Hi, I’m Bernadette. 

Today, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about “The Great Resignation” and if it’s happening in Phoenix within the local Accounting and Finance market. It’s interesting because although Phoenix is one of the top five U.S. cities across the country, we are still sometimes a little bit backwards.

Even if you look at the city of Scottsdale, their tagline is “The West’s Most Western Town”. If you talk to people who are trying to move here or who have moved here, you’ll see that sometimes we are a little bit backward in our thinking.

So, what does “being backward” mean? 

Prior to the pandemic, we didn’t work remotely. We went into the office every day with rare exceptions. I mean, some companies were a little bit more flexible. But realistically, employees in the Phoenix marketplace drove into the office every day.  

When the pandemic hit, companies had to be a little bit more…had to be a lot more open and flexible.  We had to learn how to work remotely.  If we were all paper, we had to figure out how to automate things and make things electronic. 

Some companies were better at this than other companies. There was a lot of hiring managers that still just didn’t trust their employees to work from home. It was successful and unsuccessful to varying degrees. Employees had different experiences.  Companies had different experiences. 

According to a recent study from LinkedIn, 74% of employees figured out during that time that maybe they wanted something else from work. 2 million more people retired during the pandemic than they thought were going to retire.

You also had a lot of people leave their jobs to create hobby businesses and do something different. So having the ability to work from home during the pandemic allowed employees to think about the future of their work.

So, how does this new thinking affect the local job market?

 It’s interesting because it’s no longer a local job market. In the past, you only had companies that were located in Phoenix advertise for employees in Phoenix. When the pandemic hit, last year, we had California companies starting to hire into our local Phoenix market. California companies would hire remote employees that lived in Arizona. As of this year, every company across the United States is hiring Phoenix employees as remote workers for their companies.

The job market is a lot more competitive than it normally is. If you look at the jobs posted out on LinkedIn, the jobs that the candidates respond to are the jobs that are posted as 100% remote.

What do you do if you’re not 100% remote? First off, I always say, why aren’t you? Why aren’t you hybrid? Why aren’t you remote? Is it because the president wants everybody to be back in the office? Or is there a legitimate business reason as to why employees have to come back into the office?

If you’re retail or manufacturing and you just want to maintain fairness between all employees, tell people that. If you’re growing and you need collaboration on moving the company forward, tell the employees that.  Have an open and honest conversation about why you are back in the office and get their input.

Have them give ideas and suggestions. How would they do it differently to allow them to work hybrid or remote? There may not be another option, but at least you’ve had that conversation with them and have gotten their input and ideas. 

If you can’t work hybrid or you can’t work remote, you need to make sure that your employees are engaged. This means having conversations with them. According to a recent Gallup Poll, 74% of employees are actively disengaged in their current job.

When is the last time you’ve reached out to your team and had one on one conversations? Have you asked them directly, “Are you looking for another job”? “Are you satisfied with your job”? 

Sometimes employees are surprisingly honest, and if they say everything is fine, make them tell you something. Make them give you one thing that’s a negative thing about their current job. Or if they could change one thing, what would that be? 

Employee engagement is key right now because you do want to make sure that you keep the employees that you have happy and satisfied so they’re not open to calls from recruiters when they do happen. This will make sure that you don’t have to be looking for employees in this job market right now. 

Hope that helps. Thank you for watching our videos. Stay tuned.