It's been a year since I weighed in on management theory post-pandemic, and I think the pendulum is starting to swing back. The unemployment rate is still low, and entry-level jobs are still available, but managers are starting to figure out the balance.
One of the things that many employees learned during the pandemic was that it was acceptable to set boundaries for themselves. It became normal for people to refuse to work their schedule, take off during busy times of year, and refuse to do simple job requirements - they knew that their managers would have difficulty replacing them and that they had the upper hand in the employee-employer relationship. But one of the main causes of strife between workers and management is a lack of honesty at the onset of the relationship.
When I was in management, one of the more frustrating issues was new employees changing their availability. We would advertise for a position and would usually be pretty clear about what the schedule would be. We would hire someone based upon their availability and willingness to work that schedule only to find out that their actual availability was quite different. Once we advertised for a weekend clerk in the meat department. Since we usually gave workers one weekend day off the pool of potential staff was reduced on weekends when we were busiest - we thought if we could find someone who was only available on Saturdays and Sundays that would help our staffing problems. We found someone who assured us that he wanted to work Saturdays and Sundays, but after about a month he was complaining that he never got weekends off! Applicants who changed their availability shortly after being hired was quite common. I assume that the strategy was to get their foot in the door and then try to change up their schedule after being trained and we had invested time in them. The flip side of this is employers who expect their staff to put up with ever-changing schedules, wildly varying hours and the expectation to drop everything when the boss needed them. When I lived in Kearney and worked at a Burger King, I might be scheduled for 35 hours one week and 12 the next. When I worked for UPS over the holidays I was scolded for asking to be unavailable for one day to go for a job interview (it was a temporary position). I had given several days notice. What was galling was that I never knew from day to day whether I would be called in to work; I usually wouldn't hear until around 10:00AM if I was going to work that day. Employers should be honest about the requirements of the job and potential employees should be honest about what they're willing to do.
One thing that many people don't understand is that a business exists not to provide jobs, but to sell products or services and make a profit doing it. Since labor costs typically are the single greatest expense, business owners will do what it takes to minimize, or even eliminate, the number of employees that they need to keep the doors open. Many of us complain about, for a variety of reasons, the proliferation of self checkouts, but this is but the latest example in a long trend of automation. Think about bar codes and scanners on check stands. When I was in my late teens I worked in a hardware store. We used a pricing gun to hand price every single item in the store. Cashiers would hand enter the price of every single item that they sold. Now we take the existence of bar codes and scanners for granted. Automation in manufacturing is something that has been progressing for decades, something that unions fight against...at least where there are unions. We may not like it, but that's the reality of it. But despite the creeping influence of automation, most businesses still require human beings in some capacity.
Most businesses have busy times. They may be certain times of day, days of the week or seasons of the year. When I worked in retail grocery we had a pretty good idea when our busy times would be and tried to plan accordingly. One of my tasks was to project what our sales would be in each department every week, sometimes down to the day or hour during holiday weeks. If both the employer who is hiring staff and the job seeker are both honest they will each reveal what is necessary for a hire to take place. A grocery store that is going to be "all-hands-on-deck" during Christmas of Independence Day weeks should be upfront about there being no time off during that period; a job hunter who is unwilling to forgo family time during the holidays should make that plain and probably seek employment elsewhere. Taking a job knowing the restrictions, yet intending to flout them in the future is dishonest, just as withholding key requirements or information about scheduling just to get someone on the payroll is also deceitful.
One of the worst things that a manager can do is hire someone just to get a warm body on board, or retain a nonperforming employee to avoid be shorthanded. And I'll include in "nonperforming" an employee who refuses to do what the job requires of them. There has always been the tendency among rookie managers to do this, but the low unemployment rate and the willingness of people to quit at a moment's notice has made the practice more prevalent. Nothing good can come of situations like this, and there are multiple negative consequences: (1) Work doesn't get done even though someone is still getting paid to do it (2) Built up resentment from the "good" employees. I can go on all day about how departments became more productive, working short-staffed after a lazy employee quit or was fired. Productivity will be negatively affected when other employees or the manager has to pick up the slack or constantly correct errors.
In addition to resentment and extra work, an unpopular opinion is that it is not the manager's job to "do the work". A manager's job is not to "do things", but to "get things done". Of course this doesn't mean that a manager should ideally be sitting in the back room, feet up, sipping coffee all day. Depending on the business a manger might also be responsible for ordering stock, doing payroll or even stocking shelves, but it's a misunderstanding of the manager's role to believe that the main responsibility of a manager is "getting his hands dirty" and working side-by-side with the crew. Through training, coaching, setting expectations and above all, leadership, a professional manager leverages the skills of her staff to get the job done. A newly-minted manager might find himself spending 25-30 hours doing what he should be paying other people to do while still spending 40+ hours doing "manager stuff". Picking up after employees whose idea of personal boundaries is to refuse to do what they were hired to do, or constantly correcting errors by underperformers, simply because they're afraid of being shorthanded is a vicious circle that will never end.
