Year: 2021

Why U.S. Talent Shortages Are At A Ten-Year High

A shocking 54% of companies globally report talent shortages—the highest in over a decade. But why? Here’s what we found.

www.forbes.com

“Skilled workers are in control and companies need to understand people’s priorities to compete.”

The last year has changed the way employees view and approach work. In short, employees want more, and they don’t want to compromise. In the EY 2021 Work Reimagined Employee Survey, more than half (54%) of employees surveyed globally would consider leaving their job post-pandemic if they are not provided some form of flexibility in where and when they work. Liz Fealy, EY Global People Advisory Services Deputy Leader, says, “Employees’ willingness to change jobs in the current economic environment is a game-changer. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that flexibility can work for both employees and employers, and flexible working is the new currency for attracting and retaining top talent.” Workers also want to be measured on the value they deliver, not the volume. According to a study by Citrix, 86% of employees said they would prefer to work for a company that prioritizes outcomes over output. And they expect to be given the trust and autonomy they need to do their best work. Then there’s work-life balance. In a survey conducted by Prudential, of the workers planning to look for a new job post-pandemic, 38% are doing so because of work-life balance challenges.

What is creative tension and how could it help us?

What is creative tension and how could it help us? If you’ve ever experienced that niggly feeling of frustration that you’re not quite fulfilling your potential, let me introduce you to a concept c…

iconocsgroup.com

And although creative tension and cognitive dissonance are not identical, Tompkins and Lawley claim that our mental processes for each are very similar.

“When the way the world is, and the way we expect or want it to be are different, a ‘cognitive dissonance’ and an internal tension result,” they explain.

“Both creative tension and cognitive dissonance demand resolution. Creative tension pushes us to create something new, whereas cognitive dissonance pulls us to find ways to maintain our existing views and beliefs.

BTW I believe the words “pushing” & “pulling” should be swapped, so that cognitive dissonance feels like something is pushing you (forcing you) to resolve something immediately (like someone micromanaging you over your shoulder) whereas creative tension feels more like an attractive possibility of something new out there pulling you (or gravitating you) towards it.

Cognitive dissonance – Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information. Relevant items of information include a person’s actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, and values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when they participate in an action that goes against one or more of them. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person’s belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein they try to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.

Coping with the nuances of contradictory ideas or experiences is mentally stressful. It requires energy and effort to sit with those seemingly opposite things that all seem true. Festinger argued that some people would inevitably resolve dissonance by blindly believing whatever they wanted to believe.

Two Errors Our Minds Make When Trying to Grasp the Pandemic

Disappointment and uncertainty are inevitable. But we don’t have to turn them into suffering.

www.theatlantic.com

She is making another cognitive error: She is mistaking uncertainty for risk. Uncertainty involves unknown possible outcomes and thus unknowable probabilities. Risk involves known possible outcomes and probabilities that we can estimate. Risk is not especially scary, because it can be managed—indeed, risk management is the core business of the insurance industry. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is scary, because it is not manageable: We can’t measure the likelihood and impacts of the unknowable.

The Role of Cognitive Dissonance in the Pandemic

The minute we make any decision—I think COVID-19 is serious; no, I’m sure it is a hoax—we begin to justify the wisdom of our choice and find reasons to dismiss the alternative.

www.theatlantic.com

Human beings are deeply unwilling to change their minds. And when the facts clash with their preexisting convictions, some people would sooner jeopardize their health and everyone else’s than accept new information or admit to being wrong.

Cognitive dissonance, coined by Leon Festinger in the 1950s, describes the discomfort people feel when two cognitions, or a cognition and a behavior, contradict each other. I smoke is dissonant with the knowledge that Smoking can kill me. To reduce that dissonance, the smoker must either quit—or justify smoking (“It keeps me thin, and being overweight is a health risk too, you know”). At its core, Festinger’s theory is about how people strive to make sense out of contradictory ideas and lead lives that are, at least in their own minds, consistent and meaningful.

How to resolve this dissonance? People could avoid the crowds, parties, and bars and wear a mask. Or they could jump back into their former ways. But to preserve their belief that they are smart and competent and would never do anything foolish to risk their lives, they will need some self-justifications: Claim that masks impair their breathing, deny that the pandemic is serious, or protest that their “freedom” to do what they want is paramount.

Will we be flexible, or will we keep reducing dissonance by insisting that our earliest decisions were right?

Although it’s difficult, changing our minds is not impossible. The challenge is to find a way to live with uncertainty, make the most informed decisions we can, and modify them when the scientific evidence dictates—as our leading researchers are already doing. Admitting we were wrong requires some self-reflection—which involves living with the dissonance for a while rather than jumping immediately to a self-justification.

The real reason it’s impossible to hire anyone right now

Workers quit in droves during the Great Resignation of 2021. But companies desperate for hires are finding their job adverts are still ignored

www.wired.co.uk

“Tech candidates are quitting because their companies aren’t embracing flexible work properly,” Power explains. “They’re being asked to go back into the office either full-time or a few days a week, and because other companies didn’t treat them well during the pandemic and things are picking up again, they’re leaving”. But unfortunately, most of the other companies that are hiring aren’t offering the flexibility they are looking for

Some recruitment experts say this is the toughest environment they’ve ever experienced for attracting talent. The Great Resignation has seen millions leave their jobs in the spring and summer months, but other people are not rushing to replace them.

This may be because more candidates are scrutinising the way companies treated employees during the pandemic, and are not liking what they are finding out. Companies’ track record of redundancies, flexible working, diversity or their attitudes towards the office have become the litmus test for sizing up potential employers.

“Most companies still aren’t open about the salary ranges for the roles they recruit for, and this is something candidates really want to see so they can make informed decisions,” says Margolius. Indeed, job search engine Adzuna found that almost four in ten UK vacancies over 366,000 roles – are advertised without salary information.

Why everybody’s hiring but nobody’s getting hired

Everyone is hiring. So why is finding a job still impossible?

www.vox.com

For Healy and many others, the situation just doesn’t make sense — there’s an incongruity between what they are hearing about jobs and what is actually happening.

Because although these trends have been exacerbated by the pandemic, many of them pre-date it, and they’re not going away.

Essentially anywhere you go in the United States right now, you’re going to encounter “help wanted” signs. But just because a bar or restaurant or gas station wants a worker doesn’t mean a worker wants to work for them. The millions of jobs available aren’t necessarily millions of jobs people want.

“A lot of what people are seeing are low-paying jobs with unpredictable or not-worker-friendly scheduling practices, that don’t come with benefits, don’t come with long-term stability,” Shelly Steward, director of the Future of Work Initiative at the Aspen Institute, told Recode. “And those are not the types of jobs that any worker is eager to take on.”

“We think that we made it easier 20-something years ago when Monster started posting jobs. It makes it easier for the employer, it doesn’t make it easier for the job seeker,” said J.T. O’Donnell, the founder and CEO of career coaching platform Work It Daily, who runs a popular TikTok account with work advice. “You’re not getting rejected, you’re just never getting past the technology.”

This system is also not good at understanding what a person might have the potential to do.

“People are expected to come onto the job and have the experience, have the skills, have everything, and few people do,” Steward, from the Aspen Institute, said.

The endless quest to make hiring efficient has rendered it inefficient. Candidates who are great fits for 90 percent of the job are screened out because they’re not perfect for the other 10 percent. Recruiters are so inundated with résumés flowing in online that they only look at the first few, hiring the people they can get the fastest instead of the people who are the best fit.

Meanwhile, for candidates, the entire process is a black box. Healy, the designer, ended up getting two job offers in less than a week after not hearing anything for months. He still has no idea why.

As for Washington, the legal secretary, she says she finally “released herself” from her job search on LinkedIn after months of trying. She decided to switch gears and pursue a different line of work.

Child-care workers are quitting rapidly, a red flag for the economy

South Shore Stars early childhood program in Weymouth, Mass., received zero applicants this summer for its preschool teacher positions. It was a big change…

www.post-gazette.com

In a new report this past week, President Joe Biden’s Treasury Department called the current child-care system “unworkable” with high costs for parents, low wages for workers and not enough spots for kids.

For years, there have been calls to pay child-care workers more, as the median pay in the industry – $25,460 a year, according to the Labor Department – is below the poverty line for a family of four.

Ms. Roberts, the former child care worker who quit in June, grew up dreaming of becoming a teacher. But she says it was disheartening to learn that day care workers with 20 years more experience than her still made less than $15 an hour. During the pandemic when she had to get toddlers to keep their masks on and not touch each other, she was given a raise of 15 cents per hour.

“Our country needs to look at what we really value. We should value our youngest learners,” Ms. Cover said. “Our youngest kids should be cared for and educated in settings that are no less than what they receive in K-12 school districts.”

Housing is a human right, not a commodity

Canada is now seeing the consequences of governments placing the interests of investors ahead of citizens

www.theglobeandmail.com

Housing is now predominantly valued as a commodity, traded and sold on markets, promoted and invested in as a secure place to park unprecedented amounts of excess capital. The view of housing as a human dwelling, a place to raise families and thrive within a community, has largely been eroded. Despite its firm place in international human rights law, housing has lost its currency as a human right.

Housing prices have increased at three times the rate of income. No longer commensurate with household income levels, housing prices are driven instead by demand for high-end assets among global investors.

In other countries, the result has been devastating. In the U.S., in the five years after the 2008 mortgage crisis, nine million households were evicted due to foreclosure; in Spain during the same period, 300,000 were evicted. Legendary Wall Street short-seller Marc Cohodes has predicted that this is the direction in which Canada is now headed.

Wondering why society went off-kilter during the pandemic? It was all predicted in this book

A year and a half into the pandemic, a group of citizens still refuse to acknowledge that a major health event is even happening. Why? A prophetic book by a psychologist in Vancouver, B.C., predicted this, as well as most…

www.seattletimes.com

Taylor would know because he predicted it. He wrote a remarkable little book back in 2019 called “The Psychology of Pandemics.” Its premise is that pandemics are “not simply events in which some harmful microbe ‘goes viral,’” but rather are mass psychological phenomena about the behaviors, attitudes and emotions of people.

The denialists and refuseniks today are engaging in what the psychology field calls “psychological reactance.” It’s “a motivational response to rules, regulations, or attempts at persuasion that are perceived as threatening one’s autonomy and freedom of choice,” the book describes.

“Pandemics bring out all these extremes in behavior,” Taylor told me. “Anxiety, fear, denial, racism, conspiracy theories, the popularity of quack cures, the ‘you’re not the boss of me’ backlash to health directives — these things have all been seen dating back to the medieval plagues.”