A Land That’s Lost Its Dynamism

Revisiting HR Standards in Overlooked American Industries

For spring break this year, I decided to forgo visiting a tropical paradise in favor of a bus trip across the South. Having grown up in New York City, I wanted to see what the rest of America looked like.

Up to that point, the archetype American worker I knew blended in with the crowds hurrying through the bustling streets of Manhattan to their work in skyscrapers. These workers were likely part of the so-called “coastal elite” working in professional services. They reminded me of the Dolly Parton song:

Tumble out of bed and I stumble to the kitchen

Pour myself a cup of ambition

And yawn and stretch and try to come to life

Jump in the shower and the blood starts pumpin’

Out on the street, the traffic starts jumpin’

With folks like me on the job from 9 to 5 . . .

Workin’ 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin’

Was the better place for someone to truly change the world in Silicon Valley? Or maybe in a governmental position in DC? Perhaps it was smarter to ignore expectations and just live a quiet life running a mom and pop shop in a small community. Sitting on the bus heading to South Carolina, I hoped I would figure out where I saw myself.

Encouraging economic airport signs on my way home.

As we approached Charleston, I transferred to a local bus. Instead of the utopian American suburb, I was surprised to see rusting cars in abandoned yards, one story homes falling apart, and empty strip malls. Getting suspicious glances from others on the bus, I took off my Yale hoodie. Was I so clearly an outsider? When I got to my bed and breakfast, my hosts were horrified that I had taken public transportation 46 stops and wanted to walk to all the tourist attractions for the rest of my trip. Still, I didn’t give up on my mission of understanding how life looked outside large urban areas. I managed one conversation with a tour guide and eventually one with an Uber driver, asking them about the types of people they encountered. While they were very conscious of the lifestyles of people in other states, their genuine satisfaction with life, proximity to family, and preference for the slower pace of life were so different from the ones I was used to. (There’s almost no chance they’re reading this, but if they are, thank you, ladies. Your kindness and encouragement really made my trip more pleasant :). )

I wondered if the same held for other manual laborers. Once I was back at school, I tried to find the answers in Connecticut. Through some friends, I ended up meeting Jonas, a 38 year old man who immigrated from Lithuania to the US a few years ago. Though he held a trade certification, he didn’t complete schooling beyond high school. He currently works as a carpenter around Northern Connecticut. His teammates, who do not speak the same language as him, but are still close to him because of the lunch breaks they take together, are currently encouraging him to take a proficiency exam to be their union representative. Though the position would give him more disposable income, he is reluctant to do it. He doesn’t think anything he advocates for will make a significant improvement in their lives.

I was surprised to learn that he would rather take on more hours of physical labor than attend union meetings.

Around that time, I also met Janusz, a 46 year old Polish man who immigrated to America 20 years ago. He works as a manager at a factory manufacturing laundry machine parts. Every Sunday, he, his wife and two little girls attend church, after which Janusz and his friends often discuss how they’ve done they best they could to provide for their families and achieve the ever elusive American Dream. Sure, they own their homes and cars and are content, but they aren’t truly happy.

Their lives have become routine, and though they don’t mind, they poke fun of the worldly men in suits they thought they would become by coming to the States.

I wondered what they would think of the Dolly Parton song.

Having contextualized my trips with some broader human capital strategy research, I’d like to focus this reflection on the roughly 190 million Americans who live in small urban, suburban and rural areas. While I’ve realized there is a multitude of types of American communities along the urban-rural continuum, there are some populations whose experiences at work are mismatched with their needs. To help them lead happier, more fulfilled lives, companies need to:

1. employ better job design strategies to boost meaningful engagement
2. embrace innovative job posting platforms to reach new audiences and ease their recruiting process
3. utilize automation as a means to fill critical labor shortage gaps
4. finally destigmatize community college and trade school education.

Empowerment: An Important Practice in Both Corporate and Manufacturing HR Strategy

It appears inevitable that the pursuit of general employee wellbeing will lead many companies to develop overlapping practices and values. Indeed, certain standards for accessibility, diversity, and inclusion are to be expected in any workplace. More nuanced patterns of shared standards are visible within industries, especially when grouping companies into ones with either predominantly mental or manual work.

Róża Szafranek, Founder & CEO of HR Hints, the first HR boutique operating in a subscription model, explains how various actors refer to practices regarding their employees. Private equity funds, for instance, typically refer to them as their “human capital strategy,” while startups and more avantgarde companies prefer the term “people and culture.” Chic! I like it. “Human resources” is an older, but still acceptable term. When comparing the HR standards in such companies like consulting or finance to those like car assembly and warehouse logistics, Szafranek notes the varied:

1. work environments
2. methods for task distribution
3. characteristics of the typical employees
4. strengths in the relationship that develop between employees and their company mission.

These differences can materialize as cubicles versus open floor workspaces, more flexible job assignments versus systematic ones, and higher levels of college education attainment versus vocational training. These differences also lead to the development of two distinct human capital strategies: one more focused on helping an individual employee navigate the bureaucracy of corporate decision making and the other focused on ensuring an employee’s safety and training are up to par. For instance, with regards to the former, someone in consulting often has to represent their company to clients. This naturally leads to more time spent thinking about the company’s mission and being trained in how they can best embody it. On the other hand, someone working in assembly is more focused on building something rather than getting it into the hands of a client. Therefore, they may not understand the firm as holistically as an office worker would. Nevertheless, even if it seems corporate HR can more easily empower their workers through practices like team retreats and affinity groups, more manual laborers, too, deserve recognition (that isn’t only financial recognition for beating certain metrics) for their gumption.

Kasia Gurgul, founder of Mindquest Global Leadership Development, works with leaders at companies like LinkedIn, UberEats, HSBC and Toyota on an everyday basis. She agrees that while the the duties of corporate and manufacturing HR departments can be different, being the type of people they serve have distinct needs and priorities, she’s noticing that differences are:

Less true now than it was before. There’s a shift happening in many global companies. I don’t know much about recruitment but I can tell you about leadership development. Along with my corporate clients, I have coached manufacturing, mining, ocean transportation & supply chain leaders to develop a leadership style which is more supportive and empowering, reducing the command & control approach which so often leads to disengagement.

Her response shows that no matter what kind of firm, it can all end up for naught if employees, sensing distance to their leader, feel their work is not being appreciated.

Notedly, this doesn’t just apply when leaders know the bare minimum about the work their people are doing, but rather when the world is unaware of how certain workers are contributing to it. After all, the most common dream jobs often come with social approval or validation. Take pilots, writers, or actors: achieving success in those professions means getting smiles or nods in public, with parents often pointing out such people to their kids as worth admiring. Similarly, influencers and entrepreneurs get recognition through the number of likes or comments their social media posts garner, or the amount of buzz in headlines about their latest achievements.

On the other hand are the less socially visible careers, like those in manufacturing, which don’t get the benefit of free advertising. It is rare to hear of a parent encouraging their child to work in manufacturing, being their everyday realities are often seen as boring, financially unfulfilling, or too physically demanding. Still, it is these invisible jobs that power the country and more broadly the world. Workers are urgently needed to fill them, else the risk of supply chain gaps intensifying.

A Paradoxical Labor Shortage In Critical Industries

Being a trucker, a unionized trucker to be exact, used to be one of the most admirable professions an American could do, often staying in the job through to retirement (Why Global Supply Chains May Never Be the Same, WSJ). Now, it’s projected that by 2028, there will be a shortage of 160,000 truckers, so even if by some miracle, every current Yalies from across each class year took up trucking, they wouldn’t make a dent in the gap. Automation or widespread technological support won’t occur quickly enough in the next five years to make up for this lack of drivers. Similarly, by 2024, the metal fabrication business will have 400,000 fewer properly trained workers than they need. These trends in a diminishing labor force are not new though, with “employment at textile and fabric finishing mills f[alling] by 44.4% from 2007 to 2016” and employment in the ports and harbors “f[alling] by 58.0% in the last 10 years [even as] the number of U.S. ports and harbors increased by 2.2%” (USA Today, 2018).

These declines are partly due to an aging workforce: as Baby Boomers retire, they leave behind gaps in certain fields where they make up significant percentages of workers. Though there was a pandemic era spike in retirees based on “excess retirements that would likely not have occurred in the absence of the pandemic,” the Boomer retirement population has still been growing by more than a million people for the past decade (Federal Reserve, 2022). This begs the question of who will fill the places they leave in critical industries.

It turns out the more apt question is who isn’t filling those jobs. A popular Instagram post by Chris Williamson, host of a podcast called Modern Wisdom addresses this issue. At first appearing to be clickbait, one of his posts outlines how there are currently 7 million men aged 22–55 in America who aren’t employed and aren’t actively looking for work. It, however, continues accurately claiming that this sub-population of prime working age men averages about 2,000 hours a year watching screens, with half of that time spent on painkillers. This reveals a paradox: a simultaneous labor shortage in critical industries and a huge population that isn’t working. I realized it seemed to suggest that the great American work ethic, once hugely admired around the world, is in trouble.

The post-pandemic edition of Nicholas Eberstadt’s Men Without Work confirms the phenomenon. Just like the pandemic prompted the Great Resignation and JOMO (Joy of Missing Out) movements, now, 11 million job openings remain unfilled; “for every unemployed person, two positions stand vacant. Job openings so exceed the ranks of [the cohort of un-working men] that every member of this idle army could be placed in a job, and there would still be more than 3.9 million jobs awaiting candidates.” Research proves it difficult to identify the distribution of these men, since high social costs of deindustrialization occurred all across America, though there are some hotspots. For instance, “health care providers in the highest [painkiller] prescribing state, Alabama, wrote almost three times as many of these prescriptions per person as those in the lowest prescribing state, Hawaii,” (CDC) with the longest screen time usage amongst young adults being in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama. (As a side note, one of the people I talked to while trying to better understand the phenomenon of America’s un-working men was a veteran currently studying at the Jackson School. He said that many of the people he encountered in the army were formerly incarcerated individuals who couldn’t find a job after serving their sentence. This is not an insignificant portion of the population, with “one in seven American men [having] been sentenced for a felony.” An important debate regards these men re-entering the workforce.)

Reading through the comments section of the original “Men aren’t working” post reveals a divide between people who think these men are simply lazy and should be self-sufficient in finding the motivation to pursue a job, and those who think they need more serious help. One user in the latter group wrote that in order to address the problem, we have to look more critically at the “roots of [the] system rather than surface level expression of symptoms.” She was concerned with the way people could be fired “with the drop of a pin” when their work was deemed unnecessary, which resulted in them later being wary of new opportunities which very well could end the same way. While she disagreed with the former group about whose responsibility it was to get these men on their feet (her point being government and employers, as opposed to the individuals themselves), she was able to come to agreement about these men lacking a sense of engagement in the workplace. (As a side note, the comments section discussion eventually veered into whether or not UBI would increase unemployment or provide a cushion for these men to fall back on, rather than rely on inducing artificial distractions.) Therefore, people’s interaction with the post reinforce Szafranek and Gurgul’s observations about the importance of employees feeling their work matters, no matter what it is they do, less they abandon their jobs and the workforce.

Unless a major change happens in how this is accomplished, these problems will continue compounding. In particular, HR departments have to account for the spillover effects that labor shortage has on remaining employees; the same kind of sensitivity is needed as when considering how terminations affect colleagues. In this case, workers left in understaffed industries will feel even more overwhelmed with mounting responsibilities and unfulfilled demands and themselves leave, too. This isn’t limited to invisible jobs, as the Wall Street Journal reports of “Seattle teachers want[ing] better special education teacher-to-student ratios. Railroad conductors and engineers asking for sick leave. And nurses […] looking for […] protections against retaliation for reporting instances of understaffing.” This final point is especially concerning as employee-to-leadership communication is crucial for successful business strategy, not only human capital strategy.

A Potential Solution: Engaging Job Design

In the 1950s, psychologist Frederick Herzberg realized that job satisfaction depends on two dimensions: hygiene and motivators. Foundational workplace standards make up hygiene and include things like working conditions, salary, and supervision. Providing satisfactory hygiene “cannot motivate employees but can minimize dissatisfaction” (Syptak, 1999). It is motivators that truly “create satisfaction by fulfilling individuals’ needs for meaning and personal growth” (Syptak, 1999). They can be broken down into feelings like recognition, challenge, and achievement.

One of the most important motivators is engagement, and yet it is well-known that “only about 30% of US workers say they are engaged in their work” (Forbes, 2017). This valuable mindset can be encompassed by three psychological states: involvement, enthusiasm, and commitment. This means an engaged employee is excited about their work to the point that they go above and beyond job requirements, desiring to positively contribute to the workplace and company mission. Worryingly but not surprisingly, engagement dropped 6 points among Gen Z and Millennials over the pandemic (Harter, 2022). Though it is critical to re-establish engagement amongst those who are the future of the workforce, the first priority should be to do so amongst their managers. This is so that the latter is able to both lead meaningful conversations about accountability, as well as pursue thoughtful job design resulting in higher quality work performance and lower absenteeism and turnover. Hackman and Oldham’s model for job design is useful in this regard as its five pillars of autonomy, feedback, skill variety, task identity, and task significance can combat disengagement amongst managers and employees alike.

HR departments facing the urgent reality of disengaged and departing workers should use these pillars as an intervention technique to redesign job descriptions and duties, thus preventing people from quitting or staying at home because they think their work is unappreciated, rote and pointless. Open book management, or sharing ongoing firm financial information with workers of all positions, for instance, is a well-known strategy to build commitment and ownership. This practice enables unique insights from people on the floor to flow up to command. As Ari Weinzweig of Zingerman’s describes one of his employees saying, “It’s definitely had a strong impact on my daily performance. I do things differently because I’m armed with more information” (Zingrain, n.d.) For example, this worker has become more reluctant to provide refunds to unsatisfied customers once she understood how expensive they are to implement; in a way, she claims she now understands what is means to be an owner. This story shows that rather than pursue a nationwide PR campaign destined to change the sentiment associated with certain jobs and industries being inherently “bad,” an approach improving worker perceptions of their own work is more realistic and more impactful; in other words, employers internally spurring pride is more durable in engaging workers than external validation.

Another Potential Solution: Embracing Job Platform Innovation

One of the first places an applicant can get discouraged about the nature of a job is during the search process. Resume drops on suspicious websites never to be heard from again, not even with a polite rejection email, are infamous experiences among young people. Furthermore, the way one proves their competency and skills is shifting, as soft skills become just as important as hard skills. I remember once volunteering to help non-English speakers at a library event where people came to get advice on job applications. One young woman was applying for a produce warehouse job and had had only one previous job experience as a store clerk. She struggled to develop a resume, given that her list of skills was only a few generic-sounding bullet points. This was nothing to be ashamed of since she was a hard-worker with a straightforward story of why she was a good fit for the job, but crafting the resume seemed forced: the warehouse manager required it, but it was neither a productive nor authentic attempt to understand her as an applicant. Similarly, when I underwent recruiting for some fellowships, I realized Twitter’s utility quickly outpaced LinkedIn’s. In the tech industry, cold DMs and social media engagement were preferred over traditional recruiting paths, being that Twitter helps people turn themselves into a brand with a memorable personality and original content. An 8.5 by 11 resume wouldn’t capture that.

Job search platforms have to be adapted to suit these changing conditions. Andreessen-Horowitz hits the nail on the head with their investment rationale being to support founders in the great unbundling of LinkedIn and traditional resume applications. “By creating a user experience or business model that’s much more tailored to the unique attributes” of a vertical such as gig economy recruiting, these founders can directly address industry needs that mainstream platforms like LinkedIn overlook (Hsu, 2022). Examples of these deep job platforms range from “engineering (Hired) to blue collar (Wonolo) to oil services (RigUp — now Workwise) to hospitality (Pared, Instawork, Qwick) to bookkeeping (Paro).” The superpower of these platforms is their specificity. Wonolo, for example, recently raised $200 million in venture capital funding to support businesses with critical manual labor staffing issues; their marketplace offers public feedback on wages, helping people find jobs that pay fairly, often filling positions within a few hours. It has over a million users and tens of thousands of businesses hiring on it.

The young woman, had she known about Wonolo, even without making an account, would have been able to view hundreds of warehouse helper positions in the area, even if they were temporary for now, rather than full-time. She also would have been relieved to hear that she could snag a job by making a simpler profile with personal information, rather than learn how boring Microsoft Word resume templates work. Another company to keep an eye on is Hired which rather than relying on weeks-long, multi-step interviewing processes, includes online skills assessments for companies to directly test the skill level of applicants, as they apply. Employers should look to these platforms as expanding the audiences they can reach, as well as make the hiring process more effective and enjoyable for both parties.

Another Potential Solution: Turning Automation Into An Opportunity, Not Only Challenge

Job hiring platforms are not the only kind of technologies with potential to reinvigorate employees, reduce labor shortages, and improve working conditions. For instance, Arkansas-based Ox is guided by the idea that warehouse work is unnecessarily strenuous. From the meticulous paperwork an operator has to balance alongside scanning products with an outdated handheld device to doing the lifting itself, they are the target audience for Ox’s augmented reality headset. Its display guides a worker in where in the warehouse they need to go and what functions they need to perform; this tool is part of a greater concept of human centered automation. By making the warehouse floor handling work easier, Ox hopes to decrease the over 50% turnover rate among warehouse operators (Bureau of Labor Statistics).

In addition to decreasing turnover, human centered automation products like Ox’s also have the potential to expand who is eligible to work in warehouses in the first place. For instance, “if 80% of a job [is] automated, the skill barrier for performing the remaining 20% becomes much lower” (Hsu, 2022). This enables sourcing from people with less experience or less education and introduces a positive view of automation, rather than just one reality in which is destroys jobs. (Don’t get me wrong — automation is terrifying and definitely does displace many workers whose highly technical education is no longer needed. This is a select instance where it has the potential to be viewed as an opportunity, rather than a challenge.) Even if looser recruiting practices still do not solve worker gaps and HR departments have to strategically reallocate the labor they already have access to, human centered automation will make this easier. Re-skilling workers to use this tech reminds them they are assets to a company, not expenses. This can also elicit gratitude and stronger morale, making star employees, rather than hiring them, which is already difficult enough. After all, “stars” are only partially talent, and mostly the product of their environment, as Groysberg, Nanda, and Nohria explain through numerous anecdotes about financial institutions having their star-hires defect (The Risky Business of Hiring Stars, 2004).

Final Potential Solution: Promoting Community Colleges and Trade Schools

In Europe, half of all high school students attend vocational or trade school (European Commission, 2020). In America, however, a “college-for-all narrative has been emphasized for decades as the pathway to success and stability” (St-Esprit, 2019). This notion emerged from the 1944 GI Bill designed to support World War II veterans returning to the workforce. As a result, trade school has often been regarded as a backup choice for education and certification, even though it offers huge potential for social mobility. Concerningly, half of Americans aged 18 to 24 say “they would rather work as baristas than as welders”. In another survey, barely 11 percent of that same age group said they believed that “training in the skilled trades led to high-paying jobs,” which, in fact, it does for many (Arabia, 2019). How does $50 an hour for being a carpenter sound?

Similarly stigmatized is the community college path, though a not insignificant portion of the population undertakes it. Records show that “860,000 associate’s degrees, almost 600,000 certificates, and more than 21,000 baccalaureate degrees” were awarded in the 2019–2020 school year. This can be a financially responsible decision, being that such degrees can be tens of thousands of dollars cheaper than four-year private school degrees, but still generate “a $8,000 more than the average pay than someone with only a high school diploma” (Nietzel, 2022). In fact, before coming to Yale, I myself pursued an Associate’s degree.

Unfortunately, enrollments at community colleges fell by 14.4% since 2010, with another million students dropping out during the pandemic. This means already underrepresented students are falling further behind, being that “thirteen percent [of community college and trade school students] are single parents, 12 percent [have] disabilities, and 3 percent [are] veterans” (Clay, 2012). Though it seems companies cannot protect against falling student enrollment rates as much as administrators, they can still heavily advertise their support for this kind of education on job sites and applications, vouching for how it can naturally lead to better employment opportunities down the line. This has the potential to be even more successful at trade schools, as was the case “in Utah, [where] enrollment rose at seven of the state’s eight technical colleges, [while] South Dakota’s Lake Area Technical College saw an 8.1 percent increase and Georgia Piedmont Technical College rose 13 percent” in the fall 2021 semester (Marcus, 2021).

The Tribeca Film Festival documentary, “Night School,” offers a look into the lives of such students who decided to finish their education; more specifically, the film features three Indiana inner-city adults trying to finish their high school degrees at the Excel Center, “a tuition-free program for dropouts operated by Goodwill Education Initiatives” (EducationWeek, 2017). The grit demonstrated by their teachers in helping these students prove their abilities should inspire recruiters to more willingly source from alternative schooling programs like these. The benefit goes the other way, too, with community college and especially trade schools developing workers with niche skillsets in industries facing labor shortages. In particular, partnering with two-year programs to develop apprenticeships can increase a company’s visibility amongst applicants and even build long-term trust protecting against high turnover. After the pandemic, studies showed that apprentices were “85% more likely to stay in employment post qualification with a staggering 64% staying with the same employer” (Arnesen, 2022). Therefore, community colleges and trade schools are critical participants in the movement to reengage American workers.

Conclusions

Throwing money at critical American industries in hope that investments can revitalize them is naive thinking. It is more pertinent to plan how to find, train, and keep motivated and skilled workers staffing them. Boosting employee engagement, especially in such manual work environments, requires an open minded approach to human capital strategy. Therefore, HR departments should increase their familiarity with job design theory that builds strong self- satisfaction amongst workers who otherwise would see their jobs as invisible to and under-appreciated by the rest of society. They also should consider expanding human centric automation to alleviate workplace burdens and develop apprenticeship models to more naturally source from beyond four year colleges. The latest headline to see whether or not this process will be implemented is the 50 billion dollar CHIPS and Science federal expenditure plan, which aims to rebuild America’s semiconductor industry. In the end, good human capital strategy is a dynamic firm and country’s greatest advantage.

As to me and where I’ll travel to next, I want to continue telling the stories of the people who are building the world’s industries and whose needs are often overlooked in management theory and discussions at HR conferences. I want to tell of the challenges they face, the successes they’ve achieved, and what their dreams are.

As for Jonas, I hope the HR department at his workplace intervenes and determines what environmental factors affected his decision not to pursue the union representative job. Similarly, Janusz’s HR department should vary the skills, duties, and autonomy Janusz has, boosting his engagement with parts of the firm he hasn’t dealt with before, so that he can better embody the company mission, rather than just guide product assembly. One assignment they can give him is attending conferences to research and freely implement technology to improve his team’s workload. Wouldn’t that be awesome?! Good luck to them, and good luck to us all!

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