COVID-19 changed the world of work--and the world of hiring--forever. And in today’s digital-first recruiting environment, recruiters have challenges unlike anything they’ve faced in previous decades. Fortunately, modern recruiting technology also offers tools to mitigate those challenges. Because the recruiting landscape is now built around finding the right candidate in a sea of options, recruiting technology equips hiring managers with smart analytic tools so that they can make informed, data-driven decisions to improve hiring. 

As of March 2020, HR managers and company leaders have been laser-focused on COVID-19. As of January 2022, the federal vaccination mandate for all businesses with 100 or more employees brought COVID-19 back to the center of your business discussions. But the more time you waste arguing about the mandate, the less time you have to focus on staying competitive. To address this, you have to address misunderstandings about vaccine proof, tackle fears about the vaccine, get smart about storing employee data, and always stay focused on the employee experience. 

Americans are leaving their jobs (and not coming back) at historic rates. And that means the pressure is on talent acquisition to deliver much-needed manpower and help businesses stay competitive. For businesses with an eye toward the future, it’s time to learn from the mistakes of 2021 (like why employees aren’t in a hurry to come back to work) and use that knowledge to stay ahead. When you’re vying for the same talent in a seller’s market, reaching the right candidates and making the right offers once you find them are critical to your success. 

Managers want in-person work. Employees want hybrid work. And in the Great Resignation, when employees are more willing than ever to leave behind lackluster jobs, hybrid work is no longer a perk—it's a competitive advantage. And employers need to catch up to the curve. By focusing on tools that enable the same success factors in in-person environments (like communication, agility, and innovation) employers can reimagine the future of work and ensure their future success. 

As COVID-19 leads more employees to demand hybrid workplaces, the pressure is on employers to innovate and provide long-term hybrid solutions. The good news is that modern technology is ready to provide the answers. The key is to focus on elements that drive success in in-person environments: communication, collaboration, innovation, agility, and the democratization of technology access. And with the right tools, employers can innovate and reimagine their own workplaces—and stay competitive in the process.

Today’s employees don’t want to just collect a paycheck. They want to grow in their work. That’s great news for managers and HR departments, who can capitalize on the hunger to learn through self-driven skills development. That way, employees can learn skills that are valuable to them while also motivating themselves to pursue it—the better to make sure they’re genuinely interested. 

That said, employers still play a big role. Today’s companies need to provide well-sourced, well-considered content and help drive motivation to ensure that employees gain truly valuable skills. Then, employees take over from there. 

Frontline workers are burned out and scared, and many are thinking of quitting their jobs. Yet their organizations still rely on them to do essential work. And if workplaces want to avoid a brain drain from the front lines, it’s time to invest in frontline employees. 

Among other things, that means recognizing the unique struggle of frontline employees, providing support to push back against burnout, skills training to help adapt to the future of work, and a targeted effort to drive better performance. That way, you can continue to support the communities who rely on you. 

In today’s workplace, respect is not just a kind gesture or a tool of civility. It’s a necessity for a high-performing workplace. The problem is that many workplaces still struggle to find the right balance of respect and meeting employee expectations. 

The key to respect is understanding what respect means in today’s work environment and the role leaders play in it. From there, leaders can craft their organizational standards of respect, accountability, and appropriate handling of disrespectful conduct. The net result is a happier, healthier, and culturally rich work environment.

Technology will change the way business is run—and with rapid adoption in the COVID-19 era, those changes are happening faster than ever before. Your workplace needs to be ready to evolve with the times. But first, you need to establish the right mindset for technology adoption. 

Humans inherently resist change, and your employees are no different. However, there are ways to overcome change-resistant mindsets. By driving understanding and reframing the effort, you can change employees minds (and their mindsets) to the betterment of your business.

The future of work is hybrid, but many workplaces aren’t ready for it. In order to make the transition successfully, leadership, HR teams, and IT teams need to create a secure work environment that allows successful (and safe) communication online just as much as in-person. This only happens when networking, security, and collaboration tools come together to enhance health and well-being, safety, and efficiencies. 

The key is to strike a balance—not just tools that get the job done, but tools that enable safe collaboration. That way, your team can confidently work (and innovate) whether they’re across the table or miles apart. 

Workforce expectations are changing — that we know, and that includes benefits. Employees are looking to their workplace to provide more guidance and real solutions on healthcare and wellness — and by the way, employers that step up to the plate aren’t just improving their own work culture. They’re also boosting their own brand as a forward-thinking employer.

Today we’re going to one way a new approach to benefits is changing the game – bringing well-being to the workforce.  Pop-up dental clinics right in your workplace are a proven way to ensure your employees get the dental care they need — despite their busy lives. And this ingenious new way to bring benefits on-site can have an enormous positive impact on financial wellness as well. A Cigna study found that regular preventive dental care over a five-year period reduced annual dental costs by 31% for people aged 18-64. 

Today Meghan M. Biro talks to Jordan Smith, the CEO of Jet Dental, about this groundbreaking model of employee healthcare. It’s a new way for employers to get ahead of employee expectations around benefits and care.

In 2019, a United Minds and Weber Shandwick survey found that one in five employees reported experiencing a cultural crisis within the last year to two—a significant incident indicating troubling workplace attitudes and behaviors. Worse, 30% of employees expect a cultural crisis within the next two years based on their employer’s current behavior. 

It’s more than just a bad attitude. It’s a toxic workplace culture that culminates into a dangerous trend for workplaces. Just look at the Space Shuttle Columbia accident, when workplace culture took an ugly turn. 

It's time for employers and HR professionals to do better. It’s time to revitalize culture and create a work environment that strengthens you. It’s time for managers to develop a plan of action to make sure their workplace culture is engaged, attentive, and positive. That has to happen at all levels, and it starts with commitment at the top of every organization.

Spend any time looking at career and business magazines you’re probably familiar with this term: The Great Resignation. Or as I like to call it, And we thought we were in trouble before. The Great Resignation is the tide of employees leaving their companies — a massive, unprecedented disruption in the labor market. 

What caused it? Upheavals in the workplace, a revelation among workers that they can work remotely and prefer to, a new wave of retirements that opened up new opportunities. Add a general tide of burnout and disengagement as companies undergo rocky digital transformations, and push production to gain traction in crowded marketplaces. And there’s the pandemic’s pressures, bearing down on already stressful roles. 

Recent research from Microsoft found that 41% of employees are considering resigning from their jobs in 2021—compared to 15% voluntary turnover rates pre-pandemic (as reported by Mercer). The Wall Street Journal notes that the actual “quit rate” is four million people per month, the highest we’ve ever seen. 

Today Meghan M. Biro talks to Morgan Chaney, Senior Director of Marketing at Blueboard, about how new approaches to recognition can help employers overcome this wave of departures, catalyze engagement, and turn this resignation ship around.

Gone are the days of working for one company for 40 years. These days, employees change jobs—and careers—all the time. And yet, many of us remain in the same jobs, even though we know we would love a career change. 

The number one myth about career changes is that they’re simply too difficult. We think it will take too much time and effort, or that starting from the bottom in a new field isn’t worth the cost. In reality, changing careers will require some legwork, but it’s not at all impossible. You just need the right toolkit, and enough preparation to guide you through the process. 

For one thing, relationships still matter, which means employees at all levels need to continue networking and cultivating work relationships. Employees also need to change their mindset, especially if they’re transitioning into leadership positions. And we all have a personal and professional brand to draw on—the key is to build it early and continue refining it. 

In business, uncertainty is the lack of certainty or sureness of an event. In accounting, uncertainty is the inability to foretell consequences due to a lack of knowledge on which to make predictions. And when people can’t make predictions about their workplaces, they get nervous, unproductive, and disengaged. 

That uncertainty and disengagement comes with a high price tag—The Gallup Organization estimates that there are 22 million actively disengaged employees costing the economy $350 billion each year in lost productivity due to absences, illness, and other problems related to unhappiness at work. 

In order to shift to a happier, healthier workplace, leadership and HR professionals need to shift how they manage uncertainty. Instead of shying away from uncertainty, managers need to embrace it and take charge of gray areas to drive understanding, open communication, and engagement. 

Workplace diversity is more than just a slogan. In the year 2021, businesses have come to understand that diversity is simply a good business decision. Diverse teams are more creative, more likely to re-examine facts, less prone to groupthink, and more likely to make good decisions. But in order to build those teams, you need strong leadership. 

Strong leadership comes from a few key areas: having the right mindset, building trust, cultivating engagement, and encouraging employees to support diversity and inclusion. Leaders have to interrogate their own approach so that they can work towards the diverse teams they need—and for leaders who do so early and often, the results speak for themselves. 

The employee relationship to the workplace is changing. In the Baby Boomer generation, work was about collecting a paycheck and doing your time in exchange for retirement benefits. In the Millennial generation, work is part of your identity, and a big part of the Millennial identity is altruism and social responsibility. So when Millennials go to work, they want companies that align with their values. 

There’s just one problem: less than half of Millennials think businesses behave ethically. 

In order to attract the best talent, businesses need to change this perception. That means leading with values, demonstrating ethics, and showing that values translate into action. In the process, businesses can create a more positive work environment, strengthen their competitiveness, and set themselves up for future success. 

The COVID-19 pandemic radically altered the landscape of work. And as businesses shift into the post-pandemic world, they have to deal with new realities in talent management. Like the shift from the biggest work-from-home experiment in human history to...the new normal. 

HR professionals will need to adapt to new technology to reflect a new talent acquisition environment and a new talent management environment. Hiring will have to reflect flexible labor, offering the right incentives for in-person work. In the office, HR professionals will have to learn how to manage both remote employees and person employees.

Since 2005, there’s been a 173% increase in remote work, 11% faster than the rest of the workforce and 47 times faster than the work-from-home population. Then COVID hit, and almost every employee got a taste of the work from home life. These days, 80% of employees want to work from home at least some of the time, and 3 in 4 employees consider remote work the new normal. 

There’s just one problem: translating your work culture into your work-from-home culture. 

In fact, culture is the hardest thing to transition to remote work, even though many managers believe that going remote is as sending a worker home with a laptop and a to-do list. You have to invest in your remote culture just as much as your in-person culture, which means giving employees signs that they matter, no matter how far apart you are. 

Whether it’s procrastination, overthinking, impulsivity, negativity, laziness, or just giving up, many of us find ourselves on the cusp of something big—only to shoot ourselves in the foot. Unfortunately, this is an all-too-common phenomenon. We notice an opportunity for success. We build anxiety around success. And then we make our fears come true. 

Learning how to recognize and rewire these behaviors is about more than just getting over the hump. It’s about changing your relationship to success, getting over your anxiety, and giving yourself permission to shine at work. Learning how to get out of your own way can radically alter your relationship to work in all the right ways. 

In The New, New Thing, Michael Lewis refers to the term “business model” as a term of art, essentially describing a business’s plan for how to make money. Yet your business model (and your inherent assumptions about your company) shape how nimble you are—and how good you are at making money. 

In other words, what you think about your business shapes your business in the future. So if your assumptions are wrong, you have space to make your business stronger. Once you improve your assumptions, you can change the way you do business for the better. The key is understanding and interrogating your mistakes. 

Technology is at the heart of almost everything we touch daily. Mobile phones, cars, as well as computers are a staple in most people's lives. Technology is driven by innovation and innovation is pushed forward by human curiosity and the need to want more. But what happens when people are no longer encouraged to be curious, ask questions, and want more? In essence, life as we know it will become stagnant. Stagnation will affect society in all ways, from economics to people interactions with the potential to set back progress and needed advancements in areas such as healthcare and education, but there are initiatives in place to combat inertia towards advancements. 

STEM, a program designed to advance technical thinking in the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics at the school level, was created to ensure technical progress stagnation doesn't happen. It enables learners to advance their thinking to more significant innovation and critical thinking while building on future skills. Exposing school-age children to the benefits of STEM introduces them to the benefits of technology and the future career opportunities awaiting them. 

In a tight labor market with rapid job turnover, employees no longer take a job based on salary alone. These days, benefits are just as important as income—and a critical part of the recruitment package. 

In fact, 82% of women with kids and 76% of men with kids would prefer better benefits over a salary increase, and 80% of employees overall would opt for better benefits over a better salary. And while 92% of Millennials say money is a major factor in a job, 90% of Millennials say they would prefer benefits over a salary increase. 

In other words? Employees are planning for the future, and they know that benefits can help them secure it. Recruiters planning future talent acquisition need to think the same way. 

In past years, the hybrid workplace was a dream for workers who wanted the chance to work from home and go to the office. Telework was not available for most Americans, and the 7% of Americans who worked from home tended to be knowledge workers or the highest-paid—executives, IT managers, and financial analysts. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. 

Now, 80% to 90% of workers want to remain remote. And on a deeper level, working parents want to keep the benefits of working from home—65% of respondents who preferred a remote model were female, and 84% of working parents with children under 18 find that the benefits of hybrid work outweigh the cons. 

The key for employers and HR managers is to deliver the benefits employees want in hybrid work while leveraging employee happiness into productive hybrid models. 

HR has shifted out of the back room and into the heart of the company. Employers are recognizing as never before that HR professionals have the power to shape the organizational fabric. 

In the era of COVID-19, as employees demand more support from their workplaces, HR is more important than ever before. Yet there are also more opportunities for HR professionals than ever before. Experts now say that viewing the employee experience through a customer lens can help HR drive a better experience. The key is understanding how to fit that experience to your unique sector.