“Good morning, you are fired.” It was with this text message that a domestic worker was fired in 2016. We can now count the innumerous cases of employees dismissed due to their social media life, especially on Tik Tok – we are in new era of the employee and employer hijacking effect!
Social media and the destabilizing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic brought challenges to many enterprises and their workers that imposed a wide range of steps to adapt to this new fluid environment.
Revolution is on the way and the work environment has now permanently changed. “We now work in a “mine field” that only the most steadfast and adaptable will survive”, says James Blackwell, CEO of Ronald James, a digital talent agency. Being in a relentless changing environment, James believes, every company can adjust the characteristics of their working space to their human resource strategies, and throughout it all is necessary to demonstrate great resilience and adaptability.
James Blackwell – a recruitment specialist and online coach – who helps entrepreneurs achieve real, consistent, predictable, and tangible results in business, counsels: “to perceive an equalizing force for disenfranchised individuals without a voice, the importance of social networks as agents of change and that a constant mutation of the workplace can’t be ignored. A revolution is on the way!”
The theme of the four-day week came up with the objective of reducing the weekly mental load for employees. Consequently, employees are available to spend more time with their family, rest and develop other activities they enjoy. This reduction may seem, a priori, radical.
However, are your employees 100% productive, eight hours a day? “Contrary to what is sometimes interpreted, it is nothing more and nothing less than the reduction of the working period. There are those who consider that four working days a week means the distribution of hours over the remaining days. That’s not the point.”
Therefore, we can say that we are facing a trend in human resources. “My top piece of advice is if any companies want to introduce this to their own businesses, do so on a trial basis and keep a close eye on both individual employee performance AND companywide results.” – says Ronald James CEO.
Is important also to denote that for one side the enterprises are moving toward the four working days a week, for other side the employees are embracing something that more than a social media dare: “´Quiet quitting´, the new and noisy trend in the corporate world, that is taking further consequences on a reduced workweek, this is a dichotomy to lookout for”, say James. “GAME ON: The new normal is to be always abreast on socio-economic changes and create a flexible & fast paced organization competent of adaptation.”