Latest news with #Employ
Fast Company
11 hours ago
- Business
- Fast Company
The hidden cost of RTO: Why forcing choice is detrimental to your business
Like most CEOs, I've been watching the return-to-office (RTO) trend closely. It's yet another wrinkle for the talent acquisition function, which is difficult to begin with. After all, the quest to hire and retain qualified talent is discussed at every board meeting, every leadership team offsite, and every yearly planning event. Entire books, magazines, podcasts, and conferences focus on this topic. Whether called a talent gap, the war for talent, or skills-based hiring, the essence remains the same: It's a struggle for every organization. So, why have I been struck by the most recent exodus back to offices? Because when you force choices, the results don't always land in your favor. Don't get me wrong—here at Employ, we have a great headquarters facility in Denver. Employees enjoy coming to work and collaborating in person. But there's a line between RTO as a productivity gain and it being the reason you lose qualified talent. According to 2025 research by Lightcast, remote job postings are down over 27%, hybrid postings are down 20%, and in-person postings are up over 17%. At the same time, companies that have publicly committed to a five-day in-office workweek are losing talent to employers supporting remote and hybrid working arrangements. It's a double-edged sword. The cost of an open role has direct financial implications on an organization, as well as less apparent indirect consequences. Estimates place the average cost of replacing an employee to be six to nine months of their salary. Other financial costs range from the expense of recruiting qualified candidates to onboarding and training. If temporary workers are needed to backfill open roles, the financial loss escalates. And the longer roles go unfilled, business objectives are derailed and productivity falters. Unfilled positions wreak havoc on the existing workforce. Critical projects might be delayed, and workforce planning questioned. Employee morale and engagement stand to decline, especially if employees are overworked. When the topic of it being time to hire qualified talent becomes water-cooler conversation, rest assured that unfilled roles are being noticed. YOUR CURRENT (AND FUTURE) EMPLOYEES EXPECT YOUR TRUST Clearly, some jobs cannot be done remotely. A job candidate applying as a labor and delivery nurse knows they will work onsite in a hospital setting. A hospitality worker seeking flexible hours at a quick-serve restaurant understands it's in person. The job location is well defined in the job description, and the candidate chooses to work on site. For other roles, workplace flexibility isn't an optional perk—it's brand equity. Forcing a one-size-fits-all policy not only damages internal trust but dilutes the company's external talent brand, which is particularly damaging in an already tight labor market. In the case of roles that do not require an in-office presence, pressuring a return to an office can have cataclysmic effects. When teams have operated remotely with success, especially when a robust employment brand has been built on a work-from-anywhere culture, confidence in leadership erodes when a change is decreed versus suggested. The move from remote or hybrid working arrangements to return to office is perceived punitively. Researchers at Gartner have observed that high-performing employees react to a return-to-office mandate as a trust issue, resulting in a 16% lower intent to stay. 'High-performing employees are more easily able to pursue opportunities at organizations that offer hybrid or fully remote policies,' said Caitlin Duffy, a director in the Gartner HR Practice. 'Losing high performers to attrition costs organizations in terms of productivity, difficulty in backfilling the role, and the overall loss of high-quality talent available to fill critical positions.' THE REALITY OF THE WORKPLACE Speaking of losing valuable talent, the return-to-office mandate can be a deal-breaker for those balancing childcare, eldercare, or other requirements with their career. In many cases, this falls on women in the workplace; however, it can affect any worker at some stage in their career journey. Upwork's research said that nearly two-thirds (63%) of C-suite leaders whose companies have mandated an office return of some sort say the policy has led a disproportionate number of women to quit. Gartner's research also showed women's intent to stay at 11% lower with strict RTO mandates. It's a fact that retaining an employee is less costly and disruptive than losing them. Having flexible working policies can help counterbalance care responsibilities and ensure that valuable skills remain in the workforce. QUALITY OF LIFE, QUALITY OF HIRE Apart from those roles where being in person is required, hard-and-fast rules about returning to the office make it harder to recruit. From a technology standpoint, talent leaders are continually seeking to source new candidates and drive efficiencies in their hiring systems, such as using AI-powered interview intelligence to speed up time to hire. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, labor force participation is off by two million people from the February 2020 levels, impacting industries in every state. And, if you compel people to choose between their family and their career, the former will win every time. To be an employer of choice, offer choice. If you can't offer remote and hybrid work arrangements, offer flexibility. It will be the difference between engaged employees and those planning to leave.
Hindustan Times
03-06-2025
- Business
- Hindustan Times
A short guide to salary negotiations
Talking about how much money you earn is uncomfortable for many people. But there are moments when it is an unavoidable topic of conversation. When you take a new job or learn how much your raise will be for the coming year, you have to talk about salaries. You also have to make a decision about whether to negotiate for more. Negotiating does seem to pay off, at least in monetary terms. In its 2025 survey of American jobseekers, Employ, a recruiting-software provider, found that 37% of candidates had asked for more money, and that 80% of them had got more than their initial offer. That is consistent with a paper published in 2011 by Michelle Marks of the University of Colorado and Crystal Harold of Temple University, which found that candidates who chose to bargain bumped up their starting salaries by an average of $5,000 ($7,160 in today's money). Negotiating, which is the subject of this week's episode of our Boss Class podcast, comes more naturally to some than others. A recent study by Jackson Lu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked at 19 consecutive years of MBA graduates from an American business school, and found that graduates of East Asian and South-East Asian ethnicity had markedly lower salaries than South Asians and whites. The propensity to negotiate among different groups explains the gap; East Asians and South-East Asians who did not try to negotiate were more likely to say they were concerned about damaging the relationship with an employer. Women are more likely than men to worry about the effect of negotiating—with some cause. As part of a paper on salary negotiations published in 2024, Francesco Capozza of the Berlin Social Science Centre conducted a survey of HR managers in America. The respondents thought that candidates who attempted to negotiate on pay were less likely to receive a job offer than those who did not, and that this penalty hit women disproportionately hard. If negotiating both raises salaries and risks a backlash, what is a bargainer to do? Leigh Thompson, who teaches at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, gives two pieces of advice to her MBA students as they look for work. One is not to start negotiating until you actually have a job offer (further evidence that MBAs may lack many things but confidence isn't one of them). The other is not to turn a negotiation into a bidding war, deliberately playing potential employers off against each other to extract higher offers. Don't be combative, she says. Don't threaten. Jim Sebenius, who teaches negotiating at Harvard Business School, advises scoping out the role as fully as possible and then finding the market rate for that sort of job. Information on pay is much easier to find than it was, owing to sites such as GlassDoor, and requirements in some places to publish salary ranges for advertised roles. If candidates can attach themselves to a reasonable principle—that they only want to be paid the going rate—and point to evidence to back up their argument, that is more likely to work than arbitrary numbers, begging or threats to go elsewhere. Even if more money isn't available, other things might be on the table: a promise to review pay after a certain period, named parking bays or whatever floats your boat. It can be annoying for bosses to hear requests for more money, when all they really want is unbridled enthusiasm. But some employers actively want people to be good at negotiating. Photoroom is a French AI startup that makes photo-editing software; it offers negotiating training to anyone at the firm who wants it. Its primary goal is to enable engineers to buy kit fast without getting lost in red tape; the training helps them to do so at a good price. Matt Rouif, its boss, says Photoroom also wants to know if it is paying below market rate; it buys in benchmark data on salaries and shares that data with employees so that conversations have a common starting-point. 'A lot of people think it's a fight. We're trying to find the best outcome that looks fair.' That's not a bad way for employees to frame a salary negotiation, either. Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines to 100 year archives.
