The world has been through quite the experience over the past week. We’ve had tariffs, we’ve had market crashes, we’ve had pauses on tariffs. We’ve had exemptions, or maybe we haven’t. There are a lot of moving parts.
It’s been chaotic in the extreme. Markets, along with people’s personal wealth and pensions, have been on an out-of-control roller coaster. Trillions have been lost.
There has been fear and trepidation, not just for personal finances but also for jobs. Global financial upheaval on such a scale is unlikely to come without employment pain. Will manufacturing jobs disappear from countries such as China and Vietnam? Will they reappear in the US? Will UK roles in pharma, in automobile, in engineering migrate across the Atlantic? Will cheap Chinese goods, now too expensive for US markets, make their way to the UK and the EU, threatening local producers?
Right now, we’re all guessing and few have any real grasp on the consequences.
There is, therefore, an absence of employment agency. What’s been playing out on screens and graphs all over the world, over the past week, gives people the impression that they have little in the way of personal influence over their job, its longevity and their employment future.
It feels as though everything is out of their hands.
This speaks to utter professional demotivation. If people feel the global economy will have more influence on their own job and career than all the personal effort, initiative and passion they apply, it bodes badly for productivity. Does it all feel just a little pointless?
The good folk at the likes of Shell, Lloyds, BP, Rolls Royce and BA have seen shares in their employers fall by between 10% and 15% over the last week. A period in which they have been largely powerless and impotent to have any influence on this.
And if we can put the Donald to one side for a moment – not a straightforward undertaking, I’ll concede – what are the consequences of such absence of employment agency, empowerment or ownership for employers?
Are we expecting employees simply to shrug their shoulders, roll their eyes and blindly carry on? Just forget the last week and what impact it might have had on them personally, financially and professionally? Put it down as one of those things? Not dissimilar in a way to Covid – another occasion when life for many was out of their control and purview.
People need to know that they are actively contributing to organisational mission. That whatever their role, they are making a difference, not just today, but to where their employer is heading.
The NASA story of the janitor telling JFK how proud he was to be helping put a man on the moon is, apparently and rather sadly, apocryphal but it has endured. It has universal truth. We all want to be the janitor and to share his purpose, direction and sense of engagement.
Because of what has happened over the last week, organisations need to redouble their efforts to reach out to their employee base. They need to reassure those audiences about what has happened and how they might be addressing any consequences. However un-liberating it felt, there can be no pretending ‘Liberation Day’ didn’t happen.
More than this, however, employers need to call out very clearly the importance of their people’s individual contribution and input. That, even more so given the current climate, their organisation’s future depends on its people taking risks, taking decisions, showing up, showing initiative, leading, guiding, driving.
Making a difference might have become a trite employment cliché, but it is not without impact and meaning – if people are simply now on auto pilot, sensing they are making anything but a difference, that is perhaps more of a danger than tariffs.
And if there aren’t already positive, engaging people stories circulating both within and without the organisation, making this case very clearly, then there very soon should be.
Again, employer branding and its messaging have a much more influential role to play than we might imagine.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 