A Year of COVID-19 and the Future of Work
This is the 3rd and last of a series of posts I have on COVID and the work place. Look out for other posts on the topic and check out previous posts here:
Employee Selection and COVID
Career Development During COVID
It’s been about a year since COVID caused people and businesses to alter everything about the way things are done. After so much time and consideration given to new routines, adjustments, and adaptations where are we in the world of work? What does our future hold? I wanted to do a reflective post as an organizational psychologist about the things that I have observed and where I hope things go related to work. Apologies in advance for the soap boxes that I tend to get onto when I am reflective.
Women and the Work Place
Let me first say that I will do my best not to mansplain anything. I’m just trying to make an observation that I feel is important. It’s not even a completely original observation as news outlets have called it out. But it is something I have considered over the past several months and something that I feel is worth repeating here for all 6 of my readers 😊. That is the situation of women leaving the workplace during the pandemic.
At the time of writing this, over 2 million women have left the workforce as a result of the pandemic (Women leaving the workforce article from CNBC). Although there are likely many nuanced reasons for this happening, anecdotal reports seem to suggest that many women are leaving to tend to home duties. This to me is a societal issue. There is still an implicit expectation that women take on the majority of duties in the home. Otherwise, why wouldn’t more men be leaving the workforce?
This may have a significant impact for women in the workplace in a couple of ways. When you are out of work, it can lead to lost opportunities in raises and positions. This may impact the gender wage gap since more women will have delayed scheduled raises and decrease the number of women in the management/leadership positions. It may not be years that these women are out of the workforce. But what could end up being difficult is that the progress towards evening those things out is stifled for the time being. That pause when you are the underdog can be difficult to make up after the fact.
Furthermore, the pandemic has also shown us that female led countries have had more success handling COVID-19 than countries led by men and that typically female dominated professions like nursing and teaching are essential to our society. Clearly, we need to see this issue and make sure we address it so that we can continue to make progress in this area. Hopefully employers will recognize this and adjust accordingly.
Work Family Integration is Humanizing Employees
Many have talked about the blurring of lines between our work selves and our home selves as a challenge to manage. Here is a bright side to that blurring of lines that I can see: more employers and managers are viewing employees as a whole person. We are finding that if management teams are willing to make this a priority, that it can not only work but it can allow people to address more of their lives more flexibly.
There is a danger in this since it can lead to people always being on the job or working longer. But if we adapt well, I think it can have a huge benefit of giving employers fewer excuses for providing these benefits, allow us to view ourselves more broadly than just our jobs and careers, and hopefully men specifically will take on a bigger role at home.
Personnel Selection is About to Explode
In the United States, there are still hundreds of thousands of people every month filing new unemployment claims and millions that have been unemployment for more than 6 months. People need to work. We need a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment, and we also need to pay for life necessities. At some point, the companies that laid off people are going to need people again. And those people who are have been unemployed are going to need jobs again.
The vaccine is continually providing more hope for at least a semi-normal life. With things starting to come back online, companies are going to start hiring and those unemployed people are going to need work. All those women who have left the workforce may want to get back into it. My concern is that in a rush to fill positions and for people to get jobs, we end up putting people in poorly fitting roles. Here’s to hoping that organizations are preparing their personnel selection systems now and that people are revising their resume to be prepared ahead of time. If not, the consequences of unemployment could be a very unhappy workforce for a long time. I wrote more about this topic here: Employee Selection and COVID.
Employee Listening is Vital
Listening and hearing your employees is a must have in the current environment. Managers have had to listen more to their employees or risk losing their trust and having a highly dissatisfied workforce. It is creating a litmus test for management teams. The trend behind employee listening has been steadily growing for many years. But the need has been greatly amplified by the catalyst of crisis.
If organizations were not prepared before the pandemic to hear their employees, that transition was likely a difficult one since the physical processes around work likely had to change and guidelines were fluctuating to meet almost monthly changes in health recommendations. I hope that this represents a shift in workplace practices to using and truly incorporating employee opinions and thoughts into work processes regularly. Empowerment and autonomy are two of the biggest factors in important job-related attitudes such as engagement and job satisfaction, so the move would be a good one to take. An example of an organization that (allegedly) didn’t listen well enough: The British Royal Family.
Gig Work Will Expand Rapidly
Gig work and freelancing have become the professional filler for a lot of people while they do not have a formal employer. What we thought was secure employment before is not necessarily so secure feeling anymore. More and more people will take up gig work on the side of their day job or continue the gig work they started during the pandemic. These ideas are not necessarily new (for example: The Gig Economy), but I think that these have become salient given the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The impact for many organizations is that there might be opportunities to change the way we work. More options for people work may mean that contracts with gig workers will be more prevalent, and few people will be hired as official employees. It could also mean that gig workers might be more highly preferred by employees and employers might have to up their game to ensure job security and perks that employees want. It is an interesting area of the workforce that I think will be around for the foreseeable future.
Final Thoughts
I remember in graduate school I had a professor Matthew Prewett who asked the class to consider the future of work and what things will look like. It was difficult for me to see the overall landscape of work at that point. Now having been out of school for several years and getting the chance to look broader trends at the time. Now that I’ve had more bandwidth to look at broader work trends, it is interesting to see the ways in which the environment and society really dictates so much about the way we do work. The pandemic has been a huge force in changing work, but it’s not the only force in changing work. We can respond to make work a better experience for everyone. Work shouldn’t suck, but it does too often. Everyone should feel more pressure to provide equal pay for equal work, take a humanistic perspective to employee management, effectively fit people to the right jobs, and provide choices to employees.
As always, thanks for reading!
–Brandon
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