Back to office required in 2024 – will it backfire?  Eight in 10 companies plan to track office attendance in 2024, according to a survey of 800 business leaders conducted by Resume Builder in December. Nearly all respondents — 95% — said employees will see consequences if they don’t comply with the office attendance policy.   Most employers plan to track attendance using badge swipes. Others will track manually, or use Wi-Fi, occupancy sensors or under-desk sensors.  Most respondents said they planned to provide incentives to return to the office, mainly in the form of happy hours, catered meals, and upgraded office spaces. Fewer employers plan to offer bigger incentives, like raises and childcare benefits. Employers told Resume Builder they planned to enforce RTO because it has a positive impact on productivity (76%) and improves culture (63%). They also said it improves employee satisfaction, although workers and some HR pros have repeatedly stated just the opposite.  Employers will have to think this through though.  With heightened labor agitation, it may cause an unintended consequence – a union.  Source:  HR Dive 1/2/24

Do you compulsively look at your 401K or just ignore it?  Compulsively checking your 401(k) is seen by behavioral economists as the source of bad investment decisions. Right now, though, looking at your portfolio too seldom could equally lead to missed opportunities.  In its 2024 outlook, asset-management giant BlackRock presented an interesting thought experiment: If you had perfect foresight and could shift your U.S. stock investments once or twice a year toward the best-performing sector, how much would you gain? As it turns out, much more than before. Making yearly changes between 2020 and now would have yielded a compound annual return of 55%, almost four times more than buying and holding the S&P 500. From 2016 through 2019, the return would have been 30%, just twice that of the index. Research suggests that people are far less active when buying and selling funds than with individual stocks. This is probably even more the case when it comes to “dollar-cost averaging”—regularly investing a fixed share of their salary, as happens with 401(k)s. Rebalancing isn’t always about reaping extra returns. Without it, allocations across multiple funds change so much over time that savers lose track of risks.  So set a schedule to check the investments regularly but don’t panic.  Just rebalance.  Source: Wall Street Journal 1/2/23

Are your managers trained to deal with conflict?  Workplace conflicts have been in the news lately—the tumult at OpenAI is just one example. At businesses large and small, when employees operate in shared spaces, workplace conflict can easily crop up—and morph into significant challenges.  Most managers are not trained for conflict resolution, and effective conflict resolution is essential for maintaining a healthy work culture. For example, when people work on a project together, they may think they’ve communicated or fully understood something, but sometimes they haven’t. If a mistake is made, the temperature of the workplace can go up. People usually aren’t communicating at their best when conflict arises, which can lead to a spiral that manifests in a wide array of disputes—from yelling to quiet quitting to actual quitting. A second leading source of conflict is perceived inequities. Some are based on personal characteristics (behaviors or actions that may be the precursors to discrimination lawsuits), and others on workload, benefits, and perceived intangibles (does the [boss] play favorites?). Many of the issues that emerge from this category stem from a failure of leadership to communicate the reasons underlying differential treatment.  Therefore, training managers to deal with these issues is important or productivity could be severely impacted.  Source:  Forbes 12/21/23

Working mothers need more support from employers:  The share of prime-age women in the U.S. labor force reached an all-time high last year, but several factors threaten to erode those gains. First, about 70% of U.S. mothers work, and as we saw firsthand during the pandemic, their ability to hold a job is tied to their access to childcare. That’s a problem because last September, the pandemic-era relief funds propping up the already failing childcare industry ended. An estimated 70,000 childcare centers are expected to close in the coming years, causing 3.2 million childcare spots to disappear. The ripple effects will be felt across the economy as working parents are pushed out of work.   According to care.com, an estimated two-thirds of American families currently pay at least 20% of their income for childcare, and costs are continuing to rise. Absent of government intervention, some companies are stepping in. Currently, 13% of employers offer some kind of childcare benefit, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of course, that doesn’t make much difference if there aren’t enough daycares left in business. According to McKinsey’s 2023 Women in the Workplace report, nearly 40% of mothers with young children say that if they lose their flexible schedules, they’ll have to quit their jobs. Source:  Bloomberg 1/4/23

Did you know:

• According to the Department of Education, nearly 40% of student loan borrowers with their first deadline in October did not make payments by mid-November. Today's average monthly loan payment of $210 to $314 equates to a 4-5% pay cut for the typical worker, meaning many borrowers simply cannot afford to meet payments.
• When it comes to employment, Americans in all sorts of occupations—from auto workers to Hollywood actors, from startup founders to restaurant servers—are feeling unsteady thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), reverberations of the pandemic, job design, and other factors, psychologists say. “The number one thing people are craving right now is stability—especially in their workplaces,” said Ella F. Washington, PhD, an organizational psychologist and professor of practice at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
• Various Michigan unemployment rates according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting:
  • Ann Arbor 2.6%
  • Detroit Metro 3.9%
  • Grand Rapids 2.6%
  • Jackson 3.2%
  • Lansing 3.0%
  • Muskegon 3.7%
  • Saginaw 4.1%