Good To Know: February 2022 🧑💻
A monthly round-up of things happening in hiring, D&I, and humanity.
Hey Everyone,
Welcome to Good to Know! If you are new here, I publish Good to Know on the last Tuesday of every month.
Unlike most posts, Good to Know is a round-up of things going on in hiring, D&I, and humanity with some of my comments. Its purpose is to showcase some of the great work that others are doing and learn from them.
Longer days ahead,
Ben
🤓This week we have🤓
✍️What I wrote this month✍️
Can we get a Best Places to Work ETF? 💰
The Economist Redeems Itself
🐤Solid Tweets🐤
Quick hits💥
✍️What I wrote this month✍️
☠️RIP Good Times (A Rant)☠️ - Workers aren’t coming back.
How do you create an inclusive culture? - A conversation with inclusion expert, Jenny Zhao.
The Great Reshuffle: A Survival Guide 📖 - What the winners of the “Great Resignation” are doing differently.
Can we get a Best Places to Work ETF? 💰
Glassdoor is a site that publishes user-submitted salaries, employee reviews, and general interview information for companies. It’s very popular for job seekers and, if you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably very familiar.
For the past decade-plus, Glassdoor has also published the Best Places to Work list based on employee reviews of their workplaces. I, and I’m sure many of you, take the Best Places to Work list with a grain of salt, but the companies on the list are good investments. They’ve outperformed the S&P 2x since 2009.
Sorry to interrupt but do you need to get better at hiring? Subscribe below!
The Economist Redeems Itself
In the past, I’ve been critical of The Economist for their superficial coverage of The Great Resignation.
Well, this month they’ve turned things around with several, much better, pieces addressing the issue. Their primary learning? Money isn’t everything.
They point out that many corporations are attempting to solve their resignation problem by throwing money at it. Which, given our current level of inflation, isn’t really helping things unless you’re in leisure and hospitality.
One of the other learnings also jumped out at me, mainly, that corporations should treat their workers more humanely (link is behind a paywall).
Some positions are objectively bad, with low pay, unpredictable scheduling and little opportunity for growth. Zeynep Ton of the mit Sloan School of Management contends that making low-wage jobs more appealing improves retention and productivity, which supports profits in the long term. As interesting as Walmart’s pay increases, she argues, are the retail behemoth’s management changes. Last year it said that two-thirds of the more than 565,000 hourly workers in its stores would work full time, up from about half in 2016. They would have predictable schedules week to week and more structured mentorship. Other companies may take note. Many of the complaints raised by labour organisers at Starbucks and Amazon have as much to do with safety and stress on the job as they do wages or benefits.
Finally, they note the “lowering” of job requirements. If you’re a regular reader, you know that I (and the majority of industrial-organizational psychology) view most of the traditional, corporate, job requirements, as useless. But it’s nice to see others coming around:
The share of job postings that list “no experience required” more than doubled from January 2020 to September 2021, reckons Burning Glass, an analytics firm. Easing rigid preconditions may be sensible, even without a labour shortage. A four-year degree, argues Joseph Fuller of Harvard Business School, is an unreliable guarantor of a worker’s worth.
🐤Solid Tweets🐤
Quick hits💥
Teachers are quitting to take better-paying jobs. Speaking from experience, they do make pretty great hires.
Your next interview might be with a robot and yep, the AI is (still) biased.
And Finally📈…
Would you mind sharing Lying to Ourselves with a friend or colleague if you find the posts valuable?
That’s it for me. We’ll be back next week. Thanks again for reading!