Three years after the pandemic turned assumed certainty into known uncertainty, leaders still struggle with the reinvention of work.
How do you go about recruiting, motivating and retaining an increasingly fickle workforce? How do you make your workplace welcoming, inclusive and friendly to families in every type of living situation? People talk about employee loyalty all the time, but that is not a one-way street. How loyal are you to your employees? How do you balance leaders’ desire to have employees under control at the worksite with the increasing demands of workers who prefer remote or hybrid options? (I’m on record here and here and here with my thoughts on blindly ordering your charges back to the office.)
Many organizations have devised paths on how to develop a family-friendly workplace for the new era. All of the issues they tackle – medical care, family leave, childcare and childhood support, flexible scheduling, employee assistance programs – can really be divided into three buckets:
- Devising policies for family continuity and employee support.
- Insuring adequate health and medical benefits for your workforce.
- Providing optionality for your entire employee base – not just the laptop class.
For bucket No. 1, organizations ranging from UNICEF to regional nonprofits (there are Family Friendly Workplace organizations in Australia, New Mexico, Wisconsin – probably a boatload of others) have sample policies, advice, even certification programs. Your HR department can pick and choose what makes sense for your enterprise.
For bucket No. 2, turn to your HR department and medical insurance advisors.
For bucket No. 3, you’re going to have to develop a flexible workforce, particularly for activities that must happen at the worksite. While it’s fairly easy for many office workers to log in from way far away, people must be on site to receive, pick and ship orders; operate forklifts; maintain the automatic guided vehicles (AGVs); handle quality control; and supervise the whole bunch.
Job-sharing – cross-training multiple workers for multiple roles – can help. But at some point, you’re going to have too many employees who need to take care of a sick child, don’t want to miss their daughter’s soccer game or son’s jazz recital or must take care of bereavement issues. Or you just might need extra workers as peak holiday season 2023 approaches.
That’s where Task4Pros can help. Run by people who know how to recruit, train and retain warehouse employees, Task4Pros offers your enterprise scalability options via W2 employees, minimizing risks of co-employment and misclassification lawsuits. Unlike temp workers, these trained Pros can hit the warehouse running from day one instead of holding up operations while waiting to be trained.
For example, let’s say your warehouse operations need 100 full-time employees. Well, if you’re like most places, you’re lucky if you can keep 90. But pairing 90 full-time employees with 20 flex workers through Task4Pros could be just what your enterprise’s reinvention of work ordered.
Few employees go to work aiming to do poor jobs, and they don’t want to cause issues with their bosses or coworkers. But life happens, and sometimes you have to make difficult choices. Insightful Leaders do not want people to have to pick their jobs over their family. Offering optionality to your workforce means they won’t have to.
I would love to discuss how Task4Pros can help.
Jim Tompkins, Chairman of Tompkins Ventures, is an international authority on designing and implementing end-to-end supply chains. Over five decades, he has designed countless industrial facilities and supply chain solutions, enhancing the growth of numerous companies. He previously built Tompkins International from a backyard startup into an international consulting and implementation firm. Jim earned his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University.
