Employers had better be better

I’m indebted to my father – in so many ways – for some historical context to this blog. In 1945, with victory in Europe just secured and with the Allies still fighting Japan, the country went to the polls. This was clearly no ordinary General Election. There had been a national government, with the labour leader Clement Atlee acting as Deputy Prime Minister to the Tory Winston Churchill. As any number of books and films have touched on, Churchill, suffering from depression as he was and a mighty consumer of alcohol, was a hugely prominent and popular wartime leader. Indeed, he himself could see only one winner in the election.

He was very wrong. Labour romped home with 48% of the vote, a 12-point swing and a majority of 146.

And yet even now it feels counter intuitive. Churchill may have had his faults, but he was highly visible and highly charismatic. The war had been won and surely the country would back him to lead during peacetime.

But the nation wanted change. It wanted to move on from six years of misery, fear and destitution. They were faced with a choice of Churchill and his ‘Help him finish the job’ campaign slogan or a Labour Party which was to usher in the NHS and the welfare state.

The country didn’t want more of the same, it wanted something more aspirational, something which spoke to progress and improvement. The country wanted to put the past behind it.

Just as the political colours of the time changed with undue haste in 1945, pace is everything today.

The Nightingale Hospital at Excel in east London was converted, re-purposed and opened in just a week. We will look back and analyse plenty of aspects of the fight against Covid-19 that might have been done differently, better and more quickly in months to come. This hospital won’t be on that list.

We’re seeing transitions and evolution that might have taken years, if not decades, to come about hurried along in the initiative to tackle the crisis. Pre coronavirus and the US courts were handling 200 trials per day via video conference, on March 31^st that figure was 1,800. Amazon on-boarded no fewer than 1,700 new employees on one day in mid-March. Serco, an outsourcer to the government, has cut its time-to-hire time from a month to just 4-5 days in the face of growing demand for its services.

And people will have no interest in returning in a future post-coronavirus landscape to hiring and on-boarding that looks backward. The rules and speed of engagement for the next decade are being set as we speak.

Returning to my original point around what people are looking for post crisis, I ran a brief, very unscientific poll on social media over the last week. I’d love to repeat it amongst a broader group, but the findings from this survey were very clear.

I asked friends and contacts what they were looking for when the threat of the virus lifts. Were they simply looking for a return to normal or were they looking for a workplace in which organisations were taking the opportunity to be better employers?

Some 78% of people were looking for the latter. They don’t want more of the same, a getting back to normal. They want to return to a better working environment.

We observe how politicians, business leaders and sports clubs have got things wrong, very wrong. We’re becoming highly tuned to the way organisations are responding. Which firms are laying people off or furloughing and for how long? There have been some incredibly shabby responses, yet we also need to call out the stellar examples.

Visa has announced that it will extend its sponsorship of 96 athletes across 27 sports for another year, given the 12-month delay to the Olympics and the Paralympics. This week BT has announced that it will shed no jobs, that it will award £500 in shares to its 100,000 employees, reward its non-management staff with a 1.5% pay rise and that its CEO, Philip Jansen, will donate his £1.2m annual salary to the NHS for at least the next six months.

The bar is being raised on a near daily basis. But although we might reasonably expect Mr Jansen to begin claiming his salary in due course, organisations cannot simply slip back into old, bad habits.

Our expectations on the workforce and workplace return will be significant. To hugely varying degrees, we have all suffered – emotionally, physically, mentally, financially. We have experienced losing jobs, freedoms, hope and in a growing number of cases, the lives of those around us.

Just like those people emerging from the wreckage of WWII in 1945, there is today a desire and an expectation for something more. A fairer society probably, a more rewarding working environment definitely.

The new norm won’t look like the old norm. There will be a clear after-coronavirus, distinct from a before-coronavirus. And the former has to feel a whole lot better than the latter.

Employers will not only have to explain how they reacted during the crisis and lockdown, but also how they have subsequently changed. How the employment experience they offer has improved. How they have taken on board the best of those organisations that have risen to the clear and obvious challenge – the BTs of this world – and seen this as a starting point.

Returning employees and prospective applicants will closely observe the extent to which new and emerging technology is being used to shape better, more empathetic candidate experiences and on-boarding processes. The better employers have embraced working-from-home technologies – there will be widespread expectations around this in a post-coronavirus world. Organisations have been reaching out with more vigour, listening to their people, their issues and ideas – this should only increase rather than come to a shuddering halt. Employees who have helped their colleagues, risen to the challenge, gone beyond expectations will be recognised.

Your employer brand tomorrow will be predicated around how employees and candidates feel your organisation has responded to and changed post crisis.

The coronavirus tide has moved the line in the sand of employee expectations.

It might seem fanciful, but it will be fascinating to understand whether key organisational performance indicators will change. Will we still be judged by profit, productivity and GDP? Will the admiration we feel for healthcare professional, retail employees and other key workers remain?

That the disease and its impact is non-discriminatory, will this mean our workplaces are more and more inclusive? The virus has affected everyone – the heir to the throne has suffered and our Prime Minister is currently in intensive care with Covid-19 – we have all either been locked down or been fighting the good fight.

Like the General Election voters of 1945, employees today want more, something better. These employees will quickly become candidates if they don’t see in their employers new initiatives, a new experience and a new purpose.

Employers had better be better.