As people specialists, we’re dealing every day with issues that are coming up for our clients. This enables us to have early insights into trends within the people sector, as they impact small to medium sized businesses.
Below is a quick summary of the trends we’ve seen in the last three months:
- Salary queries – a lot of employers looking for up to date market remuneration data, as they’re renegotiating with existing team members and want to make sure they’re competitive, when the current inflationary pinch + labour shortage is taken into consideration.
- As you would expect, with the current tight labour market, a lot of recruitment queries from both clients and candidates.
- In the last quarter, we’ve also seen an increase in the number of employment dispute and disciplinary matters we’re supporting employers with.
- Employee fatigue is showing up, with increasing numbers of team members reporting mental health and wellbeing issues on medical certificates, to cover periods of absence.
What does this all mean?
Whilst all of these are related to the macroeconomic and labour market conditions, there are obviously a mixture of pro-active and re-active responses from both employers and employees. Keeping close to your team members so that you can spot early signs of potential problems, is now more critical than ever.
Three highly effective ways to do this are:
- Create opportunities for as much ‘shoulder to shoulder’ time with your team members as you can. The better you know each other, the better you can work together to meet each other’s expectations.
- It you think something’s up, ask. So often the problems we see could have been avoided with an early, honest conversation when things started to feel different. Asking is the first step to understanding…the second is listening.
- Go into every conversation with an open mind; you don’t know what might be causing your team member to feel happy, sad, out of sorts; to be making more mistakes than usual or to be distracted. Really listen for what’s going on for them and work really hard to understand how the world looks through their eyes.