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As I see it, this is what's happening in the labor market:

The game has changed in terms of retaining, attracting talent, the dynamics of employee experience, and reducing turnover.

In short, it’s a buyer’s market.

In the past, companies would interview employees and ask, “Why should we hire you?”

And now employees are coming to companies being like, “Yeah, why would I work for you?” It's a buyer's market. The days of people coming in and begging your company to work for you are gone, people have options.

People don’t have any last f***s to give about working for toxic leaders.

People are also at the end of their tether when it comes to being mistreated, working for toxic leadership, have terrible culture, it doesn’t matter. They’re done with it. Hot take: some of that’s from the pandemic - some of that was just ready to happen.

So what can you be doing about this?

Not to brag, but this is a bell I’ve been ringing for years and years:

Elevate and prioritize employee experience and culture.

As an analogy, back in the dot com boom days (Amazon), organizations were winning by becoming obsessed with customer experience, being focused on what the customers need, what didn’t exist they could give them, that they want, that they need.

Organizations that have won historically with just what we've seen over the last 10-15 years is that those companies came out on top by giving customers exactly what they want, how they want it.

Not this old school “if you want to do business with us, these are our operating hours,” and, “This is how you can engage with us.” The entire disruption industry said, “If we put the customers at the forefront of everything that we're delivering in terms of a service and giving them exactly what they need, how they want it, then we will win.”

So the parallel here is that organizations and companies need to become obsessed with employee experience.

What does it feel like to work for your company?
How are they treated by their coworkers?
How are they treated by their management and leadership?
Do you care?
Do you celebrate people?
Are you obsessed with what it feels like to work for your company from the very beginning, in the hiring process, in the onboarding process, and how they're given feedback and coaching?

You need to be thinking and prioritizing that and being aware of it. And the way to do that is through creating really intentional, tactical culture, to be thinking about rewards and recognitions, to get creative, to do things that organizations have never done before.

Lots of companies are doing all kinds of creative, interesting things with benefits packages, health, and childcare. There are just things where if we were to really, truly prioritize employee experience, what would that look like?

What creative things that we've never even heard of, that would be great for employees to have as a benefit working for us and helping to make our company successful.

Because it's true that it is a buyer's market, it’s a jungle out there. And if you want to survive, you want to attract, you want to retain great people and actually get them to work for you and keep the ones that you have that are great.

You need to level up and change the game. Change your mindset about how are we prioritizing the people who are doing the work to make our company successful? That is so important. That's what's happening right now. You either step it up or get left behind.

So step it up. Be awesome.

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This article was created by Galen Emanuele for the #culturedrop. Free leadership and team culture content in less than 5 minutes a week. Check out the rest of this month's content and subscribe to the Culture Drop at https://bit.ly/culturedrop 

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