Issue.16

Welcome back to Collective Bookmarks. This week’s newsletter is a 7 minute read or about the time it takes to find your phone when you’re trying to leave your house.

We’re back from the U.S. Memorial Day weekend with an extra few hours of rest and family time in our systems. The newsletter does in fact rest, but we may have also read some reports in our downtime. This week we’re excited to be featuring actionable insights, one awesome human, and the incredible team at Hoop.

In This Week’s Issue:

• Three Things You Should Know
  • The Emergence of Domestic Off-Shoring
  • Employee Return and Attrition Spikes
  • Are You Designing For All Your Employees?
• A Person You Should Know: Jen Paxton
• A Product We’re Into: Hoop

Events We’re Attending: Purposeful Intent LA Edition
Books We’re Reading: The Good Enough Job by Simone Stolzhoff

As always, if you have feedback or questions please reach out below.

---

Three Things You Should Know

From The World of Work and Place

1.The Emergence of Domestic Off-Shoring

In a recent report ADP outlined a phenomenon they dubbed “Domestic Off-Shoring.” Domestic Off-Shoring is defined by the shift of lower paying or non-decision making roles being moved to more affordable regions, and “value-intensive” work of decision makers / executives remaining in command and control cities. They outline that the implications of this phenomenon are far reaching, but one major result is these command and control cities are increasingly becoming home to one specific sub-group of the population. They also outline the increasing disconnect this is causing between the two segments represented, executives / decision makers and employees.

What We Think: We should expect to see more insights like this come to the forefront as the unexpected consequences of the distribution of work are revealed. An entire year of blog posts could be written about the issues of affordability of housing. However, we think it’s vital to point out that without the ability to live near a network of folks who can provide you with opportunities to network, grow, learn, and move up – upward mobility is stunted. It was a struggle to live in some major cities 20 years ago as an entry level employee, and that barrier is getting worse. We would also note that any increased distribution of teams requires better communication, coordination and decision making models. The entire report is linked below as always, but the region by region data should be assessed by teams as well.

2. Employee Return & Attrition Spikes

In a recent global survey of employees and employers Unispace looked at how companies are using their workplaces and what they might be able to do to make them truly meet the needs of teams in a new era of workplace. In this report they highlight the fact that 74% of employers surveyed noted that they are struggling to keep their employees happy and engaged. This trend was also reflected in Oyster’s recent state of disillusionment report we covered in Issue.7. Unispace’s report presents the idea that the commuting / extra time taken is a critical factor for why employees are unhappy. Interestingly they also point out that “Almost half (42%) of firms who mandated returns have experienced higher than normal employee attrition, while 29% are struggling to recruit.”

What We Think: When reading any report it’s important to remember that global context often don’t represent local nuances. That said, employee dissatisfaction and disengagement being tied to return to office mandates in multiple studies should be a clear signal that teams should think carefully about how they bring people back together. The majority of companies are now adopting hybrid plans, but how those plans are implemented matters.  Creating practices & spaces that serve your new ways of working and are designed with purpose are a good place to start.

3. Are You Designing For All of Your Employees?

In a recent report BCG highlighted the rather large discrepancy between the percentage of employees that companies report as having a disability and the percentage of employees who reported having a disability when directly surveyed. Companies reported between 4-7% of employees as having a disability, but when employees were surveyed 25% reported having some level of disability. As noted in the report this discrepancy would mean that employers are missing out on the opportunity to fully enable all of their employees. The report cites 3 key ways that; employee centric policies & programs, mentorship, and reasonable accommodations. Each of these areas is worth diving into in the full report.

What We Think: As BCG highlight in the report, it is common for disabilities to be covered up by employees in order to not create any potential for discrimination or perception of inability to do one’s job. Interestingly, 70-80% of disabilities are invisible and so they can be easy to go unnoticed. We agree that creating employee centric programs is a great way to enable all employees and we appreciated that their research showed as much. An often missed factor of inclusive design is that by making improvements for those with differing needs, we often create better outcomes for all.

---