You cannot claim to care about the people who work for you, and not even check in on their well-being. Those two things do not go together at all. We have to get to that very minimum level before we can do more, and if we can’t even be bothered to get there, I see no reason why anyone with a choice would want to continue working for you.
I mean, it seems so simple, and yet so genius. But also so very unethical:
“In a program called ‘Communicate with Care,’ Google trains and directs employees to add an attorney, a privileged label, and a generic ‘request’ for counsel’s advice to shield sensitive business communications, regardless of whether any legal advice is actually needed or sought. Often, knowing the game, the in-house counsel included in these Communicate-with-Care emails does not respond at all,” the DOJ told the court. The fact that attorneys often don’t reply to the emails “underscor[es] that these communications are not genuine requests for legal advice but rather an effort to hide potential evidence,” the DOJ said.”
Training to meet the skills gap in your workforce is a never-ending challenge. This is not a one-time set it and forget it type of task. It is an ongoing task that will always need updating and tweaking. Have you planned for keeping everyone on your team up to date and continuing to develop the new skills you’ll need year after year?
A gap doesn’t get created overnight, and it won’t get fixed overnight. Even if it did, a few days later you’ll have another gap. The world changes every day. Don’t assume your people can change with it without any assistance from you.
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.
This brings me to that final point. Having a learning culture requires a plan for each employee and for different types of jobs. It requires coordination between the official training department, managers, HR, and the subject matter experts throughout the organization. It may look a bit messy. It may include some mix of internal training, external resources, job shadowing, self-study, and group learning. I’d argue that a true culture that promotes and encourages learning would leave open all of those possibilities. I’d also argue that your training staff isn’t just there to teach classes but to provide and coordinate all of those options. They are there to “provide opportunities to learn and grow”, whatever those look like for all of your employees who wish to do so. They are key to retention but they cannot do it alone. The culture must reward and encourage learning and growth in meaningful ways or all the training staff in the world won’t make a difference.
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.