Companies Are Doing More to Keep Workers From Walking

than workers willing to fill them. Potential hires are domainding better pay and better treatment, and some employers are starting to listen. My colleagues Nicole Bullock and Matthew Boyle in New York are keeping a close eye on all of this. For Workshift, that's a whole area of news coverage here at Bloomberg. That's all about the future of work. They're here with me now to tell us about the ways the relationship between employers and employees is changing. Nicole, I Matt.

You write all about ruptures and changes in the workplace, and we are seeing a lot of them now. One of the biggest is how many employers in this market are having to change the way they do things to attract and keep people. Matt, what does that look like in the workplace. Well, yeah, Wes, it's really playing out in sort of a multitude of ways. But one thing that's that's clear, as you said, is that the number of available jobs for every unemployed worker, I think it's

at around one point seven now. It had been as high as two. I mean, that is amazing. And at a time when we have all these changes to workplace norms and the whole idea of you know, who we're working for, where we work, why we work, is being upended, changed and redefined. Companies are really scrambling to find highly

skilled people. So what they're gonna have to do is it's just to get a bit more creative, you know, Rather than just say here's the job, here's the salary, it's now a conversation around can this job be remote? How often can it be remote? What sort of benefits are you going to give me? And is this the job where I can find some purpose? We keep hearing

this word purpose. There is a strong sense that I've seen that people also want to work for organization that does have some sort of deeper purpose that aligns with

their values. I think what we've seen is a combination of these supply demand dynamics that you talk about coming right after a time that basically had a lot of people around the world, not just in the US, really kind of pushing the pause button on their daily grind, which caused them to really reassess, against the backdrop of a global pandemic, what they wanted out of their lives

in general, but also out of their work lives. Yes, people were resigning, but it wasn't like you know what you may have read that they were resigning to go live on the beach or just sit in a hammock all day. They were resigning for something better and whether that was better pay uh, an organization that valued them more or what. This reassessment is something that's still obviously

still ongoing. People still have tons of choices. It's been maybe curtailed a bit in certain sectors, especially tech, where you're seeing layoffs. We now have confirmation risk from Amazon memo from the CEO to staff that they will be cutting more than eighteen thousand jobs, as mentioned, much more than previously expected going into the end of the year. The parent of Snapchat plans to lay off about and

it's nearly employees. Facebook's parent Meta reportedly getting ready to lay off what could be thousands of workers, one of the biggest layoffs yet that we've seen. But again, you know, compared to pre pandemic levels, layoffs are still below historical levels. We have to remember that because we all get so excited when Amazon and Salesforce layoff thousands of people. And I'm not saying those aren't big moves, but historically, since

you know, people still have options. When you see a tech worker post on LinkedIn, I just lost my job at Meta or Salesforce, and within minutes you've got half a dozen recruiters saying, you know, we've got something for you. So it's really a sort of very active time right now in the job market. So one of the interesting aspects is the e cent to which this has persisted. We're coming into what will be the fourth year of the COVID reality and we're still talking about return to office,

working from home, flexible work. And a year ago, when Matt and I first came together to write about workplace topics in the Future of work, the discussion was, oh, this will be over by the end of two and it's not at all. In fact, you know, every day we're writing about what any company from Apple to Harley

Davidson to any other brand name. You know, what they're doing on a case by case basis to address the push pull of what their workers want, what their culture has been historically, and what bosses on the ground and workers on the ground need to do to conduct their daily life and be productive at the office or you know whatever their workplaces. So let's talk about some specific examples. You cover all kinds of companies and you look at the ways that they're doing it, and there's a lot

of different ways. What are some companies that are really leaning forward to attract new workers and keep the ones they have happy. I mean Airbnb is a good example. They got a lot of attention early in the pandemic for their remote work policy. Basically, I think it was one where not only did they say, you know, you can work from anywhere, they also a liminated paytiers based on whether you work remotely. That's a little known issue,

but a huge one. Let's say you're working in San Francisco and you wanted to or needed to live in in Boise, Idaho. Historically, a company like Airbnb or Meta Facebook would say, Okay, that's fine, you're gonna take a pay cut because you're living in a less expensive region were compared to San Francisco. That's caused a lot of companies to lose workers, especially as cities like Boise and others have become much more popular places to live during

the pandemic because of the rise of remote work. So what Airbnb did is just say, Okay, we're eliminating these pay tiers based on location stuff and allow you to work up to ninety days a year from any region where Airbnb operates in. Of course, it helps that Airbnb has millions of places you can live and work under their rubric, and their employees probably get a little bit of a discount there, But they want to work with

cities to learn more remote workers to those places. So what's happening there, I think is one pretty fascinating example. Another example that we've written about is Harley Davidson, and this is an interesting one because their CEO has said that he realized himself during the pandemic that flexible work was beneficial to his life and and so he thinks that this is from a work life balance standpoint, great

for his employees. But he was also very forthcoming about the fact that they're creating an e bike and they need to attract the best and the brightest from places like Tesla. So he's also using this policy as a way to try to attract people who have this expertise but are working at other places that may not be so into offering that kind of flexibility. And you know, Tesla is one of the main examples where Elon must basically said you're coming in the office or you're fired.

So what happens to people who are working in say New York City or San Francisco and they see that people have moved to a lower cost city and they're still making the same pay. Are they getting a pay raiser they just started penalized for not moving out. Yeah, so I must say, yeah, you're not going to get additional pay if you stay in an expensive city like San Francisco or New York. You're not going to get

combat at pay or something like that. But it is again causing a real reassessment for people to think, Okay, you know, if I'm working at a company that is going to dock me if I move to a less expensive region of the world. To think of any how many New Yorkers moved up to the cat skills and are still up there. You know, it really makes you think about is this the place where I want to be.

If my company is going to you know, reduce my pay for living in a less expensive part of the country, maybe I do need to be working somewhere else, you know that won't do this. And Airbnb is a good example, but there's many others over the past twelve eight months that have eliminated those location based tiers as we call them, just seeing that they're sort of a relic of the past really and all of these interesting aspects around flexible work or the ability to work in a flexible environment

or not. It's interesting that these have emerged as bargaining chips for both employees and employers, so both in terms as we've talked about, as retention tools, but also as ways to thin the ranks without actually announcing layoffs. So you know, you can say everybody needs to be back here,

or thank you for your service. You know, as the economy is entering on certain times and has been on certain times, this is also a way that companies can do the opposite, right, they can maybe trimmed down a bit without having to say we're laying off x number of people. But the risk there is the people you lose when you do that is probably your best people, the people you do not want to lose it all, who have the ability to just go down the street. Yeah. Interesting,

you know a good example of that. Potentially. We don't know all the details in this, but at Twitter, Ellen said, you know, no more flexible work, and then had to kind of walk back a little bit because you know, perhaps too many people took him up on it. It's closing its offices until Monday, the company facing, as we now know, a mass exodus. This after, of course, you know, must give employees and ultimatum to commit so a hardcore

environment or leave. Workers seemed to be taking the latter option, and do seem to be leaving. Yeah. Not only did you have to hire people back that he fired who you realize either needed. It was also like, oh wait a minute, may be flexible work, could you know be a thing here? You know, which this is hilarious when someone like that comes to this conclusion that we all

came too long ago, Nicole. Another thing that you hear more and more about is this idea of moving to a four day work week, which is something that employers were just dismissed out of hand not too long ago, and now it seems to be getting some traction. Yes, that's that's true. This idea of doing a four day work week, whether it's an actual four day Monday through Thursday, have Friday off, or as sort of a catch all for more flexibility, this is really taking hold. There's been

several pilots all over the world. Really, the one probably that got the most attention was one in the UK. And the range of companies that are doing these is everything from a local fish and chip shop to uh not in the UK, but Unilever is one of the big names you know in terms of a large corporation doing these, and and the early findings at least have been that it does not affect productivity, so productivity does

not go down. And that's really the metric that perhaps has has had this stick a bit more is the concern is am I going to get the same amount of work out of fewer hours. The other aspect of this is that you work four days or thirty six hours however you want to do that, but you keep the same pay, right, that's the lynchpin here. So the productivity really needs to stay there. What really struck me the call with the four day work week pilot was

the amount of planning that doing this requires. You don't just flip a switch on Monday and say, okay, guys, now we're doing a four day workweek. Isn't this great? I think one of the firms in the UK pilot actually said something like, you know, planning for the four day work we resulted in like six day work weeks for us for a few months to figure out how to get this right. Because there are many ways you

can do this. It's not just on Monday Thursday. It could be based on hours, it could be based on rolls. There are always going to be maybe certain roles where you know this is just not going to suit. So

every company is different. Whether you're Unilever, which did the results there, they did it in New Zealand and they're actually extending it to Australia now, or you're just a fish and chip shop in the UK that was also doing this but trying to figure out, okay, how do we do afford day work week but account for the fact that you know, at certain times of the week there's a huge demand for fish and chips of course,

so we want to have workers there. We don't want everybody to be on their you know, day off on that. So every business is certainly different here. But I think the key really is the amount of planning that this takes is substantial, and so not just going into this thinking, Okay, this will be wonderful, we'll just flip a switch, Matt. One of the aspects of the planning was starting by

having people look at what tasks they can eliminate. For example, you know, is there something that you're doing that that you really don't need to be doing. And I think that's part of the appeal here because if any of us look at our schedules, I mean I can think of probably three things that I do because they're just part of the process that I've been doing for quite

a long time that really is not adding that much value. Yeah, like meetings, for example, I mean, even if you don't choose to do a four day work week, even if you just reduce the number of recurring meetings, let's say, or you know, useless meetings, that's probably a good thing as well and a benefit to all. Now, Colin, Matt,

please stay with me. We'll continue our conversation after the break, Matt Before the break, you mentioned how a lot of people think that cutting back on meetings would make our work lives better. At the beginning of the year, at least one well known company actually announced they were killing most meetings. Do you think that's a worker meetings just gonna keep creeping back? Well, yeah, I mean that's the thing with I mean, Shopify is sort of become a

poster child for this. They announced a new policy at the beginning of this year where they were going to get rid of every recurring meeting with more than two people and limit big meetings to just one six hour window on Thursday, So if you wanted to have an all hands engineering meeting, you can only do it in that window. And they also, which was also intriguing to me, it were encouraging people or telling managers to encourage the

rank and file to decline meetings. From what I've found in the research I've looked at a meetings is that that is often the biggest problem. We just accept every meeting we're invited to because we don't want to annoy the meeting planner, or we think we'll miss something. You know, in in the meeting that said at the meeting and then I'm out of the loop anyway, So Shopify has done this. But to your point of you know, are

they going to creep back? I think they might. I got a lot of comments after wrote the story that said, look, Shopify and other companies that are doing this so called calendar purge. You know, they're just going after the symptom, not the disease. So I think it'd be really interesting to check back with Shopify in August or September and

be like, hey, guys, how's it going. So, Matt, how much do you think meetings moving to Zoom during the pandemic have accelerated This again another reassessment of the work process because you have, for example, this happens to us all the time, you have a meeting and half the group is in the office, but everybody's on Zoom, maybe even Matt and I sitting next to each other, or you know, people are on on Zoom theoretically in the meeting,

but really just kind of multitasking half paying attention. Yeah, it has been a huge problem. That was one of the main issues early on when companies started getting people

back to the office. The early RT o movement, let's call it, where people were coming back and spending more than half of their day on zoom calls with people who were still virtual or remote and you even had interns then, you know, coming in for their summer internship, all bright eyed and bushytailed, and then looking around and saying, wait, where's my manager? Exactly? Oh he's he's working remotely from you know, Thailand. Oh great, So why am I here? And how am I going to get mentored? Um? So

you're right. This has led to part of the big reassessment here, particularly around the value of offices and making sure that you have an intention purpose for coming to the office Nicole. Things like the four day work week and getting rid of meetings, they both point to something workers say they want. They want better control of their time.

They want their bosses crashing into their time at home after hours, with all kinds of demands that make them feel like they're expected to be tethered to their jobs day and night. So time is one reason why nobody wants to commute anymore. We've had some interesting research that we've written about showing that people have used the time they've saved from commuting to sleep. So apparently we're all

sleep deprived. I mean, there's also some really interesting research from Microsoft that, you know, they make Teams, which is the collaboration software that a lot of us use, and what they found when they looked at the data of the peaks of usage of Teams software, they found what they call this third wave of productivity after ten pm, and a lot of it was from parents who had to you know, deal with you know, household chores and kids and dinner in let's say that three pm to

six pm time frame, and then only when ten pm rolled around did they actually have time for themselves. And we're spending it going back on teams and answering emails and sending you know, blasting stuff out getting work done. Essentially, really don't think that's a particularly good thing. But now that we have access to all this data from you know, who's using what particular workplace productivity platform, it's really showing

us some interesting things. A lot of what you're describing here gets at another imbalanced workers complain about, which is that they feel like they're expected to be completely loyal to the company and go above and beyond for sometimes no extra pay, but that the company doesn't have to be as loyal to them. You know, they get hassled that they need a sick day or they can be fired at a moment's notice, even though they're supposed to

give two weeks if they quit. And more employees are starting to wonder why they're working so hard to make the executives and shareholders of the company even richer while their own pay can't keep up with inflation. So this is I think a big factor behind what has been probably one of the biggest buzzwords of the last you know, six six months or so, which is this whole idea

around quiet quitting. Now the problem has morphed into its own American version what some people call quiet quitting, where employees show up but make sure that they do just what they are required and no more. Contrary to what the name actually says, it's not really quitting. You're just doing the basics of your job and that's it and nothing more. And it's been an incredibly controversial topic that has made its way all the way to Davos and

had a whole panel dedicated to it. I think it also speaks to people really wanting more work life balance, which has been as well a big topic of the kind of pandemic era is people realizing that they just wanted something elseide of life than working it all away and you know, ending up in old age, and you know what, what was the point of that, really, especially when the boundaries between work and life, of course broke

down completely when when we all went remote. So many workplace norms have broken down, including the distinction between you know, our work time and our home time. I always loved my commute historically before COVID it was about an hour, which for New Yorkers typical, but that was my time to sort of get rid of the work, my work, you know self, and put on my home self and become a dad and a husband or you know, work exactly says leave it there now. We're never leaving our

job at work. We're never leaving it anywhere. Unfortunately. Um So, I think to your point West, this has caused this increase in frustration of if I'm always always working, if it's really seven and my employer can get to me when whenever they want. Yet, of course, if I have a problem, you know, good luck finding help there. It's related to mental health or stress, so you know, I might just sort of quietly give up a little bit and just get my paycheck and do that. You know.

Some of the initial response to to this quiet quitting phenomenon was that, oh, it's just slacking off. You know, this is not nothing new. Slackers have been around forever, and the pushback has been, no, it's actually not that. This is about preserving some of these boundaries. And also we even interviewed some people who were keeping kind of a day job that had a steady, attractive salary in order to get their own business going. So it wasn't that they were finishing up at five pm and watching

Netflix for binge, watching whatever their favorite show is. They were actually quiet quitting in order to create the job that they wanted. Another thing that people who work in retail, work in the service industries restaurant, bars, hotels complain about is that they're expected to be on call every day, even on their days off, and if a manager calls them or text them now and says I need you to come in, they're expected to come in on a

moment's notice. Our companies starting to address the scheduling problem where people feel like even when they're off, they're not really off. Well, we'll know. The way they address it was by implementing these automated labor scheduling software bots basically that optimized you know exactly when demand is high, if it's a Walmart store or a bar restaurant, and they,

you know, they match the staffing to fit. But the problem for workers, of course, is they often don't know, you know, until the day or or a week or so, what their schedule is actually going to be, because you know, the software is optimizing, but it's certainly minimizing the experience of the employee who is then told, as you say, you know, well we need you in on Tuesday, suddenly well I can't, you know, I need to take my

kid to the doctor. Well too bad. The workers don't have a heck of a lot of leverage to say no. Meanwhile, though, of course, we have this shortage, so you would hope that employers are being perhaps a bit more lenient. But these labor optimizing schedules, I mean, they're just so you know, useful, and they are so ubiquitous that I don't see employees going against the conclusions there to to suit the needs of an individual employee. It's just they're so embedded. I

think which is a problem. We'll be right back. In other countries where there's more of a tradition of worker protections, there have been a lot of movements to kind of change the law to enshrine more worker protections. Can you talk a bit about what's man It's happening around the world really, particularly in Europe, where lawmakers have urged the European Commission to propose new rules that would let employees switch off from work related tasks and electronic communication email

outside of office hours. They call it the right to disconnect, and it's happening in places like the Netherlands, in Ireland. You're also seeing laws in certain countries where they are trying to codify the right to remote work, so basically saying every citizen has the right to ask for remote work.

In the United Kingdom, workers there can now or at least there's been proposed legislation that workers could ask to work remotely on the first day of their job, rather than having to wait weeks or months as is normally the case. So we are seeing a lot of momentum and movement outside the US, at least related to this right to disconnect. Even Portugal had a law as well saying your manager can call you after business hours. But again it gets complicated though, because defined you know, what's

after business hours these days. And let's say a Portuguese worker wants to you know, take a yoga class during the day and work later on. Is it okay for the manager to contact them later on when they're you know, back into sort of a more productive mode. But by and large, West, I mean, there is a huge amount of momentum swelling to codify this, to sort of write rules for how do you request remote work? How long does your company have to respond, what can they how

can you know if they refuse on what grounds? I mean obviously, if you're a construction worker, you need to be on the construction site. But I think you know, the rules are really being rewritten left, right and center outside the US right now. Do you think that US companies, getting the pressure on them to attract new workers are

looking at some of these examples and maybe make some changes. Well, I mean, we still don't have you know, paid leave on a federal level in the U S. What does that say where basically the only industrialized nation that that that still doesn't has. I think you're going to see movement west in state by state. The Federal Trade Commission recently came out and said they want to ban noncompete clauses entirely um which is a moving that we've only

seen thus far on the state level. And those are clauses, of course, that prevent a worker from taking another job in the same industry or opening a business in the same industry that would compete with their previous employer. They're very stifling to innovation, they're stifling to wages and just career opportunities. You know, there are also regulations and things pending in state houses around you know, things like anti

bullying for example, just healthy workplace laws. But on a federal level, especially with this current divided Congress, I don't hold out a lot of hope that we're going to see, you know, something that we've seen in like Ireland or the Netherlands and sort of coming full circle on this discussion right now in the US, it seems very contingent upon the supply and demand dynamics of a particular industry, of a particular company, and of the workers themselves. Really

in the US, I agree with Matt. I don't think on a federal level we'll see much beyond what the FTC is trying to do anytime soon, and it's really just playing out company by company, industry by industry, and

worker by worker. If you're in a highly sought after field and you have tremendous expertise and what you're doing, and you're very highly rated at your company by your bosses, then I think you have tons of leverage right now to potentially take advantage of a broader environment where people are talking about flexible work and work life balance, demanding better pay. And we're seeing this, you know, even in some places that are unexpected areas like retail, hospitality and

the restaurant industry. It's an industry that really has is at the heart of worker shortage. So I can't tell you how many times I walk by a store retail store in Manhattan or a restaurant in my neighborhood in Brooklyn and see help wanted sign. Nicole Bullock, Matthew Boyle, thanks so much for talking with me today. Thank you, thanks a lot. You can read more Workshift Courage from Nicole Bullock and Matthew Boyle at Bloomberg dot Com. Thanks for listening to us here at the Big Take. It's

a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Virgolina, Our senior producer is Katherine Fink. Our producer is Frederica Roman Yellow and our associate producer is Zena Siddiki. Raphael m Seely is our sound engineer and our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm west Caasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take.