People don’t want to work anymore, right? Wrong!

Having problems recruiting and retaining employees? Change your thinking. There is not a shortage of good job candidates and people do want to work. Bill and Ralph discuss the benefits of shifting your perspective and being open to redesigning “work” to attract quality talent and keep them engaged.

Bill Berthel: Welcome to the Get Emergent podcast where we discuss contemporary topics of leadership teams and organizational effectiveness. I’m Bill Bertell and I’m

Ralph Simone: Ralph Simone.

Bill Berthel: Hey Ralph. So today we want to talk a little bit about, what we’re hearing from a lot of leaders. A lot of our clients, this difficulty in finding people that either want to work or there aren’t people out there.

Ralph Simone: Well, you know, it’s interesting when I had lot energy. Now let’s at least say. As a record number of people have quit their jobs. Many sectors of the economy are struggling to fill vacancies. That is true. Yes, but we feel that the reason they’re having trouble is because they’re not changing the way they’re looking to fill those positions and they are not changing the positions that they are filling.

Bill Berthel: So you’re suggesting that there is a way to find these people, that there are people out there that wanna work. We just need. Switch it up a little bit.

Ralph Simone: Absolutely. I mean, I think it’s, you know, when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change. Yeah. And I think the first we’ve gotta stop talking ourselves out of the fact, you know, that nobody wants to work.

They may wanna work differently and the way in which we find them and not just find them retain them will require us as leaders. To think and act differently. I think this is an opportunity to think again, because this projection becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and then we convince ourselves that we can’t get it done.

Bill Berthel: I love that. You know, it, it reminds me so, uh, past career, as an HR director, I had recruitment reporting to me. And you know, this was the time when newspaper ads and ads in the classifieds weren’t catching people’s attention anymore. They were all of a sudden this new thing called social media. Right? And we, and we wanted to resist going to that new space cause we didn’t know much about it.

And so we’d throw classified ads out in the paper and gosh, less and less people were answering those ads. We had to change it up. We had to do something different

Ralph Simone: and we have done that. Organizations over time have made the shift. This is just another time to make another shift. And, you know, we both kind of enjoyed, one of the recent Harvard business review articles, which talks about designing work that people love.

And it’s time to design and redesign the work that people love so that we can attract and retain people. I, I. I have two clients that are hardware space and logistic space. Okay. They have no trouble filling spots. Mm-hmm and it was interesting to me. I said, where do you get your, some of your best people, you know, waiters and bartenders.

And, and, and I say, so what do you do? They go, we, we go out to eat a lot. We go down, we go out to drink a fair amount. And when we are engaged by somebody who shows a lot of energy, And