STRUGGLING WITH BASIC ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES

In the wake of continued “The Great Resignation” companies are still struggling with basic economic principles, which is understandable because most of them have never seen the power shifting to the labor as they collectively started to wake up. Now we are hearing from the insiders in corporate America’s 1-billion-dollar question, a question but more of a ‘squirm’ from corporations who do not want years of wage depression to affect their record-breaking profits.

“How do we retain our talent without raising pay?” Yes, if you investigate any work forum with employees around and above middle management, you will hear this often. The most common answer has been laughably coming from MBA’s, “More team building events, more pizza parties!” The level of obliviousness that can only be rivaled by most out-of-touch emperors. Today however I would like to present other answers to this mind-boggling question for out-of-touch oligarchs. Encourage work from home: I was writing about the benefits of working from home even before the pandemic. Sadly, it takes a massive global crisis for us to make progress sometimes. It is baffling to this day there are still workplaces that try to resist this despite the obvious benefits for the company, namely:

You now can reduce the needed office space, directly cutting overhead massively. Large meetings no longer have physical constraints. No excuses for being late or reserving a conference room.  No more productivity loss due to water cooler/cubicle chatter.  No more recruitment constraints for location, no need to pay for employee relocation. If the best programmer I am looking for is living in a bunker in the middle of Arkansas, I can now have him join us without any issues.  No need to pay for lunch catering.

Let’s consider the benefits of this for employees, mind you every one of these makes the position more enticing and people will be considering these when making decisions to leave or stay. 

No more commuting, need I say more? Cut to dry cleaning costs, some savings of time and money for people who need to wear suits. Ability to collaborate with teammates anytime, anywhere. Ability to take care of other chores during breaks/lunch breaks.  Much greater control over one’s environment.

There may be some cons to this and now that we have seen various companies experimenting with working from home we can now more accurately list the cons:

Some people who have little control over their work area have more distractions. These may prefer a more hybrid model. Chatty catty employees cannot bother people in their cubicles. People without basic IT skills can have problems troubleshooting the issues with their connection to work on computers; fortunately, with now remoting in, this has been largely mitigated.

Now comes the largest one: Middle managers who did not contribute anything to their teams now are at risk of being found out and losing their jobs. This terrifies them for such people generally get their positions by cozying up to the higher-ups and working from home makes it much harder. Some people will do anything to avoid an honest day’s work sadly and the main thing they will do is scream and shout how change is bad, and they deserve their positions.

In the next issue, we will be looking at another addition to this answer, Embrace Streamlining