Page 23 - BusinessWest January 8, 2024

ID expectations, but employees are not coming back to work with that same mindset.”
As for that lack of tolerance for differing opinions, it’s showing up
in a rise of calls to EANE’s hotline that fall into the broad category of employee relations, said Ebner, who described them this way: “I have an employee who has done, or is doing, this; what do I do about it?”
She noted that “there’s a lot of workplace-respect things happening today; we seem to, as a general soci- ety, have lost our ability to get along with one another to some regard. And I think that translates to the workplace; there’s less tolerance for someone who doesn’t think as I do or believe exactly the same things I do.”
As a result, EANE has been doing considerably more workplace-respect and conflict-resolution training these
“There’s a lot of workplace- respect things happening today; we seem to, as a general society, have lost our ability to get along with one another to some regard. And I think that translates to the workplace; there’s less tolerance for someone who doesn’t think as I do
or believe exactly the same things I do.”
days, but the underlying whitewater remains.
“There’s no happy medium, so there’s a lot of tension,” she went on, adding that, with what is shaping up to be an epic presidential race this year, this tension will only rise as 2024 progresses, probably creating more employee-relations-related calls to the hotline.
Overall, in this climate and at this time of seemingly constant change, employers must put a premium on communication and, especially, train- ing their mid-managers, what Ebner called their “people leaders.”
“These are the mid-level manag- ers that have been ignored for years,” she said. “They’ve been ignored, they haven’t been trained, and they’re just sort of hanging out there. They need to be focused on; this is how organi- zations are going to be successful. They’re closest to the money — the money is your employees; you can’t function without them.”
For this issue’s focus on employ- ment, BusinessWest talked with Ebner about the forces rocking the boat that is the modern workplace and what can be expected in the months to come.
BusinessWest
Riding the Waves
Returning to Deadliest Catch, Ebner explained that, while the boat captains captured on the show pos- sess many admirable qualities, flex- ibility, a willingness to compromise, and even communication are gener- ally not among them.
And these are traits that today’s business managers certainly need, she went on, adding that, without them, life is going to be much more difficult and stressful — as if it weren’t already difficult and stressful enough, for those reasons above, many of which started during, or were acceler-
ated by, the pandemic.
Return to work, or RTW — anoth-
er acronym that has worked its way into the lexicon — is just part of it. The larger piece involves who’s
holding the cards in the workplace today, she went on, adding that, dur- ing COVID and the height of the workforce crisis that followed, it was clearly employees that were driving the boat. Many think they still have the upper hand, but, increasingly, employers believe they are back in control.
And that’s where the rock-’em- sock-’em turmoil comes in.
“With COVID, we kind of dropped
all of our performance-management standards, and now, employers are trying to bring those back,” Ebner explained. “They’re saying, ‘you can’t call out four times and violate our attendance policy and still have a job.’ During COVID, you could, and you could post-COVID the past few years because the job market was so tight.
“Now, that’s settled down a little bit, so employers are trying to rein things in a little bit, and employees are very resistant to that,” she went on. “We see it with return to work ... you see it nationally with large corpo- rations that are trying to bring their employees back, some more success-
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