How to Win Corporate Culture Wars in a Pandemic Recovering Economy (Part 2 of 4)

In last week’s first installment, for discussion purposes around the tech industry (but likely transferable to others), I labeled our current new year and the previous two years in this way:

2020: The Year of Big Money – Young professionals are forever scarred by unprecedented gains.

2021: The Year of Chaotic Transitions – Top talent lured from their pre-pandemic employers by blue-skies promises.

2022: The Year of The Great Reset – Lower productivity, heavy performance management, and the possible rise of those who stayed put in 2021.

This series of articles follows a few conversations with an executive leader in the tech industry, Lee Sellers, the Director Americas Digital Sales – North Region US at Citrix. In the first installment, I painted a boots-on-the-ground picture of top (and often young) talent becoming emboldened by the 2020 boom year of tech profits and unprecedented pay increases, results which generally occur as an anomaly versus a way of life. In this installment, we’ll look at the effects of such pandemic-driven prosperity on the now deserving but perhaps duped and detached top producers.

2021: The Year of Chaotic Transitions

The once watched-over professionals who spent their days within the bricks and mortar, or at least within the management-oversight reach, of corporate organizations were forced by the pandemic to function virtually: fulfilling their roles, their quotas, and their team responsibilities from the comfort of their own home. By avoiding commutes to and from work and simply showing up at one’s computer to zoom out their daily productivity, they experienced a unique space in which personal life (e.g., kids down the hall in virtual school, walking the dog) could be equally embedded within their former work-centric days. Though greatly detached from the in-house culture of their organizations, they sensed a freedom and flexibility most modern corporate professionals had never known at this scale. However, being physically detached also made them much more available and susceptible to the lure of messengers of opportunity (recruiters).

Heyday for Headhunters

Having spent 15 years of my earlier career as an executive recruiter (and written a book about it), top talent has always been accessible, even within the confines of ears-wide-open office settings. Yet, the now even easier access to top talent made for a corporate scouting heyday in 2021. It was no trouble for a top producer to simply take a random call from a recruiter and hear of blue-skies-at-target earning opportunities. . .and jump ship based on those projections. With the surge in growth and profits of tech and other pandemic-blessed industrial sectors, both start-ups and veteran organizations spent 2021 buying talent to grow their businesses, and continue to do so.

However, according to Lee Sellers, this is having a huge double whammy effect: drastically reduced productivity alongside drastically increased wages. Companies are now paying much more for less product. Why? First, because the blue-skies lures have been expensive. Many folks jumped from their first job out of college to the next one with a 60% increase. Still young professionals, these folks had been somewhat coddled in their first job, trained for six to nine months and then slowly mentored out into the field. In their opportunistic transitions, however, they may be experiencing a stark wake-up call. At the productivity and income levels they signed up for, they are expected to deliver quickly, basically given some online training and tools and told to run.

However, running doesn’t happen that fast. These newbies to their companies are experiencing high-level stress and not hitting their pandemic-elevated quotas. The dual impact of new jobs while still working virtually and having all the general home challenges (kids, etc.), mental health is being challenged. Though winners in their former product or service, they’re lagging the expectations placed upon the cost of their heads. Some may even now be subjected to the oversite of performance management. Therefore, there’s a double whammy of higher salaries and lower productivity for some organizations, and perhaps the industry as a whole.

The title of this article series is “Corporate Culture Wars in a Pandemic Recovering Economy” and here’s where we look toward a future where Lee Sellers believes there will be a growing necessity for companies to elevate their culture to retain top talent. This isn’t the time for your grandpa’s old company’s ways of doing things. But before we paint a picture of the legs upon which organizations will compete with one another for talent going forward – at least as long as this candidate-driven market continues (which some expect through this year and into next) – let’s take a look at how Lee himself sought to mitigate the bleed of talent by instituting a cultural shift of energy into his own team. It’s not brain surgery, but simplistically powerful.

Foreseeing what the dramatic conversion from the office-bound work environment would cause, Lee changed the way he interacted with his now virtual team by incorporating, first and foremost, the mental health well-being of his folks. We all know that when top folks and senior executives become less effective, there are usually domestic stressors behind it. So, rather than have his conversations with team members be mainly metrics and KPIs focused, he met with each team member on a regular basis and simply talked. Just talked. He demonstrated to them that they were more important than just their numbers by making room for their life. He showed them that he could be trusted and inserted a very personal element into the former productivity-is-king management focus. Often, he would even mandate their taking time off and not even attempting to work while on vacation (as top producers tend to do) so that they could stay more wholistically healthy than they even might manage on their own.

The result of that? In early 2021, Lee took over a last-place team for the previous four quarters and transformed them into the top team for the first three quarters of 2021, with a fourth quarter that even topped Q4 of 2020. Out of three teams managing four territories nationally, his is top. And, while promotions have been rather slow in most of tech (remember, the lower productivity element?), Lee has been able to promote 10 of his team members to higher roles and hold onto his top talent even in an otherwise tough 2021.

Now (and in the next installment) comes 2022: The Year of The Great Reset.

Chief Empowerment Optimystic (CEO) Darrell W. Gurney is an executive, business and career advisor; speaker; workshop facilitator; author and licensed spiritual counselor. Founder of CareerGuy.com and TheBackForty.com, Gurney coaches individuals to achieve their highest self-expression and facilitates programs for professional, trade and community groups as well as MBA programs and university alumni organizations nationwide. He is known for his commitment to supporting individuals in creating and living their best life now. His newest book, The Back Forty: 7 Essential Embraces to Launch Life’s Radical Second Half is now available on Amazon and a series of free difference-maker interviews available here. The book is hailed by Midwest Book Review as “a perfectly timed tool for reevaluation brought on by ‘The Great Resignation’ occurring in today’s world economy.”