If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to move up the ladder at your current company, you may be planning how to grab that promotion. While the traits that companies value most haven’t changed dramatically, the challenge is that it …
Show up like a kid peeking over the fence. Better to live on your toes than stumble back on your heels. Successful leaders are prepared for action. They show up READY. Three ways… Continue reading →
Show up like a kid peeking over the fence. Better to live on your toes than stumble back on your heels. Successful leaders are prepared for action. They show up READY. Three ways… Continue reading →
When my editor at Fast Company asked me if I had made 2021 resolutions and kept them, it caused me to do some reflection. As I looked back over the last eleven months and a bit, I felt enormously satisfied with the ways I invested my time, including sw…
As many of us continue to work from home, it’s natural to form new habits and mindsets to navigate a new way of working. While some of these behaviors may feel helpful in the moment, they may not serve you well as we consider life post-pandemic.
“Research has found that about 40% of everyday life is shaped by habits,” says Gretchen Rubin, author of The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too) and creator of the Happier app, which helps users track and stick to habits by tapping into personalized motivation techniques. “If you have habits that work for you, you’re much more likely to be happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative. And if you have habits that don’t work for you, it’s much harder. Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life. They shape our whole existence, and they matter tremendously.”
As we look to what awaits in 2022, consider if you’re holding onto these three habits.
Spending Mental Energy on Things You Can’t Control
With the roll out of the vaccine, a light at the end of the tunnel seemed to get closer. Then came the delta variant and now omicron. One habit that you may need to break is recognizing that you can’t control what’s going to happen with the pandemic, says Ethan Kross, author of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It.
“There are lots of things that we can do to be safer and to live productive, satisfying lives, even in the current climate, but there are some things that are just out of our control,” he says. “The moment we recognize that, we can minimize the chatter surrounding the pandemic and move forward.”
Kross defines chatter as our negative inner voice that can keep us feeling stuck and helpless. “Chatter is the dark manifestation of our inner voice, and it’s a huge problem,” he says. “It makes it hard for us to do our jobs and gets in the way of our relationships and our health. Uncertainty and lack of control fuel the experience of chatter. Anxiety and depression rates spiked over 30% during the pandemic. Clearly, these are chatter fueled times.”
Fortunately, there are use a few techniques you can use to control the chatter, such as temporal distancing or mental time travel.
“Instead of focusing on this very moment, think of how you will feel sometime down the road?” asks Kross. “For example, my kids are getting their second dose of vaccine. In two weeks, I’m going to feel much better about the current circumstances than I do right now because they’ll be fully protected. You can imagine traveling in time even further into the future. How will you feel two years from now when more people are vaccinated and when we have more therapeutics?”
Looking backward can also help, adds Kross. “Think about the last major pandemic,” he suggests. “Things were much worse back then. There was no Zoom, no takeout, no mRNA vaccines. You could go further back in time to the time of the bubonic plague that decimated society for much longer periods of time. Broadening your perspective can be helpful.”
Measuring Success by Old Standards
Another mindset you may have adopted during the pandemic is buying into limiting beliefs that may be holding you back, says Kindra Hall, author of Choose Your Story, Change Your Life: Silence Your Inner Critic and Rewrite Your Life from the Inside Out.
“It’s those statements like, ‘Oh, I just can’t do this, or ‘What’s the point?’” she says. “It’s stories that are reeling around in the background that keep us from taking action.”
Limiting beliefs may be due to past measures of success. “I was struggling with my own idea of success, and I was telling myself, ‘I can’t achieve it. I can’t succeed,’” says Hall. “When I started catching that belief running subtly in the background, I analyzed it and realized that in 2019, I measured my success in airline miles, hotel night stays, and time zone fatigue. Suddenly that was gone, and my inner voice was saying that I can’t be successful because it’s done the math and I wasn’t flying all over the place.”
Instead, Hall suggests redefining what success looks. For her, a better measure became doing virtual keynotes from her bedroom and then going out and building Legos with her kids. “I had to work to change that programming and replace the negative stories with ones that were relevant going forward,” she says.
Not Planning for the Next Normal
Just when you got used to remote working, many employers are calling back teams to office or hybrid arrangements. This can be a big disruptor to the habits you’ve adopted, good or bad.
“So many habits were disrupted during the pandemic, but what’s interesting is that some people have introduced positive habits, such as eating more healthfully because they’re cooking more or doing morning meditations because they’re not commuting,” says Rubin.
Some habits may be worse, such as watching more television or no longer going to the gym. Rubin suggests being honest with yourself by asking, “How do I hold on to the things that are working better for me? How might those things be challenged? And how do I get back to the habits that I’ve maybe lost or got disrupted?”
“Consider what your next normal will be by reflecting over the past year and mindfully choosing what stays and what goes as you move forward,” she says.
Habits often form before you realize it, as a reaction to our surroundings. Rubin says it’s important to step back, give yourself a little space and time, and think about what you want your life to look like. “Ask yourself, ‘What’s working and what’s not working?’” she says. “Then determine how you will build toward this next normal by mindfully shaping new habits.”
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In 2021, employers had to respond to major workforce demands for remote work, flexible schedules, higher pay, and respect for health and safety. Now, more than 60% of the U.S. population is vaccinated, kids are back in school, and as the environment shifts, so will workplace expectations.
Differentiation will be the challenge for employers who need to hire in 2022. “Talent has options now,” says John Graham, VP of employer branding at Shaker Recruitment Marketing. “It definitely created a more acute awareness of what they’re willing to accept and what they’re not, whether it be relocation, whether it be salary, whether it be culture.”
1. Streamline the hiring process
Competition for available talent will remain tight in the new year. “For recruiters, it’s going to be more stressful in the sense that anyone they’re talking to is probably talking to any number of … other recruiters or employers,” says career coach Cynthia Pong.
Warner Music Group’s director of talent acquisition, Eric Di Monte, says the “post and pray” method of listing job descriptions is now less common, and recruiters are more proactive in their searches. They have to be.
The goal should be speed, says Raj Mukherjee, SVP and general manager of SMB at Indeed. “Employers should consider how they can streamline their hiring processes so they can get candidates through faster. With a mismatch in hiring urgency between employers and job seekers, it’s crucial that employers have seamless hiring experiences.”
But don’t sacrifice experience. “The better the experience during interviews as it relates to the candidate’s need for a great company and team culture,” Di Monte says, “the better the likelihood of attracting future employees.”
2. Increase compensation, including benefits
There’s been plenty of discussion of raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour—that’s the new starting pay at Target, Starbucks, and Walgreens, for instance—but that works out to only $31,000 annually, if you never take so much as a bathroom break. That’s a living wage almost nowhere. Not surprisingly, even with pay hikes, the retail and service industries are struggling to fill open roles.
Graham believes the goal should not be a living wage, but a thriving wage, plus benefits. If the grass is greener, off they’ll go, he says. “It’s all about ‘how much can I get immediately? What are you going to cover? What additional incentives or benefits am I going to receive?’” Di Monte believes focusing on the “total package”—both salary and benefits—will keep his company competitive in the labor market.
Amy Glasmeier, who teaches economic geography at MIT, where she also created the Living Wage Calculator, says as long as workers can access public resources that cover their expenses, they’ll wait out the wage standoff. “It only makes sense for a person to sit out of the labor market if they have access to food stamps, can access subsidized health care, and may qualify for housing subsidies and heating subsidies.” Employers that offset employees’ fixed costs, like child care, transportation, paid time off, and medical care, will have the advantage.
3. Build a culture that delivers
If compensation falls short, Graham says, employers may still have a fighting chance if they can prove a healthy work culture. He predicts candidates will consider paycheck against company reputation. For those who can look beyond numbers, “team and company culture can be a major factor,” says Di Monte.
Culture will be especially important in hybrid workplaces. Some employers operate with an out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude toward remote staff. Knowledge workers working remotely will ask: “How do I know that truly you are embracing the world of remote and you’re going to allow me the flexibility?” says Madhu Chamarty, CEO at workforce planning company BeyondHQ. “Are you going to recognize my productivity and not subject me to undue physical and emotional and mental stress as a result of embracing this new way of work?”
4. No wishy-washy positions on working arrangements
Relatedly, employees want to know where they will work. Eighty-nine percent of workers expect to be able to work from home at least some of the time after the pandemic is over, so a work-from-home policy “to be reevaluated in June” won’t cut it. You’re either in the office or you’re out—or you’re hybrid—but expectations should be clear. Hybrid, Chamarty says, will give employers wiggle room as new COVID-19 variants threaten in-person gatherings.
5. Reconsider employee expectations
Flexibility now comprises more than when and where employees work, it also includes performance expectations. “In the last couple of years, even decades, we’ve been on a train hurtling out of control,” Pong says. “Expectations around productivity and output without there being commensurate understanding that we’re human beings. We had already been working to an unhealthy extent prior to [the pandemic], so we need to recalibrate what our expectations are for work output and productivity.”
6. Show your DEI work
Candidates want to see that real results followed magnanimous pledges to end workplace injustice. It’s time for companies to show their work through the eyes of marginalized talent: Has their experience in your workplace improved?
Better to be frank about your status than to sell an idealistic image. “Historically, companies were very conservative about showcasing anything but themselves in a shining manner,” Graham says. “You can’t hide. The internet exists. There are no more secrets. Are you willing to be accountable publicly and honestly about where you are, where you want to be, and what you’re doing to get there?“
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