Over the last several weeks, and in my returning to blogging for the first time in a year, I’ve talked about how my last year having returned from the military has led me to a kind of leadership role within my family that I have relished, but at the same time, I’ve been watching the world shift how it’s treating employment, both from the management and employment sides of things.
For my money, the Pew Research Institute is the best organization of its kind for apolitical data in the working world. I found some of their data that came out earlier this year about the amount of people still telecommuting to work and why.
There were two statistics from Pew’s February 2022 report, “COVID-19 Pandemic Continues to Reshape Work in America” that struck me:
For most workers who are opting to return to the workplace, they feel that they are more productive at the workplace rather than at home.
Fewer than half of the workers surveyed were “very satisfied” with the steps that have been taken in their workplace to keep them safe from COVID-19.
I worked in the military during vaccine season, so I’m not going to politicize this at all. I think it’s important to see the two messages coming from employees here: 1) They want to be at work and 2) They don’t feel safe at work.
For the three years I was stationed in Japan, without my family, there was nothing more that I wanted than to be back home with them. It didn’t matter if we did two Zoom calls a day and I visited five weeks a year, by not being there full-time, I was not the most effective father and husband. I was not the best leader.
Despite the fact I wasn’t there, I made sure that they had everything they needed, be it something as minor as hand sanitizer, or something as major as a week’s worth of groceries at all times. People cannot live, they cannot work, they cannot exist… if they don’t feel safe.
I’m not going to restate the entire “keystone habit” case study of former Alcoa chief Paul O’Neill. He proved safety was more important than anything else and if you’re unfamiliar with this study, I hope that you will look it up. It explains better than I can how an emphasis on safety turned a $3 billion company into a $27 billion firm. Now that’s leadership.
There are some companies requiring workers return because that’s the way leadership wants things. The biggest example is Tesla and while you can debate if Elon Musk should have alerted his employees to return to work through Twitter, in his defense, he was close to buying that company at the time. His demand for his workforce to return was met with very extreme opposite reactions. I don’t know if there’s validity to arguments about Tesla workers telecommuting, but I do know that if you’re an employee, you either follow the leader or you find another leader.
Our world is a place of change like most of us have never seen in our lifetimes, whether it’s gas prices, anger about politics, loan forgiveness, or the many social changes happening. But there’s one thing that’s always going to be true that every leader needs to recognize. You need to lead by example, and you need make sure everyone feels safe, be they your employees or your family members. A leader leads, no matter where they are.