By Katia Del Rivero

A Local Problem?
I currently live in León, Guanajuato. Of all the enterprises I’ve visited, not a single one of them seems to understand how to recruit staff, get them to stay and generate a bond with the company.
Among the locals, there are plenty of stories to explain this. The shoe industry made them tired of poor labor conditions and bad relationships. The automotive industry spoiled them with over the top labor conditions. There are no committed people anymore. There are no loyal millennials, changing jobs now and then.
When we started working in other cities, from Querétaro to Zacatecas, every single enterprise has the same concern, complaint, and uneasiness.
What happens in Mexico City? After a year or so, after my husband died. I found a similar situation when I go back with my clients. So it seems is not a local thing, it’s happening in many places, in plenty of enterprises.
What’s the Origin?
I don’t think there’s a single cause. I believe it’s a mix of several situations coming together.
1. Enterprises broke the ‘stability’ code
Not long ago, a ‘successful’ person would have one job through all his/her life. Two were acceptable. Three were in the line of ‘instability’ and no longer attractive in the market. People would try to keep their jobs and feel good about it, and they taught this to the following generations. I still remember walking in front of a Bank with my mother when I was five, she told me one day I should work there and have lots of benefits. Everything sounded good until enterprises changed. Suddenly they started missing the established ‘ethics code’ and began firing employees, sometimes without prior notice. Others would end up the labor relationship before retirement so they wouldn’t become an ‘employer’s burden’.
2. People learned new codes
Life has a single rule, to me, it is quite simple: ‘survive’. This isn’t different in enterprises. Organizations changed the code, and people learned new codes to survive. They learned about labor mobility, work per contract, entrepreneurship, and how to build different presentation sheets based on competencies and results, rather than seniority and stability.
3. New generations learned ‘the lesson’
Many enterprises don’t realize the ‘children’ and ‘grandchildren’ of those who fired without warning are their current workers. And they don’t want to accept they ‘learned the lesson’. Surely when children lived the surprise, helplessness, crisis that arose in their families before the dismissal for which their parents and grandparents weren’t prepared, they ‘swore’ they wouldn’t be treated in the same way. Their sense of loyalty is completely different, they bond with themselves and with anything represents a benefit for them, not with an enterprise.
4. We have evolved as a society
In the age of stability, if you had a bad relationship with your boss, what a pity, you learned how to cope with it. Just like the marriages that were never in love, but learned how to live together and ended up being ‘happy’. Today, it’s not like that anymore. According to statistics, 51% of employees leave their jobs because of the relationship they have with their superior. Some studies even make it look like enterprises strongly depend on the bonds leaders establish with the enterprise. We know little or nothing about social construction, so we barely talk about the co-creation process a labor relationship means, where both the employee and employer have equal parts of responsibility. Some collaborators imitate today’s marriages, where they get married to divorce before ‘irreconcilable differences’ tear them apart, before trying to figure out how to reconcile them.
5. Technology has done its part
As a result of technological breakthroughs and their impact on everyday life, our needs change and evolve quickly. Today you can be attractive and capable for and enterprise, and tomorrow you’ll be obsolete. People know this. The ‘rules of the game’ have changed, and so do people.
Are there Any Alternatives?
I believe there are, but they aren’t a recipe from a cookbook. If you google ‘absenteeism’, ‘job desertion’, ‘emotional salary’, ‘happy organizations’, ‘happiness at work’, ‘meaningful enterprises’, you’ll find tips and ideas of how it is supposed to work.
I don’t trust this ‘novelties’, to me, they are ‘fashions’. One day they are in, and the next day they are out. They are ‘old wines in new barrels’. Well known practices which have a new name.
I prefer the ‘building together’ idea. Is paradoxical. Yet, it is what has kept us alive since ancient times, and at the same time, we have updated it to fit the technological changing modern world.
If you’ve tried everything for solving the loyalty issues, and still nothing’s worked, maybe you should explore with your people.
Recently we accompanied an enterprise that had taken every single measure they could think off. And people would still leave.
We identified alternatives, people proposed low-cost simple actions which they implemented by themselves with the enterprise’s support. Discussion groups for making group decisions, a space for talking about the production needs and challenges where hierarchy doesn’t matter, internal alternatives discussions, process changes, recognition systems based on individual needs.
The result? The rotation has reduced, new integration forms for new elements and process that avoid the enterprise from ‘suffering’.
These may not fit every enterprise since every enterprise should find it’s own forms.
We are facing new times, and we still try to keep past forms. Perhaps, we need a new training method, that shows us how to build contributing and everyone’s value besides their position, that listens to the enterprise’s inner voice, and build from collective wisdom, one that contributes to the creation of new alternatives since old ones aren’t working anymore.
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