As we all try and figure out the weird state of play, here’s a smattering of data points I’m reviewing.
New Census Bureau/Harvard University research says that By age 26, 80% of young adults live fewer than 100 miles from where they grew up. 90% live fewer than 500 miles away. Black and Hispanic people live closer to their hometowns than other groups, per the study. And “distances traveled rise rapidly at the top of the income distribution, increasing to an average of 325 miles for those born to families in the top 1%.”
Between June 29 and July 11, nearly 3.9 million people said they did not work because they were either sick with coronavirus symptoms or were caring for a sick loved one, according to recent Census Bureau data. In comparison, almost 1.8 million people around the same time last year said they missed work for those reasons. And it’s vacation too. Nearly 4.8 million people took time off during the week that the Census Bureau did its June household survey. During the same period in 2021, around 3.7 million were taking time off.
A survey of 1,000 UK workers by Slack found that almost nine in 10 respondents (86%) would prefer to work longer hours over fewer days by shortening the typical working week from five days to four. Slack found that 66% of respondents say they would look for a job immediately or within three months if their company did not offer hybrid or remote working.
Boston University surveyed another 1,000 people; more than half of the respondents experience recurring loneliness, and 15% of the sample population fell into the ‘at risk’ category. More lonely employees think about quitting more than the least lonely ones, and coworking and third spaces were found to address this.
And the cherry on this series – Insider looks at employees refusing to come back into the office. At companies requiring employees to come in five days a week, fewer than 49% of employees are actually doing so — meaning that more than half of their workforces are flat-out refusing to comply. And even at companies that require attendance for only part of the week, there’s still a sizable share of employees — as high as 19% — who aren’t coming in as much as they’re supposed to.
The most common repercussion employees reported in the work-from-home survey? Nothing at all. And only 12% of respondents say their employer has fired someone for refusing to come in.
Why do we care?
Surveys are undoubtedly backward indicators. How much will economic uncertainty matter? Time will tell… but for IT services companies, I suspect the answer is “not much.” While I’m a bit nervous, most of those analysts I’m tracking are less so, and as we know from yesterday, there’s a lot of optimism. So if that’s the case, keeping and retaining people isn’t going to get any easier.
I’m trying to take a broad, inclusive view of people as humans rather than cogs in the machines of work. Savvy employers will consider their entire life, not just their life at work, when considering how to manage them.
Oh, and my, I told you so — I predicted that companies couldn’t force people back in, and it’s playing out exactly that way. I don’t expect that to change much. What are they going to do, really?