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Re: The future of work
Should employers mandate COVID-19 vaccinations?
Before companies return to work, they must develop a strategy involving rules related to vaccination.
... While many employees are accepting the vaccination, literally with open arms, others may opt-out due to fears about compromising their personal health or religious views.
...If employers choose not to mandate vaccinations, they can still encourage and incentivize employees to receive one.
Some companies are offering employees incentives to get vaccinated" that according to HRExecutive.com,
"One of the ways this will be executed is through financial incentivesCOVID-19 vaccination policy can include a section on this and other security precautions companies need to take before opening their doors to all employees.
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Re: The future of work
Toronto office, industrial vacancies tell two tales of the pandemic
The shift in the nature of work and consumer shopping habits brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic is on full display in the downtown Toronto commercial real estate space.
New reports by commercial real estate services firm JLL said the office vacancy rate in the downtown core rose to 8.4 per cent in the first quarter – up from 5.1 per cent in the prior quarter.
With vaccination rates rising both in Ontario and the rest of the country, businesses are looking to soon have workers return to the office.
While companies that need to utilize offices have had no trouble finding space for rent, the opposite can be said for industrial-based businesses, which have been key in feeding the surge in demand for goods as Canadians endured more than a year of working, and shopping, from home.
Industrial vacancy rates have remained below the two per cent mark for ten straight quarters.
With space at a premium, buildings that are currently under construction but can be ready for immediate occupancy are being snapped up at lightning speed.
As more consumers shop online, businesses are increasingly needing warehouse storage and fulfillment space for their products.
JLL believes industrial vacancy rates will remain at these low levels and could even worsen this year.
“This will keep upward pressure on rental rates and is expected to ignite significant speculative construction starts later this spring and summer,” the report said.Comment
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Re: The future of work
With the rapid re-opening of the US economy due to new guidance from the CDC, will employees return to the office workspace in large numbers?
A lot of employees made personal significant decisions about where and how they work and may not be willing to return to the five days per week commuter lifestyle.
Certainly a lot of business depend upon office towers filled with workers.
Will print page volumes increase with the return of office tower workers?Comment
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Re: The future of work
90% of millennials and Gen-Z do not want to return to full-time office work post-pandemic
A Citrix study found that corporations expect people born after 1981 to deliver an extra $1.9 trillion in profits.
A new report from Citrix Systems found that people born after 1981 -- called the "Born Digital" generation -- are no longer interested in working full time in offices and are vastly more tech-savvy than any generation before them.
The Born Digital Effect features insights gleaned from 1,000 business leaders and 2,000 knowledge workers in 10 countries, attempting to gain a better understanding of people born in an era inundated by technology. Respondents were based in France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Mexico, the US, the UAE, China, India, and Japan while focusing primarily on those working in the financial services, healthcare, technology, and manufacturing sectors.
Of the 2,000 surveyed, 750 were members of Gen-Z, meaning they were born after 1997, and 1,250 were Millennials, who were born after 1981.
The survey includes an economic model that shows corporations expect Millennials and Gen-Zers to "deliver an extra $1.9 trillion in corporate profits."
These two populations now make up the majority of the global workforce, but they are increasingly disconnected from corporate leaders, with different approaches to work-life balance, business, and more.
The survey found that 87% of respondents are focused primarily on career stability, security, and a healthy work-life balance. The responses were in stark contrast to business leaders, the majority of whom thought their younger employees were most interested in workplace technology and training opportunities.
According to the survey, 90% of respondents have no interest in returning to office work full time once the COVID-19 pandemic is over. More than half prefer a hybrid working model where they can work from home most or all of the time, while 18% want a hybrid model where they work from the office more.Comment
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Re: The future of work
The return to the office is pushing even more women out of work
The pandemic took a toll on the careers of many working mothers. A rush back to the office is shaping up to be just as damaging.
The lack of child care and in-person schooling that has pushed millions of women out of the workforce in the U.S. since March 2020 has only gotten worse. Though businesses including Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Netflix Inc. responded with backup day care and emergency leave, much of that was temporary and is coming to an end. The US$53 billion in federal rescue funds to keep day-care centers running and to reopen shuttered care was a stopgap.
Many businesses recognize the conundrum for working parents, which comes as they are struggling to find new workers and keep existing employees. Even as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. barreled ahead this week to get workers in the office, Citigroup Inc. is saying that most of its employees can have hybrid arrangements. Companies such as International Business Machines Corp. are talking about waiting until September for many to come back.
But even working at home requires someone to watch the kids and the return to office has meant a spike in demand, while the supply of slots at day-care centers, camps and other programs still remains well below pre-pandemic levels. For many families, the only immediate solution is to cobble together a part-time schedule, or in two-parent households for one of them—often the mom—to drop out of the workforce for now.
Kelly Brinkman of Prairie Ronde, Louisiana, is one who left her job—involuntarily. Brinkman worked for a home health and hospice agency, which decided in March to phase out remote work. She was given less than two weeks to return and couldn’t find care for her three kids, so she was fired. Though she’d like to find another job, child care would be more expensive than what she would make.
“For parents, it’s an uncertain world,” said Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute.
The ramifications are global. A paper this month from researchers at Northwestern University, the University of California San Diego and Mannheim University tracked the devastation of women’s careers during the pandemic in the U.S., Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the U.K. They found the same pattern of women dropping out to care for children as men continued to work. In the U.S., 1.8 million fewer women were employed in May 2021 compared to the previous peak in February 2020, the last measure before most U.S. offices were shuttered.
“The bounce-back for women, particularly mothers with child-care responsibilities, has been way slower than anyone has anticipated,” said Titan Alon, an assistant professor in the department of economics at UC San Diego and one of the authors of the paper.
One issue is finding enough people to staff day-care centers. Angela Garcia has three empty classrooms among her two Toy Box Early Learning and Childcare Centers in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She has a waiting list of 40 to 50 families that would fill those rooms if she could find staff to hire, she said. Making it worse, about 20 per cent of the more than 700 centers in New Mexico closed during the pandemic.
“I don’t work in an industry where I can say: Alexa, change the diaper,” said Garcia, who is also president of the New Mexico Child Care and Education Association.
Nationally, the estimate is that more than 30 per cent of child care centers and 25 per cent of in-home family day care closed during the pandemic, according to Child Care Aware of America, an organization that advocates for access to affordable child care. Staff turnover was high even before COVID, especially with such jobs paying only an average of US$11.65 an hour. A Care.com survey this month found that 72 per cent of parents are saying child care is more expensive and 46 per cent are saying it’s more difficult to find.
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Re: The future of work
Post-pandemic, the office will now have a whole new look
- Employers embrace shared workstation systems as post-pandemic office life takes shape.
- If you want to go to work, make a reservation online first.
Before Shira Berg, 30, heads to her workplace, she reserves a desk in advance.
The director at Autumn Communications helped her New York office implement a shared workstation system. With clients that include Amazon, Instacart and Goldbelly, the PR agency doubled in size during the pandemic. But adhering to Covid guidelines with just 27 desks for 45 employees required some coordination.
Plus, like so many other offices phasing in a return-to-work plan, not everyone has to come in all the time.
“There’s nothing that replaces that in-person collaboration and facetime but that might not need to happen every day,” Berg said.
Soon, more workers will be heading back to the office, but it may not be the same as when they left it.
Reserving a “hot desk” or “hoteling” is suddenly a popular approach.
It allows companies to save money with a smaller real estate footprint, while adapting to new, more flexible ways of working.
Post-pandemic, most employees still want to work from home, at least part of the time, rather than commute five days a week. Some even said that they would consider switching jobs if their company returned to fully on-site work.
To that point, 30% of employees would prefer to work remotely in some capacity and would look for another remote or hybrid job elsewhere if their current employer doesn’t give them the option, according to a survey of human resource professionals in June by the Society for Human Resource Management.
For the most part, employers are responding with plans for hybrid arrangements.
In a recent McKinsey survey, 9 out of 10 organizations said they will be combining remote and on-site working, although most also said they haven’t hammered out the details.
A separate survey by Mercer, which polled nearly 600 employers in May, found that of the companies with plans in place, 70% will adopt a hybrid model, which will be a combination of in-person and remote working.
As new work arrangements take shape, shared desks and workstations will be much more common, according to Ruhal Dooley, a human resources knowledge advisorat theSociety for Human Resource Management.
“As we move toward flexible work schedules and we move toward folks working different times and different days, the primary advantage is that workspaces don’t need to be as big to accommodate everyone,” Dooley said.
Monitoring who is sitting where and when also helps companies manage new cleaning and sanitation standards, and reduces congestion.
Flexible schedules are particularly well suited for younger workers, Dooley said, who “have not yet shown the same need for routine” and also working women who had to reduce their hours or take a leave from work in order to take on additional duties at home.
While it varies by industry, hoteling is already widespread at tech firms in locations such as San Francisco and Seattle, according to Amy Yin, founder of OfficeTogether, an office reservation and scheduling software company based in San Francisco and New York.
But others will follow suit, Yin said. “We’ve seen a huge wave of companies inquire about plans for the fall.” As restrictions loosened and vaccination rates increased, a lot more firms started figuring out their plans for September, she said.
“We are in a big experimentation phase.”
In an April 7 letter to shareholders, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said: “remote work will change how we manage our real estate.”
“We will quickly move to a more ‘open seating’ arrangement, in which digital tools will help manage seating arrangements, as well as needed amenities, such as conference room space,” he said. “As a result, for every 100 employees, we may need seats for only 60 on average.”
The downside is that workers forfeit the personal touches that may make them feel at ease, such as photos of their family or a preferred office chair.
“Having your own space is comforting,” Dooley said.Comment
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Re: The future of work
Thats womens problem. We already found out last week that men have zero sayso over womens body and issues.They should have just aborted the kids and its problem solved. Maybe if the kid has not been out of the womb very long its not too late to still abort it.Comment
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Re: The future of work
I have my own team where we have encountered a similar problem. Many employees are unwilling to go to work like they used to because they are happy with remote access to employment. But that's not right. Your job is to convince people to work and interact with each other. Slides With Friends — Interactive events, meetings, and presentations can help you do that. There they tell you how you can effectively conduct a team-building exercise and bring people back together. Creating real friendships between team members requires a degree of vulnerability that can be difficult to detect in everyday conversation and is especially difficult in video calls.Comment
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A tree is known by its fruit, a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost, he who sows courtesy, reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.
Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused.Comment
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