There has been significant shortage in labour owing to global crises and the impact has lead businesses on revaluating how to attract the right kind of talent also protect their customer experience from any kind of fallout.
As the year is advancing and with newer variations of Covid, the ongoing labour shortages are staring at our faces even more. More or more workers are rethinking their decision about their current position in the company. Is it the right kind of workplace for them or they need to consider change? Once Covid lockdown is totally released and people will work out of offices, it would be of paramount worry for the management, on how they would manage employee experience.
Parallely consumer demands have also increased manifolds. As per our 2022 reports on Global Consumer Trends, consumers want better treatment of their money – a parameter which can only be achieved if employee experience falls in place. Read this blog to understand why there are labour shortages and take some tips on encouraging labour force while you protect your CX using some state-of-the-art customer experience software.
Key Stats on Labour Management
Even though shortage in labour and an impact in the economic growth are nothing new, the current situation experiences higher unemployment rate due these factors. According to a statistic, in the USA the percentage of job openings went up by 33 percent, yet more than 9 million people remained unemployed. There is a significant disconnect that is happening between workers and employers that is driving lower rates of labour participation.
Workers now constantly look for new roles
Employees radically evaluate their existing roles and the role they play in their everyday lives. 20 percent of the workers have changed their jobs or designations during the Covid 19. The focus of labour market is changing, where businesses are struggling to maintain themselves owing to staff shortage.
The hospitality and tourism industry suffered maximum
The fact that the in-person nature of every role and the extremely high risk of infection, the industry of tourism and hospitality has been profoundly affected by the pandemic. Around 1.7 million of workers witing this sector who have lost their jobs since 2019 end have moved away to a different industry altogether or have quit completely. There’s a huge skill gap in the manual services and the jobs at the labour market.
Reasons behind labour shortage
The current global crisis isn’t anything new. As the working-age population growth is stagnating and there is slow wage acceleration, the problem of labour shortage was one issue long overdue.
However, currently there are quite several compounding issues that enhance labour shortages, indicating a slow decline within the labour market which has become a huge issue.
The Covid 19 Scenario
Due to pandemic, thousands of jobs were lost, and many companies were closed, ultimately leading to 9.5 million of people classified as unemployed. However, even when there were job openings growing over 2021 where around 9.2 million opened in August, trying to fill up positions were tougher than before.
However, whether health concerns are due to labour shortages, or they are caused due to Covid 19 unemployment benefits is something not understood yet. There was a poll conducted on 1000 employees in America to understand why Americans aren’t tempted by the labour markets. The study revealed:
- 42 percent hadn’t received any response from all the jobs they had applied to
- 32 percent remained worried about getting exposed to Covid 19
- 29 percent were getting offered less pay than the ones they did earlier
- 17 percent were trying to shift their career
- 11 percent thought that the unexpanded benefits of unemployment provided them the ability to remain choosy about their jobs
- 9 percent were earning much more salary through several benefits than any new job would offer them
Key Takeaway – There has been application of jobs by labour force, but the roles that are available aren’t coming up to the level of expectations they have, thus being more of an engagement issue than dearth in labour. Engaged workers signify a higher degree of customer experience: 79 percent of the companies that have engaged employees find much higher customer experience than those that haven’t.
Utilize experience management towards ensuring that customers don’t feel the pain of this global crisis.
The Great Resignation
Driven by the events that changed the dynamics of the world in the past two years, employees have started re-evaluating their priorities. What is the role that work plays in their lives, also are they happy with their job status? Can they identify higher salary while also looking into a healthier work-life balance?
Many, feels like, have found their labour markets rather challenging. The US Bureau of Labour Statistics states that July 2021 alone saw 4 million US citizens quitting from their jobs. The Great Resignation, or however it has been addressed as has spread globally as the workers consider how they would wish to utilise their time- also whether their jobs are suitable for them.
Prime Takeaway: Enterprises need offering more than merely jobs to fill the positions lying open – employees are standing up to their values. Businesses that consider employees nothing more than numbers to boast of eventually find themselves from going elsewhere to get better jobs.
Not just that, the customers care more regarding their employee experience than ever before. According to a report from McKinsey, one-fourth of the consumers feel that a company treating its employees is highly to be considered while making a purchase.
The Prevalent Skills Gap
Before the Covid onslaught, employers were struggling to look for candidates that would have the skills they required for their vacant job roles, the problem persists in the current scenario.
Thanks to customer experience management software, certain popular research found that almost 60 percent of the businesses state that they can’t find applicants with right kind of skillset. Also, 30 percent of the applicants state their skills don’t match the jobs that are being offered.
The global trend in the technological advancement was fastened by this abrupt requirement for safer working conditions and remote work, that made the skill gaps much wider. Covid 19 fastened the adoption of digital technologies by 3 to 4 years, changing all the scenarios in customer experience right from internal operations to supply chain management.
Businesses throughout every job sector is looking to hiring workers that could maintain but are finding it really tough to source these.
Prime Takeaway: Brands need to look for technology enabled talents from the labour market- but also accept the fact that investing in the high-profile workers with training plus development could be the best solution to find the perfect candidate.
Merely training your team doesn’t merely help your retaining workers- it also enables you in providing an enhanced customer experience through customer experience management skills. With higher number of workers looking to consistently learn plus adapt to newer directives of the company, your customer would also benefit.
A Workforce that’s Aging
The issues that accelerated pandemic that were already about to happen- namely, the increasing proportions of the earlier workers. The close nature that comes of retirement for several workers affected by the pandemic could have been partially the reason behind leaving the labour markets.
Rather than waiting for some short years to retire, many took the opportunity rather early. In the year 2020, 20 percent of the population in the United States was retired, a 5 percent append from the year 2015. Unfortunately, it would only keep continuing.
Prime Takeaway: There are several external factors that would affect the labour market- also in several cases, attempting at streamlining recruitment or better targeting candidates might not create much of a difference. Learning how you should separate internal business problems from your customer experience is the main point of ensuring that your business flourishes, even when there are glitches.
How Nations and Brands are Resolving the Problems at Labour Market
Bringing Down the Financial Support
As has been mentioned earlier, there are concerns that support of financial unemployment is one factor about workers who do not return to their jobs. Half of the US states have planned they would end the extra benefits funded by federal reserves to attempt plus inspire higher participation of labour and bring down the unemployment rate.
However, the unemployment benefits of only three states, when you combine with the unemployment benefits, were having higher worth than the average wages. Bringing down the unemployment rate may not correlate with minimized financial support.
Wage Growth plus Offering Newer Benefits
To tempt workers towards filling urgent openings in jobs, business leaders are giving increase in wage. The average hourly salaries for the non-farm sector workers were raised for the companies. The hospitality industry, particularly the restaurant, companies are coming with more cash plus better benefits like the emergency program in childcare.
Reducing the Capacity
For certain businesses, bringing down the capacity has been the solitary mode of coping with the difficulties at worker retention and maintaining the current safety restrictions. For instance, the restaurant industry had to bring down the services it has to offer, even though the complete customer expenditure at the restaurants went up to a huge sum in just a year in the year 2021.
Tips to Support Your Labour Force and Protect Customer Experience
After your business has considered the nature of the shortages in labour, the actions that states and businesses have undertaken and the reason behind candidates reasoning or not accepting the roles, there seems like a mismatch between employee experience and brand experience. There is a balance between labour market and labour supply- however, the incentive towards working isn’t enough that could convince your potential employees.
Issues that affect you – issues related to supply chain, profits in your business, aren’t the focus for your future workers. Their livelihoods outside the purview of their works and their experiences at work are the ultimately deciding factors towards what functions or job roles they prefer to take up. By encouraging the labour force also retaining the employees would entail looking crucially at your businesses from an external perspective also changing the offering you give.
Provide Competitive Salaries
There has been stagnation in salary infrastructure for decades now, also with the present federal minimum salary lagging by $5.13/hour behind the inflation from the year 1968, there has been long overdue in wage acceleration. Workers who are re-evaluating their working lives have been provided a stark opinion of the issue and they are looking to correct it with any new kind of role they could take up.
Enable Flexible Range of Working
Employees are now experiencing flexible arrangements at work, and they are not keen on going back. Prior to the pandemic, people would have to accept the working conditions as they came to be, because the alternative couldn’t be attained. However, after close to years of arrangements that were flexible, employees aren’t keen to go back to the old methods.
88 percent of the workers who run mainly on the capital called knowledge and primarily bank on the same look for work time flexibility and location. Here, the brands will need to be flexible themselves first if they wish to find workers who would suit their needs.
Assess Your Work Differently
Before Covid hit, one completing the work at home was considered of less worth. In this new world of working, evaluation of employee needs must be different.
Identifying workers for the hard-to-fill in positions could be easier with an improved approach to the value of work- and enabling this view clear while on the recruitment situation or process.
Understand The Pulse on Your Employee Experience
It doesn’t need to be intrusive listening to your employees. Taking your pulse sharing on the experience in workers could be mutually beneficial and would provide you insights into the employee engagement part that could stave off the shortage issues in labour.
You could see not just how your present workers fathom regarding your business, however, understand how your future staff would perceive you. How would your workers perceive or take regarding your staff referral programs? What is that they want from their jobs? What are the requirements of the fresh requirements and what kind of actions you have taken to make sure your existing workers would likely stay?
Through employee experience programs is important to ensure during stays at a minimum at the time of crisis. The last two years have offered yourself the exclusive opportunity of improving employee experience – so better not miss out on attracting your workers over your competitors.
Focus on Your Quality of Customer Experience, Not the Quantitative Interaction
Cultivation of connections that could be meaningful between you as a brand and your customers is the most convenient method of mitigating fallout from problems regarding finding workers. Rather than bringing out the prices and reducing services when there is scarcity of workers and high labour costs surface, you could focus on providing experiences that are competitive that would have your customers coming back also bringing others to your brand.
Utilizing best practices for your customer experience management with software is merely the beginning point. Coming with a sophisticated approach towards customer interactions that could adapt as your capability change and business capacity is your key to ensure that your customer experience does not need to suffer when you are running with issues like staffing problem.
