career, is your career, and you should act that way when it comes to learning new skills.
The second thing I thought was, if 77% of people are ready to learn new skills, as a company, you need to step up and offer opportunities for people to do just that. Very few people are going to be happy sitting and doing the same job for the next 20 years, and rightfully so, since we know that there’s almost no chance the jobs we do now, will still exist in the same way in as little as 5 years.
And, the last thing that jumped out at me? Nearly half are interested in running their own businesses? Are you prepared for that? For half of your employees to maybe become your competitors? It wouldn’t shock me. There’s a lot to be said for the flexibility of working for yourself. Choosing your projects, choosing your location, and your hours. Really, the one thing I keep seeing, over and over again, in interviews with experts and economists, is that health insurance is the one thing standing in the way. If we untied employment and health coverage, there might just be a massive overall in the U.S. labor market.
Luckily, with everything having remote options now, it’s actually pretty easy to pop in and simply listen without really being noticed, or at least, feeling a bit better about not being noticed.
And, really, you should. Everyone should. Not because you necessarily have anything to add, but because you have an opportunity to listen.
Listening to different groups of people talk about their issues will open your eyes to the things that we, as white men, don’t notice. It gives us the opportunity to hear about racism and sexism that still happens to real people that we know and interact with every day. The stories about things like street harassment aren’t happening to random women complaining online, they are happening to the same women I just spent hours working through a project with, the people who’ve been victims of racist violence aren’t random names in the news, they are the folks we were just chatting about the weather with before a conference call, and collaborating with on documentation for the last week. The things we might read about adding pronouns to an email signature make it sound like a decent thing to do, but hearing someone you work with talk about how life-affirming it is to not be the “one” person at the company doing it? Yeah, it hits different when you hear that from someone you know.
So, as much as I have gone about my professional life glad that there were resource groups available but not really paying much attention to them, I’ve recently made a change and tried to drop in and listen where I could. It’s been a challenge. These are not fun, light, conversations. They shouldn’t be.