Things are going to get tough on the jobs front as the Covid crunch really hits. So how can we take a team approach to this?
In the last month we’ve heard about jobs going – or gone – in universities (700), Taranaki oil and methanol plants (160), Vodafone (200, but with 150 new jobs created), and Whakatāne mill (210).
Businesses are struggling. Queenstown had 2000 fewer jobs in the last quarter, and hospitality is struggling in Auckland despite the America’s Cup. There aren’t enough seasonal workers for horticultural growers in the Hawkes Bay. More than 16,000 Kiwi businesses shut up shop between September and November last year.
These numbers are insights to track economic data and quantify trends, right?
They’re news stories filling our apps and media feeds, right?
But with just one job gone, the ripple effect begins.
That job statistic could be the person on the bus next to you. The parent dropping your child’s friend off to play. Your neighbour’s grandparent or your best mate’s daughter.
It could be you.
The psychological and social impact of job loss is real. Pressure goes on mental, physical and financial health and on families. It’s a tough emotional and financial rollercoaster.
In the December quarter, at least 140,000 people were going through this – 29,000 more than the year before. It’s the equivalent of the total labour force of Dunedin, Nelson and Rotorua combined. Young people, Maori and Pacific workers and women are disproportionately hit.
Responding as a team of five million
What if we shifted from observing these figures, got off the sidelines and took a ‘Team of five million’ approach to doing something and alleviate the human impact as we do?
As businesses, going beyond and behind the numbers and looking for innovative ways of solving multiple problems.
We don’t need tourism workers. We need health workers to support our Covid response. We don’t need airline and border staff. We need tradies to build more houses. We need horticulture workers, engineers and crews to build new infrastructure and aged care workers.
Going beyond the numbers
Flexible work expert and student of wellbeing economics, Gillian Brookes, believes going beyond the numbers is crucial for long-term sustainable impact in the post-Covid world.
Brookes’ starting point is the housing crisis, as the number of homeless and those who want to buy a home and can’t, continues to escalate. A construction boom may well be an answer. Construction can’t boom without labour and there’s a skills shortage. So we keep peddling backward.
Brookes’ solution is smart and centres on getting more women into construction.
From her Wellington base, Brookes despairs that during lockdown in 2020, 90 percent of all job losses were among women - showing females disproportionately take the most vulnerable and precarious work in our economy. She advocates that with a shortfall of skilled workers in construction, this is an excellent pathway for women to move away from that type of work.
To get there, Brookes says the industry needs to be a place where women can belong and make their long-term careers. A big part of this is making work more flexible. Not only will this retain more women over the longer-term, it offers women stable, skilled careers and creates inclusive workplaces in an industry characterised by a lack of diversity.
How can we get more of this type of thinking happening, turned into action and creating the change we need?
Creating a team of businesses
A year ago, around 20 companies put their hands up to redeploy the hundreds of Air New Zealand staff who found themselves without work.
Places like My Food Bag, Summerset, Foodstuffs, Countdown, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, AMP and Ryman Healthcare took them on.
Scaling and expanding this sort of ‘Team Business’ approach should be easy.
First, by building a source of jobs from a force of businesses that actively provide opportunities for those losing their jobs in other businesses. Creating a sustainable system that deliberately connects businesses and people before jobs come to an end, making it easier to flow into new jobs, with less stress, anxiety and uncertainty that goes with jobs loss and the job hunt.
Second, for those who are recruiting, making a commitment to filling a proportion of the vacancies ONLY with people who are about to lose their jobs or who already have. What if your business signed up to filling seven out of every 10 new or vacant roles with people without work?
Third, change can be hard, even if you’re the most change-ready. NZ Post had its corporate heart in the right place when it shed thousands of staff several years back with its Future Zone wrap-around support for people whose jobs were going.
Change support was personalised with a menu that included budgeting, CV and interviewing skills, training opportunities in other like-minded businesses and mental wellbeing and self-confidence building. What’s the opportunity here for your business and how you go about laying people off?
First post-election Budget
The Government is mindful of this. Its positioning for this year’s Budget shares supplementary information from the Household Labour Force Survey showing some groups of New Zealanders reporting lower levels of wellbeing and life satisfaction.
The unemployed, those not in the labour force and sole parents are experiencing the lowest levels of overall life satisfaction, lower mental wellbeing and higher levels of loneliness.
Government has started to fund wellbeing support for some communities struck by the economic downturn.
We don’t need politicians telling us industries are getting their come-uppance for being too cocky pre-Covid, or dismissing wellbeing support with one-liners that ‘people need workers not workshops’.
What can you and I do?
If we are employed and can offer retraining advice, resilience support or skill development, then how about offering that to one person in your community who may be looking for work.
We can also work on our own resilience, in case we lose or change our jobs
Colmar Brunton research released last week tells us that Covid has changed us. We’re worried about the cost of living, and concerned for our security and our mental health.
We’re warned of more turbulence in the wake of new GDP figures. It’s going to feel like this for a while. We can chose to be bystanders or we can bring new meaning to the ‘Team of five million’.
Listen to Anna Hughes’ 'Books That Work' podcast available on Apple and Spotify or where you usually listen to your podcasts, or on booksthatwork.co.nz.
