I’m in education. It takes more than it’s fair share of hits around here.
I’m not sure you “couldn’t achieve” full staffing, but pay and work environment compared to your competition certainly factors into the equation.
You’re right about performance. New people aren’t going to usually be great. They have to be properly trained and that takes an investment. If they’re just sent out to the job, a lot of times the performance is subpar, especially if the worker has no experience in the said field. Sometimes it’s better to be lower staffed than it is to be fully staffed with the wrong people in place.
As for the recent hire you caught on camera, it sounds like he either faked a good interview or someone hired the wrong person.
That’s right, I remember now from some earlier discussions. That’s a different ball of wax these days.
I can agree at a macro level about wages. I mean Wal Mart and Amazon Prime are great examples of hoarding massive piles of cash to build a spaceship vs bettering wages vs say Publix which is an ESOP.
That’s certainly part of the problem, but something else has changed. I started my career in hotel management in 2001. For the most part your line level staff fit into two main categories 1- non college educated longer term employees 2- in college or just out of college temporary employees.
I moved on to a regional manager role and then a director of ops role until 2007. So for 5 years I was intimately involved in the hiring process across 5 states. From 2007-2019 I worked my up up the executive food chain becoming less personally involved in line level hiring as we grew into 13 states and 5 countries.
The company offered very competitive pay, bonus structures, health benefits, vacation and travel benefits, tuition reimbursement opportunities and became 30% employee owned during that period of time. Your average front desk agent in 2013 was making more than I made as manager in 2002. But around 2013 something started to shift everywhere within the US. Our international labor force remained largely stable.
We noticed by 2015-2016 some changes in who made up our domestic workforce. 1- the high school educated group was yielding recruits that seemed to care less about a stable job with benefits. Especially startling in that group was the increasing numbers that didn’t have any desire to go into a management track and advance their career opportunities. 2- the transitionary college students largely disappeared around 2015.
My point is we paid less and offered less in the early days and didn’t have the labor challenges we had when we paid way more with a ton to offer. I have no idea what it was, but there was a major shift in just a couple of years. From California to Wisconsin from Maine to Florida we saw it everywhere.
And here’s the real kicker. We at the executive level could see it in the numbers. We could here it in discussions with our local managers who were bearing the brunt of it, but I can tell you we had no idea.
It wasn’t until 2019, when I left the company and had my own small business that I got it. Being hands on in hiring at the line level again left me dumbfounded. The difference in applicant in Charleston between the time I left in 2004 and the time I returned in 2019 was night and day.
I noticed it elsewhere two. I spent a good deal of time doing delivery to our various hotel clients. From Marriott to Hilton to the high end boutiques downtown, I interacted mostly with the front desk staff. Completely different workforce than the one I started my career in.
I think for anyone who worked a front line job in the 90s up until 2010 or so, but hadn’t worked a frontline job since, you have no idea how massive the change is. I know I sure as hell didn’t. I can promise you if I really understood it, I would have made different choices about this stage of my life.
Pay is certainly a carrot, but it is not the carrot it once was. Once we find the right person, it works very well. Unfortunately that right person is someone who’s actually had a few bad jobs with bad pay and doesn’t want to give this up to go next door because we ask them to keep things neat and tidy. And I say unfortunate because that is a dwindling pool to draw from.
Recently we hired someone we knew who is a college educated engineer. Desiring to make some extra money they worked at Publix part time. This person is in their early 30s and even they remarked how different the people they worked at Publix with were compared to the last time they worked front line in the late 2000s.
We can toss around all the ideas in the world about paying and how to be a more attractive company, etc. And it’s a good idea. Been there done that bought the tshirt. But the challenge is larger than that.
I do not claim to have the answer. There is no magic bullet here. It’s something in this moment’s collective culture that has to be understood.
But at least it’s back to the old problem of quality compared to October- June. I can cycle through knowing eventually you find the right fit. Before the benefits stopped there was no one to cycle through.
