In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, the traditional employee-employer relationship is facing unprecedented challenges. It stands at a critical juncture, being pressure-tested by a myriad of external and internal factors. But why does this matter, and what does it mean for businesses striving for growth and success?
Perhaps the answer lies in the very essence of business itself—people. People are the lifeblood of any organization, driving innovation, productivity, and, ultimately, profitability. Any strain on the employee-employers can significantly impact these key business outcomes. How? Consider the evidence: According to Gallup, disengaged employees have 37% higher absenteeism, 18% lower productivity, and 15% lower profitability. Isn't that a compelling reason to pay attention to the health of your employee-employer relationships?
But let's not stop there. Technology increasingly plays a pivotal role in shaping these relationships in the future. With remote work becoming the norm and AI and automation transforming job roles, how are you leveraging technology to foster stronger bonds with your employees? Are your business strategies aligning with your talent strategies to ensure mutual growth and success? These are crucial questions that every forward-thinking leader should be asking as we prepare for the future of work.
While cutting interviews of expert contributors for The Lever with Drew Fortin - a show designed to challenge our thinking and highlight the transformative effects of AI, robotics, and web3 on the future of work and the good things it means for workers - we delved into this question.
We posed this que "The employee-employer relationship is broken. How do you respond to that statement, and what do you attribute to your beliefs?"
Greg Barnett, Ph.D., Chief People Scientist at EnergageI think we have what I would call a 'transparency revolution.' Employees know more about other jobs, they know more about wages, and they know more about other employees, so essentially, they are revolting and trying to find a better match. So I don't think that the relationship is broken. I would say that, actually, the relationship is being reset by employees having more power and by putting some of the rules in place. Many years ago, it was mostly the employers that would set the rules and have the power. |
Steve Callan, Vice President of Solutions Architecture at SilverTech, Inc.The employee-employer relationship has always been broken. It's always been a power struggle. The employer wants employees there for a certain block of time to do a certain thing and output a certain thing, and the employee is pushing back and saying, well, if I'm going to do that, then I need more money, or I need more resources, or I need more time. It's always constantly that back and forth. As technology has entered the world, it's empowered employees to see what's beyond their own walls, to create things that either are in their business that can help the business in a way that their job role didn't require or potentially allow them to enter something completely different with lower effort. |
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Shuo Chen, General Partner at IOVC and Faculty at UC Berkeley College of Engineering and Singularity UniversityIt is easier than ever before to be a company of one nowadays. So it's not like before where you really needed to hire your own team, you needed to buy your own hardware to form your own data centers and go through all these motions to just have a website up and running. We're not at those days anymore where anyone can drag and drop a couple of buttons. They can have their own website up and running, start their own paid marketing campaign, start getting paid clients, and have their own business, whether they're doing that full-time or part-time. Both are equally easy nowadays. So that has certainly been a key driver and shift in the employer-employee relationship. People are realizing, for the first time, that enabled and augmented by technology, you don't have to be an employee anymore. |
Lori Costew, Retired Chief of Diversity and Head of HR, Autonomous Vehicles Unit at Ford Motor CompanyIt depends on the organization. When people recognize that their skills and their competencies are their currency. I'm not going to stay in an organization that's not valuing my skills and competencies because I have that currency, I have that agency, and I can go elsewhere. And that's what we're seeing a lot more of and companies there. So much has been done around automation, and how do we make things easier? Just think back. How many times have you been frustrated because you really just need to get to a human to ask a question? And you get caught in this long phone chain of hit one, hit two at three, and then you get disconnected at the end. Or as an employee, you're now told, okay, you're all self-service now, but you can't find what you need, and you spend hours trying to solve your own question because there's no one there to ask it. It's taking that employee- and customer-centered approach into everything you're doing. Because the organizations that lose sight of the importance of retaining employees, especially the more complex your product is, the harder it is to have people churn every 1, 2, 3 years. |
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Avi Goldfarb, Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence at the Rotman School of Management, University of TorontoWhether it's broken or not is not my expertise, but there have been changes because of remote work. There have been changes because of changes in technology, and some have been going on for 40 years plus. But the old story of "get a job out of school and you stick with that company till you retire?" Now, that hasn't been around for 20 years anyway. And that changes the connection you have to your employer. And then, as we've moved to remote work over the last few years, you don't even have the same interpersonal connections with your fellow workers. Right? Well, that can make you more productive, and in some ways that's fine in terms of the firm's point of view, but it might make you less connected to your team and to the organization overall. |
Emily Harburg, Ph.D., Co-Founder & CEO at PairUpI think the employee relationship is just being re-envisioned right now. I think that we're in this moment where, I mean, initially, the great resignation was happening where companies were trying to figure out how to keep staff happy and engaged and working with organizations. And then there've been all the greats that have happened since then of great rehab, great reshuffling. I think it's hard to keep track of all the greats that have happened in the past year and a half. To me, the optimism is that there are new lines being drawn about how people can connect with their employers and how much, certainly, questions of how much should work do for you and in terms of the role that work plays in your life. But a lot of people are rethinking how they want to be at work and how we know how much time and energy it is in our lives and in our days. And so I think that there's some healthy resetting that's happening. But, also I think employers are starting to really think about "how do we think about the whole person at work." |
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Corey Hymel, Vice President of Product & Research at GigsterI don't know if 'broken' is the word, but the status quo has changed significantly... What happened was that with COVID and going remote, many ideas and understanding of what people saw as the traditional wave of working shifted very fast...There are a lot of different kinds of management practices and principles that come with running distributed teams that many companies were not prepared for and have caught them off guard. And what that does is fragment that employee-employer relationship. So that's where we see some of the biggest hiccups, and I think it will be interesting to see how businesses can adapt to solve those problems in the future. |
Deborah Kurtz, Vice President at HireMindsNo relationship is perfect. The task for us isn't to think about how to make the perfect relationship. The task for us is to create as many opportunities as possible for humans to find dignity and excitement in their work. Or to leave their work and try something else in the pursuit of a relationship where they can give what the employer is expecting and they can receive what they expect or want from an employer. |
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Jenny Larios Berlin, Entrepreneur in Residence at the Martin Trust and a Lecturer at MIT SloanI think it's fundamentally based on how we are as a [US] country, which is that we are capitalists. And so, if you are a capitalist, you're constantly thinking about the self-interest of something. And so that goes to the very core of our culture and how we think about things because we frame things around this capitalistic mindset, and as a result, everybody is looking for each other's personal gain and personal move. |
Vivek Mehta, CEO at Weeve.aiThis was the motivation for why we started Weev - that broken nature of the employee relationship. In my previous life, I was a technology consultant, and my job was to go from client to client, working on large-scope projects like the Affordable Care Act. And in that experience, I saw this growing disconnect between employees and leaders. And this disconnect was leading to burnout, project failure, and ultimately turnover. It was from a combination of changing technologies, faster paces of work, changes in culture and loyalty, and ultimately all of that added to this shift in leverage. And so it really begs the question, how do we build strong employee-leader relationships at scale? |
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Carol Meyers, General Partner at Glasswing VenturesI'm not sure it's broken. It's never been perfect. It seems that the balance of power is shifting, and we would love to see a clear level of equality. Right now, I think a lot of employees have power because the economy's been strong, and it's hard to hire people, but that shifts. And sometimes, when things aren't so great and there aren't a lot of jobs, then employees put up with a lot because they don't want to lose their job. They really feel like they need the income. So I'm not sure it's really broken so much as it could be better. Even if you look at surveys, people's level of engagement at companies, it ebbs and flows, but it's not like everyone is completely unhappy with their job or the arrangement or how it's working. I think there are some particular tensions right now, and it will be very interesting to see what happens. Work from home is one of them. Flexibility is another. So I think we'll see changes, but I don't think it's a hundred percent broken. |
Charlie Olson, Co-founder & CEO at PandoI may be instantly defensive as an employer, hoping that at Pando, our employee-employer relationship is not broken. I took a great teammate out for dinner last night who's been with Pando for five years now. Wow. We pride ourselves in long-term relationships with our teammates, and it's been fantastic to see them grow and ascend, not just personally in terms of skill development and career development, but also through life, going through some major chapters of getting married, having kids, etc. That's been the most rewarding and profound part of building Pando. I'm most proud of the team we've put in place, our culture, and the kind of roll-up-our-sleeves attitude that this team has brought to bringing something new to the world and doing it together. Our mantra is better together, and I believe that and mean when I say it. |
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Adam Ozimek, Ph.D., Chief Economist at Economic Innovation GroupWell, someone feeling that could be responding to a variety of different trends in the labor market. First, they could be responding to this tension created by remote work where employees want one thing, and the manager wants the other thing. And so they may be feeling the tension created by that return to the office. And that's something, like I said, in the long run, will be sorted out by competition. And they may face startups that are able to do it remotely, or it may turn up that the workers are wrong and this is an occupation, and it's going to end up being in person. So the long run is for workers to shift out of that occupation. So there's a variety of ways for that tension to be resolved. Other factors are that we have had a very tight labor market over the last two years, and so that's caused a high quit rate and a high rate of turnover. People are looking for better jobs because they've been able to find them, especially in the lowest-skilled part of the labor market, which is not where employers are used to having to deal with it being difficult to find workers. |
Meg Patel, Ed.D., Head of Professional Services at Lever Talent, Inc.I do see and believe that the employee-employer relationship is broken. The part that I have compassion in and around for the company side of things is just such a painful lack of awareness that if you have to wait for an engagement survey to tell you that you're terrible to your employees, it's way too late. And you've already impacted so many people and their lives and their families and all that. And so I do feel like until we can get to a place of having standardized performance metrics, it's hard for companies to fully realize where their shortcomings are and where their hidden caution areas are. Now with the imbalance of the relationship, I do think that employees also share in that obligation. If you believe in yourself and you believe that only one person is responsible for achieving your cultural career destiny, and that's you finding the leverage within yourself is where you have to start. |
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Joyce Sidopolous, Co-founder & Chief of Operations at MassRoboticsI think it really depends on the employer. You have to empower employees. You have to allow them to make decisions and let them stand behind what they're working on. And you have to show gratitude and praise them. But you also have to let them make decisions and you have to let them have some ownership. |
Bledi Taska, Ph.D., Chief Economist at LightcastFor sure, we're not in a situation where we were 50 years ago where there was this concept of lifetime job and commitment. So essentially once you are matched with an employer, you go, "that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life." Those days are past. And, I don't think there is this concept hugely of commitment, but I am also not as pessimistic as others. I actually think that overall, and also in the labor situation, there's more information now. We hear more things and employees are more informed. So I think we have what I would call a transparency revolution. Employees know more about other jobs, they know more about wages, they know more about how other employees, so they are kind of revolting and they're trying to find a better match. So I don't think that the relationship is broken. I would say that, actually, the relation is being reset. And, I think, in this case, is being reset by employees having more power and by putting some of the rules in place. |
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William Tincup, HR Tech Investor, Advisor, and Founder of RecruiterDaily.comWell, okay, so I'm going to say "duh," but not to offend. What I mean by that is, has it ever not been broken? Can we point to a time, or can we harken back to 2019, the glory days of when there was a wonderful employee-employer relationship? I don't believe there's ever been a wonderful bond between the two. I think we were pitted against one another, kind of like unions in a way...So I don't know if there's ever been this euphoric moment where they've all gotten along. I think COVID, remote work, flex work, and hybrid work has strained that relationship immensely. Because if we thought we had a good relationship, which was delusional, it definitely highlighted how wrong we were to believe that we had a good relationship. |
Liz Wilke, Ph.D., Principal Economist at GustoNo relationship is perfect. I think that the task for us isn't to think about how to make the perfect relationship. The task for us is to think about how to create as many opportunities as possible for humans to find dignity, and excitement in their work, or to leave their work and try something else in the pursuit of a relationship. Where they can give what the employer is expecting and they can receive what they expect, or want, from an employer. As long as we have to work and plenty of people want to work because they find meaning and purpose in it, then I think that the task isn't to define all employment relationships. It's to enable workers to know what they are looking for and to provide great ways to find it in the market, and for employers to understand what workers want and need and to give them ways to provide it. |
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Based on the brilliant insights from these experts we can be sure of one thing - the employee-employer relationship is under a lot of pressure right now. We can sort these opinions into three camps:
Regardless of what camp you fall into, one thing is certain: in this moment, employees are gaining leverage in the fight for better work lifestyles, and flexibility, and they're on the hunt for purpose and meaning. It's imperative that businesses listen and lean into this shift if they want to survive and remain a strong workplace in the future.