Of Course Senior "Leaders" Are Out Of Touch With Their People.
Honestly, why would they be in touch with their needs?
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This is a good new article in Harvard Business Review about CEOs and senior leaders being out of touch. There are so many flawed assumptions in this article that you could probably choke an entire farm of horses with them, but let me just give you two that really popped out →
Executives are usually up on the macro labor numbers like total wage spend and average wage growth but not on what their labor model means for individual workers. When we tell them that 50% of their workers work fewer than 15 hours each week or that the majority of their full-timers earn less than $30,000 per year or that less than one-third of their full-time workers earn a living wage (all real examples from our work), they’re shocked. Many companies also track metrics, such as employee engagement, that can give a misleading picture of job quality. While engagement surveys may be useful in assessing year-on-year trends, they don’t give a true picture of job quality. We worked with one company that was proud to be certified as a great place to work, but it also had about 60% employee turnover, mainly thanks to low wages and unstable schedules provided only 72 hours in advance. Employees understood that the company didn’t offer good jobs.
LOL on that one. And now →
Because executives are out of touch with how hard things are for their employees, it’s easy for them to figure that a “strong culture,” frequent “employee appreciation,” and cool but insufficient benefits such as wellness programs add up to job quality. The CEO of a health care company told one of us, “I just don’t understand. I care so much about our employees and we do so much to show our appreciation, but they still keep leaving.” He was proud that the company celebrated major employment milestones for all workers and offered some discount programs. Great, but many of his frontline employees still had to work two jobs to make ends meet and had to juggle that second job with the unpredictable weekly hours at his company. Some companies think that encouraging employees to “be themselves” — to display tattoos, wear whatever they want, and so on — is a way of offering good jobs. The ability to express individuality may be important to employees, but it won’t pay the bills.
Can’t stop laughing now. But … this is reality.
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