pinpoint one human resources CEO and director Lucia Mabasa. Picture: Supplied
By Lucia Mabasa
October is a difficult time of the year. The tenth month of the year is close enough to the festive season to start thinking about annual bonuses, Christmas parties and holidays – and yet it’s probably one of the most difficult times for business leaders.
The C-suite is still chasing this year’s targets – and thinking about how they will handle the first quarter of next year. Some of them will be starting to sweat about meeting the staff’s expectations, especially if their companies haven’t shot the lights out this year.
It’s tough at the bottom, but it’s even tougher at the top. COVID didn’t help either – not the shutdown but the focus on employee wellness that often skews the narrative in a post pandemic world. There was a very welcome empowerment of staff and an entrenching of the need to balance individual needs against corporate demands, but in the process one of the most basic employee rights – the right to earn a monthly salary – became seriously compromised.
Charity begins at home and the apex consideration must be the health of the company you work for. You can work for the most progressive organization in the world with generous leave conditions, opportunities for study and even to be able to work from home but it’s all moot if you can’t be guaranteed your salary every month.
It’s a concept that has somehow become lost in the evolution of human capital management where the burden has been placed on business leaders to focus on staff wellness sometimes at the cost of performance.
We all want to work for companies that have our best interests at heart and who put a priority on making sure our needs are met – even CEOs want to work for firms like that! But the bills must be paid – and sometimes that means cancelling leave – or postponing it – and waiving the right to work from home so that the company literally can have every hand on deck.
Before COVID, corporate culture was such that even reading what I have just written would have made me the subject of derision, but far too many CEOs – and especially line managers – know the truth of what I am saying. Too many companies have still to bounce back from the ravages of lockdown and the unprecedented disruption of the pandemic, yet management has to deal with the expectations of employees who have become increasingly entitled but are blind to the consequences of their demands.
Managers are feeling emasculated and impotent and are either becoming tyrannical in their responses to what would otherwise be reasonable requests or give in and push the problem further up the management chain by becoming even more demanding themselves.
Neither option is sustainable. We can’t return to the early days of the industrial revolution when there were no days off at all any more than we can rush headlong into a brave new world of employee benefits with no thought to the cost or the consequence.
The answer as always is a happy medium, navigating the often-disparate demands of the employer and the employee but it is easier said than done. Communication is vital. An honest open-door policy and a system of regular feedback with staff ensure that any gap between expectation and reality is quickly and easily bridged. Being honest and open doesn’t mean being unkind, it does mean letting staff know what the trading situation is like – and what has to happen to allow the re-institution – or termination – of remote work or no meetings Wednesdays or even team building on the last Friday of every month.
Critically, it also lets people know what has to be done to ensure that the 13th cheque many of them are already mentally spending right now is paid in December so that holidays can be enjoyed, school uniforms bought and all those other pressures can be managed.
One of those key interventions is probably putting the shoulder to the wheel now in preparation for the final push for the year, making sure that targets aren’t just made but slightly over-achieved and that every delivery deadline is treated as important and met in the spirit that it was originally set.
At the same time, CEOs and business leaders have to look after themselves too. If you are asking everyone else to work hard, don’t be the person who says, “do as I say not as I do” and book yourself some time off, show up and lead from the front; the first one into the office in the morning and the last one to leave at night. When you do, you can enjoy Christmas like everyone else because there will be plenty to celebrate – instead of having to wonder who to retrench come Easter next year.
Businesses are not welfare systems – neither for those at the top nor those at the bottom. They can’t be, but when they work properly, they benefit everyone in the ecosystem. None of us should ever forget that, whether we are sitting in the boardroom or getting into our overalls in the change room.
* Lucia Mabasa is Chief Executive Officer of pinpoint one human resources, a proudly South African black women owned executive search firm. pinpoint one human resources provides executive search solutions in the demand for C suite, specialist and critical skills across industries and functional disciplines, in South Africa and across Africa. Visit www.pinpointone.co.za to find out more or read her previous columns on leadership; avoiding the pitfalls of the boardroom and becoming the best C-suite executive you can be.