Category: Employment

By Erica Pandey

Companies that made it through the pandemic in one piece now have a major new problem: more than a quarter of their employees may leave.

What’s happening: Workers have had more than a year to reconsider work-life balance or career paths, and as the world opens back up, many of them will give their two weeks’ notice and make those changes they’ve been dreaming about.

“The great resignation” is what economists are dubbing it.

• Surveys show anywhere from 25% to upwards of 40% of workers are thinking about quitting their jobs.
• “I don’t envy the challenge that human resources faces right now,” says Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University.

Compassionate Eye Foundation/Gary Burchell

By Jennifer Liu

In 2019, workers were quitting their jobs at record rates, with labor experts saying workers did so in order to secure the pay raises and promotions they weren’t getting from within.

Then, beginning in March 2020, the labor market shed 20.5 million jobs in the first few weeks of the coronavirus pandemic. Now, a year later, there are still nearly 7.9 million fewer Americans counted as employed than in February 2020, while the labor force is down 3.9 million.

But with signs pointing toward recoveryin many economic sectors, workers are feeling the itch to job-hop yet again. By some estimates, 1 in 4 workers is planning to look for opportunities with a new employer once the threat of the pandemic has subsided, according to Prudential Financial’s Pulse of the American Worker survey. The data, collected by Morning Consult on behalf of Prudential in March 2021, includes a sample of 2,000 employed adults, including a statistically significant sample of workers that are or have been working remotely during the pandemic.

Here’s a look at who’s planning to leave, and what employers should be thinking about as they retain — or recruit — in a post-pandemic environment.

A year into the global pandemic, Amazon and Google are pushing for a return to the office.

BY CONNIE LIN

In March 2020, when the nation began working from home after the coronavirus pandemic breached U.S. shores, the shift was immediate and extreme. Speculators mused that the worldwide experiment in remote business would revolutionize the work economy. And naturally Big Tech, having already pioneered the digital frontier, seemed poised to lead the charge.

For a while, it did: In May 2020, Silicon Valley mammoths Facebook, Twitter, and Square all said their employees could opt to work from home indefinitely should they wish. Google initially fronted one of the longest timetables for a return to the office. But now a year into the global pandemic, it appears to be pulling back the horses on remote work.

The search engine giant said Wednesday it will speed up office reopening plans in April for those who volunteer before the September 1 deadline, according to a memo cited by CNBC. The company, which made headlines last year for eyeing a “hybrid” workweek schedule, also reportedly said that after September 1, employees who want to work remotely more than 14 days per year must formally apply for it—requesting up to 12 months in “the most exceptional circumstances.” (We reached out to Google for comment on the memo.)

by Nancy Baym, Jonathan Larson, Ronnie Martin

We know it’s been a while, but do you remember bumping into colleagues in the office hallway, chatting about weekend plans or a big project you’re working on? Do you recall finding yourself in the right place at the right time, giving someone a missing piece of information or introducing a colleague to someone new? If you’re like many people, you may not have realized how much these conversations mattered until you found yourself working from home.

These informal interactions are key to what’s known as social capital — benefits people can get because of who they know. You rely on your social capital every time you’ve hit a dead end and someone pitched in to help you, even though they didn’t have to. It shows up when you need expertise and someone you’d only met once was able to offer it. You also help others build their social capital when you go above and beyond to support them with knowledge, mentoring, or kindness. And the reason you can turn to someone else and offer extra help is that you’ve built a base of familiarity and goodwill through these unplanned interactions that once filled our workdays.

A San Francisco restaurant. New data shows that nearly 80 percent of new jobless claims in California last month were from people cycling in and out of employment.

By Ben Casselman

Why Are Jobless Claims Still High? For Some, It’s the Multiple Layoffs.

Jobs are coming back. Businesses are reopening. But a year after the pandemic jolted the economy, applications for unemployment benefits remain stubbornly, shockingly high — higher on a weekly basis than at any point in any previous recession, by some measures.

And headway has stalled: Initial weekly claims under regular and emergency programs, combined, have been stuck at just above one million since last fall, and last week was no exception, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

“It goes up a little bit, it goes down, but really we haven’t seen much progress,” said AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist for the career site Indeed. “A year into this, I’m starting to wonder, what is it going to take to fix the magnitude problem? How is this going to actually end?”

The continued high rate of unemployment applications has been something of a mystery for many economists. With the pandemic still suppressing activity in many sectors, it makes sense that joblessness would remain high. But businesses are reopening in much of the country, and trends on employment and spending are generally improving. So shouldn’t unemployment filings be falling?

New evidence from California may offer a partial explanation: According to a report released Thursday by the California Policy Lab, a research organization affiliated with the University of California, nearly 80 percent of the unemployment applications filed in the state last month were from people who had been laid off earlier in the pandemic, gotten back to work, and then been laid off again.

By Abdullah Shibli

As we fight to overcome the damages done by the Covid-19 pandemic and restart and recalibrate our economies, this is a golden opportunity to ask what we can do to prepare ourselves better for the next decade. One thing is certain. New technologies will emerge more rapidly now that we know how to adapt to a major catastrophic event such as the all-devouring Covid-19 virus and how to fight back. Innovative approaches to working and living will make the world in 2030 a different one than the one we had envisaged before the pandemic. And we all need to adapt to this new world. Bangladesh’s challenge is to transform our education programmes and skills development infrastructure to deliver the talents needed for an innovative, digitised, and post-agricultural economy in the forthcoming Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Bangladesh’s progress in manufacturing exports is comparable only to that of China and Vietnam. The apparent contradiction, however, lies in the fact that Bangladesh made such progress without any rapid structural transformation of the economy. Despite a very high share of manufacturing exports in total merchandise exports, the export basket of Bangladesh remained highly concentrated around low value-added and low-complexity products.

In the next decade, the largest challenge will be faced by women both in industrialised and emerging economies. Women hold jobs in areas that are predicted to grow, such as registered nurses and personal care aides—possibly accounting for 58 percent of new job growth. At the same time, women hold a large portion of shrinking jobs, like office clerks and administrative assistants, customer service, food service, and community services.

By Avery Hartmans 

• Zillow CEO Rich Barton discussed the future of work during the company’s Q4 earnings call.
• A hybrid model could create a “two-class system” that negatively impacts remote workers, he said.
• Others have echoed his concerns. GitLab’s CEO called a hybrid model “the worst of both worlds.”

Throughout the pandemic, the buzzy phrase in corporate America has been “hybrid model” — as in, a new way of working that involves both remote work and coming into a physical office a few days per week or month. 

And while that model seems like an elegant solution for life post-coronavirus, there may be a hidden downside for employees, Zillow CEO Rich Barton warned.

During the online real estate company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Barton discussed how Zillow managed the shift to remote work throughout 2020 and what he’s expecting for the future. While Zillow has been successful operating as a “cloud-headquartered company,”the company does plan to have some employees return to its offices, and that can present challenges, Barton said. 

“We must ensure a level playing field for all team members, regardless of their physical location,” Barton said. “There cannot be a two-class system — those in the room being first-class and those on the phone being second-class.”

Angela Priestley,

We’re set for some massive jobs and skills displacement over the coming years, thanks to the adoption of various technologies, particularly AI and automation.

The World Economic Forum runs extensive research across the changing job requirements and skills demands of employers in order to determine where some of the major shifts will be.

In 2018, this research led them to make a bold prediction that they reiterated again in 2020: that is that by 2025 “the average estimated time spent by humans and machines at work will be on parity based on today’s tasks.”

In 2020, they predict that 85 million jobs may be displaced by massive shifts in how labour is divided between humans and machines by 2025.

But it’s not all doom and gloom.

By Gili Malinsky

SENIOR TAX ACCOUNTANTS MAKE AS MUCH AS $78,000, ACCORDING TO INDEED.

2020 brought a lot of changes to the workplace as employers worldwide tried to grapple with the social distancing and health protocols of the coronavirus pandemic.

More than 4 in 10 (43%) HR professionals saw remote-work flexibility to be the top change within organizations, according to an October-November 2020 Monster survey of 3,100 recruitment and HR professionals from around the world. That priority is reflected in the array of positions now increasingly offered as remote jobs.

Jobs board FlexJobs recently highlighted career categories where remote job listings have grown by more than 25% since March 2020. Read on for eight career categories with growing remote work opportunities according to the site, including popular job titles and their average annual salaries, organized from highest to lowest growth.