The U.S. Is Facing a Scarcity of Its Most Precious
It’s not just about the pay. It’s also about other work environment-related aspects like culture, purpose, compensation, benefits, work activities, relationships, leadership, and quality of life. So, whether you’re an independent or a full-time employee of a firm, it’s important to feel a sense of purpose associated with your working for a certain client or company. It’s this purpose and positive work environment and culture that will motivate you to be at your best and highest performance levels. Read on and learn why motivation, inspiration, and productivity in the workforce is so much more than just getting a high salary or compensation benefits.
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The U.S. Is Facing a Scarcity of Its Most Precious Resource There's a scarcity issue for the modern economy's most important resource... You have likely read many headlines about high unemployment and historically low labor force participation rates in the U.S. At the same time, the country faces high worker shortages. Companies are desperate to find employees, even offering unorthodox signing bonuses. The solution everyone keeps talking about is compensation. President Joe Biden has talked about needing to give people raises and hiking the minimum wage. There is a constant barrage of news articles about raising employee pay. If people don't make a living wage, the economy can't function. That means pay needs to be at a certain level. However, considering the breadth of these issues with labor scarcity or at least labor mismatch, pay alone will not solve getting people to take certain jobs. The compensation issue is that it can only be a "nonnegative" incentive tool. Studies show that if you pay people too little, they'll work less, be less engaged, and at some point, quit. However, if you pay people a lot more, it doesn't mean they'll work harder than they already do. A lot goes into motivating someone to want to work beyond promising more money. Simply raising pay levels won't do what's best to bring workers into a business or help retain them. Wall Street's investment banking arms provide some of the highest-paying jobs around. However, the turnover is massive. Why? Because often, the actual work performed and the culture are toxic. For most people, all the pay in the world doesn't offset a horrible work environment. Studies from Alight Solutions, Gallup to academia show why people stay and love their work... It's not for maximum pay... Once in a while, people quit a job because they are truly underpaid. More often than not, people leave a place of employment because they didn't like their boss, the corporate culture, or the role didn't match their expectations. It's important to think holistically about "employee engagement" drivers to get the right employees and retain them. In the book, Driven: Business Strategy, Human Actions and the Creation of Wealth, which was co-authored by my friend and colleague, Professor Joel Litman and Mark Frigo, a firm that had been at the forefront of employee engagement is Hewitt Associates. Human capital consultants spend a lot of time understanding how workers and management can be aligned to fulfill a company's vision. Company boards pay these types to design compensation frameworks for management teams. Management teams hire them to use best practices in recruiting and retain the most valuable talent. Hewitt came up with a list of the seven "levers" for employee engagement that can help ensure employees are happy, engaged, and working at their most productive and creative capacity:
Compensation is seen as the weakest for motivating workers to perform their best. Gaining and keeping great talent requires covering many different areas. Even if an employee is well paid, they won't be a high performer if they don't feel purpose. If that employee doesn't like the assigned daily tasks or lacks good relationships and mentorships, that person is likely looking for an alternative. Great companies and great employee engagement structures focus on all these things, not just on one. After all, those research polls show that people quit because the company dropped the ball in many ways, not pay alone. As someone who’s been supporting a lot of independents for many years now, I hope you take this high-performance tip seriously. This is not just applicable for traditional full-time employees. Even if you’re working as an independent professional or contractor, you must also take note of the points mentioned above so you’ll be able to perform at your best. This is because the more engaged and motivated you feel towards what you’re doing, the more you’ll be inspired to work more productively and creatively. When that happens, you’ll achieve high-performance levels as an independent! And isn’t that the point of our Everson’s High-P Fridays articles? Hope you’ve found this week’s insights interesting and helpful. Follow us on LinkedIn. Stay tuned for next Friday’s Everson’s High-P Fridays! For business owners, marketers, and independents, social media has become one of their marketing tools as a lot of their target market are also active in this platform. Learn more about how this social media activity can help you boost your brand’s online visibility on next week’s Everson’s High-P Fridays! |
