In 2010, it’s time to put forward focus on the winners in workplace, beyond
I’m There for You, Baby
How to begin another year?
We have all read the year in reviews from a dozen publications, online, off line, inline and out of line. Enough looking back. I am thinking about the approaching year, and my overriding first concern is for the entrepreneurs and their families to not be casually dismissive of the really good stuff they already have. If you have a jewel, take time to polish it. It will not grow brighter sitting in a drawer, and jewels don’t grow on trees.
It is a well-known tendency to pay attention to the neediest companies in your portfolio or to the employees who are struggling, and to let the ones who are doing great just roll along. This puzzle can be difficult to solve. In your family life, the neediest among us always need a helping hand, a bit more focus, some more time to tie their shoes. But at the same time, the star soccer player in your family needs to be extra encouraged.
Balancing this behavior in your company is complex, and it can be perceived as unkind, unfair and unfeeling. But while focusing on the winners and letting the losers come to rest peacefully seems to be counterintuitive, it is unfortunately the correct model to maximize your successes. I am not completely comfortable myself with this approach. I leave it to each of us to find the right amount of time to spend tying that shoelace.
But now, to 2021 and beyond. Here are some jewels that you can look for, courtesy
the coronavirus risk fades, “the rebound won’t help the people that have been hurt the most.”
Looking back over 16 years of data, Escobari finds that workers in the occupations most heavily hit since the spring will have a difficult time reinventing themselves. Taxi drivers, dancers and front-desk clerks have poor track records moving to jobs as, say, registered nurses, pipe layers or instrumentation technicians.
“Many of today’s unemployed workers may find it harder than in the past to find new jobs and advance through the labor market,” Escobari wrote.
COVID is abruptly taking out a swath of jobs that were thought to be comparatively resilient, in services that require personal contact with customers. And the jolt has landed squarely on workers with little or no education beyond high school, toiling in the lowwage service economy.
“The damage to the economy and particularly to workers will probably be longer lasting than we think it is going to be,” said Peter Beard, senior vice president for regional workforce development at the Greater Houston Partnership, an economic development group.
What’s more, he said, COVID will intensify underlying dynamics that were already transforming the workplace. Automation, for one, will most likely accelerate as employers seek to protect their businesses from future pandemics.
The challenge is not insurmountable. Stephanie Brown, who spent 11 years in the Air Force, found her footing relatively quickly after losing her job as a cook at a hotel in Rochester, Mich., in March. She took advantage of a training program offered by Salesforce, the big software platform for businesses, and got a full-time job in October as a Salesforce administrator for the New York software company Pymetrics from her home in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Yet despite scattered success stories, moving millions of workers into new occupations remains an enormous challenge.
Jared Sooper is also looking for a change after losing his job in March managing a restaurant in the North Park neighborhood of San Diego. Fleeing San Diego’s rents, he and his f iancée packed their things in a UHaul trailer and relocated to a converted storage space under the deck of her parents’ house near Providence, R.I.
Once there, Sooper, 37, learned of an initiative financed by the state government to train workers displaced by the pandemic and connect them to job opportunities. In November, he finished a five-week program run by Local 51 of the union for the plumbing and pipe fitting trades to become a welder.
“2020 seems to be turning around,” Sooper said. “I’m feeling pretty confident. If they don’t take me for this one, there are others I can apply to.”
Still, he couldn’t immediately find a union job as a welder, so for the time being he took a job doing body work for a company that makes eco-friendly bus frames.
Derrius Gosha, 30, had been in Los Angeles for only a few months when the pandemic ended his job on the sales floor of Bath and Body Works in February. He is now back at home in Birmingham, Ala., living with his mother and grandmother. John Restrepo, 25, furloughed in March from his job as a server at Tony’s Town Square Restaurant in Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Fla., is sticking it out in an apartment with his two roommates. Barbara Xocoyotl, 57, furloughed in March from her cleaning job at the Omni hotel in New
Haven, Conn., had to give up her apartment and is living with a daughter in New York.
All are waiting for the economy to restore the jobs they have known.
“If there are no retail jobs, I could work at a warehouse, and I’m OK on a conveyor belt,” Gosha said. “The only thing I wouldn’t want to do is put on a hard hat and go dig a ditch.”
After weeks of hunting, he landed a seasonal position in the lawn and garden section at Lowe’s.
Often, the old jobs just don’t return at all. As he searches for an opening at CVS, or Walgreens, or another restaurant in town, Restrepo pins his hope on a deal that his UNITE HERE union local struck with Disney to offer the workers it let go a first crack at jobs once business returns, and retrain them for other Disney jobs if their old positions are terminated.
“Thinking optimistically, by the summer of 2022, the majority of us will be able to go back,” he said.
Xocoyotl has a doomsday plan in case the old jobs don’t return: to return to her hometown in central Mexico to be close to her mother.
“I’ve been looking for a job, but nobody calls me back, nobody tells me anything,” she said. At her age, she added, “people don’t even ask what one is good for anymore.”
Training has always been a challenge for policymakers, and the pandemic complicates matching new skills with jobs. Austin Urick, 31, went back to school after he lost his job last year selling equipment for the oil and gas industry. He enrolled at San Jacinto College near Houston to learn instrumentation and electrical systems. He expects to graduate this month, certified to calibrate and replace gauges and pumps used by oil and gas companies.
The industry, however, has suffered during the pandemic. While he has some good leads, his job hunt hasn’t yielded any offers.
“It is worrisome,” Urick said. “But my Plan B is not just oil and gas.”
The instrumentation degree can be taken in different directions.
“I can work in an elevator company or in a hospital, anywhere that has gauges,” he added. “I can go down the street to Budweiser.”
Harris County, where much of Houston sits, lost about 160,000 jobs in the year through September. Using emergency money approved by Congress in the CARES Act, it has enlisted community colleges and nonprofit groups to develop training programs to move 3,000 workers whose jobs were hit by the pandemic into more resilient occupations: plumbing or accounting, nursing or coding.
“Workforce development was a major priority when I came into the office,” said Adrian Garcia, a county commissioner whose district is among the poorest there. “Now, with the pandemic in our midst, it is critical.”
With the training program filling up, he is counting on the county to find money to expand it. And yet at scale, it will be a considerable challenge to assist workers in the transition to a new economy in which many jobs are gone for good and those available often require proficiency in sophisticated digital tools.
“We need a New Deal for skills,” said Amit Sevak, president of Revature, a company that hires workers, trains them to use digital tools and helps place them in jobs. “President Roosevelt deployed the massive number of workers unemployed in the Great Depression on projects that created many of the dams and roads and bridges we have. We need something like that.”