Strong company cultures are the heart of a successful workplace...getty
Every CEO wants long-standing employees, but their ineffective leadership causes organizational stress that cripples the workplace culture. Quite often, we read articles or hear of CEOs abusing their power and tarnishing their company’s reputation.
This is due to them neglecting feedback from their team and making decisions based solely on their own judgement. Not only does this erode trust, but it sets a standard that employee and leadership voices are not welcome.
When employees are taken care of, they go above and beyond to drive the company forward. Conversely, when they don’t feel valued, appreciated or kept in the loop, employees quickly become disengaged. The cost of a disengaged employee impacts more than the bottom line.
It decreases productivity, creates negative client experiences and destroys the company culture, to name a few. According to a Gallup survey, the State of the American Workplace 2021, 80% of workers are not fully engaged or are actively disengaged at work.
While CEOs claim to embody a people-first and feedback-driven culture, they believe, due to their position, that they know better than everyone else. Todd Ramlin, manager of Cable Compare, said, “if a person is fortunate to have the opportunity to be a CEO, they need to ask themselves if they can live by the company values, expectations, rules and processes that are in place.”
They can’t pick and choose which rules and processes to abide by, yet punish others when they do the same. Doing so cultivates a toxic workplace and demonstrates poor leadership. Here are three things CEOs do that sabotage their workplace culture.
Embraces Data, Dodges Emotions
The workplace is made up of a diverse group of experiences and perspectives. CEOs who lack the emotional intelligence to understand another person’s viewpoint or situation will find themselves losing their most valuable people. Sabine Saadeh, financial trading and asset management expert, said, “companies that are only data driven and don’t care about the well-being of their employees will not sustain in today’s global economy.”
Businessolver’s 2021 State Of Workplace Empathy report, revealed that “68% of CEOs fear that they’ll be less respected if they show empathy in the workplace.” CEOs who fail to lead with empathy will find themselves with a revolving door of leadership team members and employees. I once had a CEO tell me that he didn’t want emotions present in his business because it created a distraction from the data.
His motto was, “if it’s not data, it’s worthless”. As such, he disregarded feedback of employee dissatisfaction and burnout. Yet, he couldn’t understand why the average tenure of his employees very rarely surpassed one year. Willie Greer, founder of The Product Analyst, asserted, “data is trash if you’re replacing workers because you care more about data than your people.”
Micromanages Their Leadership Team
One of the ways a CEO sabotages a company’s culture is by micromanaging their leadership team. Consequently, this leads to leadership having to micromanage their own team to satisfy the CEOs unrealistic expectations. When leadership feels disempowered to make decisions, they either pursue another opportunity or check out due to not being motivated to achieve company goals.
As such, the executives who were hired to bring change aren’t able to live up to their full potential. Moreover, they’re unable to make the impact they desired due to the CEOs lack of trust in them.Employees undoubtedly feel the stress of their leadership team as it reverberates across the company. Arun Grewal, founder and Editor-in-chief at Coffee Breaking Pr0, said, most CEOs are specialists in one area or another, which can make them very particular.
However, if they want to drive their company forward they need to trust in the experts they hired rather than trying to make all of the company’s decisions. At one point during my career, I reported to a CEO who never allowed me to fully take over my department. Although he praised me for my HR expertise during the interview, once hired, I quickly realized he still wanted full control over my department.
Despite not having HR experience, he disregarded everything I brought to the table to help his company. I soon began questioning my own abilities. No matter how hard I tried to shield my team from the stress I endured, the CEO would reach out to them directly to micromanage their every move.
This left our entire department feeling drained, demoralized and demotivated. Sara Bernier, founder of Born for Pets, said, “CEOs who meddle in the smallest of tasks chip away at the fundamentals of their own company because everything has to run through them”. She added, “this eliminates the employee’s ownership of their own work because all tasks are micromanaged by the CEO.”
Neglects Valuable Employee Feedback
Instead of seeking feedback from their leadership team or employees, CEOs avoid it altogether. Eropa Stein, founder and CEO of Hyre, said, “making mistakes and getting negative feedback from your team is a normal part of leading a company, no matter how long you’ve been in business.” She went on, “as a leader, it’s important to put your ego aside and listen to feedback that will help your business grow.
If everyone agrees with you all the time, you’re creating a cult mentality that’ll be detrimental to your business’ success in the long run.” This results in a toxic and unproductive workplace culture.
What’s worse than avoiding constructive feedback is receiving it and disregarding it entirely. Neglecting valuable feedback constructs a company culture where no individual feels safe voicing their concerns. Rather than silence those who give negative feedback, CEOs should embrace them. These are the individuals who are bringing issues forward to turn them into strengths in an effort to create a stronger company.
Prior to joining Digital.ai as HR-North America, I owned my own Workplace Culture Consulting agency at Heidi Lynne Consulting helping individuals and organizations gain
A new report from Pew Research Center finds that 60% of workers who changed jobs between April 2021 and March of this year reported an increase in their wages, as adjusted for inflation, significantly more than the 51% of job switchers who said they saw wage gains the year before. It really does pay to change jobs. During the second year of the pandemic, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis, half of workers who changed jobs saw their pay increase nearly 10%. The median worker who stayed put saw an inflation-adjusted loss of almost 2%.
It’s long been thought that changing companies leads to bigger bumps in pay than asking for a raise from the same employer. Now, a new analysis of government data confirms that conventional wisdom—but appears to suggest a growing gap in the fortunes of those who stay put versus those who switch jobs, as high inflation and record turnover rates amid the Great Resignation have shaken up the job market.
Sixty percent of workers who changed jobs between April 2021 and March of this year reported an increase in their wages, as adjusted for inflation, significantly more than the 51% of job switchers who said they saw wage gains the year before, according to a new report released Thursday from Pew Research Center that analyzed data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. Among workers who stayed with their employers, the share that reported an increase in real wage gains fell from 54% to 47% over the same period.
The difference was stark: During the second year of the pandemic, half of the workers who changed jobs saw their pay increase 9.7%, while the median worker who stayed in the same job experienced a loss of 1.7%.
In addition to Pew’s analysis of government data, it also surveyed 6,174 U.S. adults about their job search plans, which could reveal concerns about a slowing economy. While 22% of workers surveyed shared plans to search for a new gig within six months, a greater share—37%—said they expect finding a job to be difficult.
“That’s the feeling on the ground, which may or may not contradict what we hear about labor shortages,” says Rakesh Kochhar, who led the research on Pew’s analysis. “But it may be some insight into what lies ahead, or what people are thinking lies ahead.”
Kochhar says the difference between the two groups reporting real wage gains during the first year of the pandemic was not statistically significant. He speculated more workers who switched jobs during those early months may have done so involuntarily, which could explain why more of their new jobs didn’t pay more.
But as the Great Resignation took hold, the benefits for job switchers appear to have grown. The findings are another indicator of how the tight labor market has continued to hand workers a bigger payday while employers struggle to hire.
“Across the board, workers are going to their bosses asking for more money,” says Ben Cook, CEO of the job negotiations firm Riva HQ. “But it’s often difficult to get large percentage increases at your current role, so that’s driving workers to seek other opportunities.” Over the past year, those other opportunities were often coming with a 10% or more jump in pay, according to Cook, who says he believes newfound confidence among employees has had the most impact on the increased turnover rate.
The Pew analysis of government data found that 2.5% of workers, on average, quit their jobs each month in the first quarter of 2022, a rate that suggests some 50 million workers could switch jobs this year. Its survey of U.S. adults also found that Black and Hispanic workers, young adults and those without a high school diploma were more likely to change jobs in any given month, as well as that about half of job switchers also change industries or occupations in a typical month.
The report closely follows the Federal Reserve’s announcement of another move to cool inflation, raising interest rates Wednesday by 75 basis points for only the second time since 1994.
The Fed’s aggressiveness, plus uncertainty in Ukraine and other factors, including Thursday’s report that GDP shrank 0.9% in the second quarter, have stoked fears of a recession. Layoffs in tech have accelerated—Shopify shed about 10% of its workforce earlier this week, for example—and venture-capital funding for startups has slowed. But U.S. employers added 11.3 million jobs in May, and that rate, while down from previous months, still exceeds the pre-pandemic norm.
“We’re not seeing a profound, pervasive decline in labor market activity at all — that’s what you’d normally see in a recession,” says Julia Pollak, chief economist at the online employment marketplace ZipRecruiter.
In a survey published in April of 2,064 U.S. adults who had started a new job within the past six months, Pollak’s team at ZipRecruiter found that 69% of new hires who voluntarily left their old jobs ended up with a higher salary under a new employer..
“We can see in the data that this was not a Great Resignation out of the labor force,” she says. “This Great Resignation was really the ‘Great Trading-Up.’”
While most workers who quit their jobs in 2021 did so for higher pay, others stepped down primarily to escape burnout, which surveys show has reached more than half of American workers.
Whatever the reason for changing jobs, higher pay is often a helpful byproduct. Take Bethlehem, New Hampshire, resident Ashley Willumitis, who a year ago swapped her job as a school admissions director for a program management role at a software company.
“One of my friends actually said to me, ‘if you’re going to be miserable at work, can you at least make some more money?’” recalls Willumitis. The 35-year-old, who earned less than $50,000 in her education job, has more than doubled her paycheck, enabling her partner to step away from work for a break.
After quitting, she met with a career coach and therapist, and first took up a low-stakes marketing job where she practiced shutting off her computer at the end of the work day and letting emails sit more than a few minutes before responding, freeing up more time for activities she loves, like biking.
“You gave your whole self to it and didn’t necessarily make a ton back,” Willumitis says, referring to the way she used to think about work. “It was through having some other people point out my skills to me that I realized I could not only make more money elsewhere, but arguably work a lot less.”
I’m an editorial intern on the Leadership and Communities team, covering founders, small business and Under 30. Previously, I worked in business development for a startup
Inflation may be hitting new 40-year highs, but less than a quarter of U.S. organizations say they are revising their salary budgets due to inflation—despite many workers asking for raises or other actions to cope with higher prices, according to a new survey.
Mercer, the human resources consulting firm, surveyed more than 300 U.S. employers in March and found that 45% do not factor inflation into salary budgets. Less than 25% say they are making changes to their salary budgets because of inflation—yet 42% say workers have been asking them to take financial actions to help with rising costs.
Still, the survey found that nearly half of organizations say they will conduct additional salary reviews for either some or all of their employees as a response, a sign some may be growing concerned about losing workers if they don’t take action. A full 77% said dissatisfaction with pay or an offer of higher wages at another firm were the top reason they were seeing turnover among their ranks.
“Organizations are being cautious about setting a practice of paying primarily based on cost of living, as opposed to cost of labor,” Tauseef Rahman, a partner at Mercer, said in an email about the new survey data. He was referring to the way many employers make decisions about compensation, determining what people with certain job titles in specific regions are typically paid.
He’s not surprised by the disconnect between what employees are requesting and what employers have done so far in response. As Rahman says, “the concern is that organizations can create the expectation that pay is entirely based on cost of living, and not based on the cost of labor which has more to do with availability and demand of talent.” One challenge, he says, is that employers “might not have been clear with candidates and employees as to … [how] pay was being set.”
At the same time, Mercer’s survey also finds that 50% of organizations say they’re paying more than market rate due to the challenges they face finding and keeping employees, and 41% say they are implementing some kind of retention bonus.
Meanwhile, 60% of respondents reported seeing an increase in the number of counter-offers candidates are receiving, and about 30% say they are beating or matching counter-offers.
Josh Bersin, a human resources industry analyst, says he’s hearing from companies that inflation is having an impact. “Everyone I talk to is going through this re-evaluation, saying ‘you know what, we’ve got to add more money. We’ve got to reset salaries more often to adjust,’” he says.
“There’s a saturation point—you can’t compete based entirely on wages,” Bersin says. “But we’re at the point right now [of people saying] ‘I will not work for you unless you can pay me more money.’ So there’s this stair-stepping process going on, [where] everybody’s raising their wages a tiny bit at a time.”
“There’s this stair-stepping process going on, [where] everybody’s raising their wages a tiny bit at a time.”
Bersin thinks the Department of Labor’s data may be a little behind what’s happening within employers’ payrolls. Consumer prices rose 7.9% in the 12 months that ended in February, according to data the Labor Department released last week. At the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, the U.S. employment cost index showed that compensation costs for civilian workers increased 1% for the three-month period ending in December 2021, with wages and salaries increasing 4.5% last year.
While that is a two-decade high, Bersin thinks “wages are probably going up faster than the federal government realizes,” he says. One human resources executive he spoke with recently told him “we’ll issue a job offer on Monday, they’ll accept the job on Thursday … [and] they don’t show up. Over the weekend they got a job for 50 cents more an hour. It’s just that fast.”
Some companies are finding other ways to provide more compensation to people. For instance, Jonathan Johnson, Overstock.com’s CEO, says his company issued stock to a broader group of employees. The company’s research shows it is above the national average on pay in the markets where they compete for talent, Johnson says.
“You can’t spend your equity at the gas station, but it can help you create wealth and it maybe helps you save,” he says. The company also did not increase what employees pay for medical and dental benefit premiums this year.
Rahman says that where companies are offering raises due to inflation, they tend to be “targeted adjustments” that are based on things such as the competitiveness of pay, an individual’s performance, or business needs. Just “like inflation is complex and not a single number for everyone, pay adjustments are similarly complex.”
I am a Senior Editor at Forbes, leading our coverage of the workplace, careers and leadership issues. Before joining Forbes, I wrote for the Washington Post for more than a decade…
Employee demands are driving changes in compensation strategy as employers respond to labor shortages and surging inflation, new research shows. Pay data and software firm Payscale’s 2022 Compensation Best Practices Report reveals that 85 percent of organizations are concerned about rising inflation eroding the value of pay increases.
The survey gathered responses from management-level decision-makers at 5,578 organizations, mostly based in North America, from November 2021 to January 2022.
In January 2022, inflation was 7.5 percent higher compared to a year earlier—a 40-year high. The unprecedented jump in inflation rates has 85 percent of organizations worried that planned 2022 pay increases won’t be enough. At the same time, 76 percent of organizations faced labor shortages or difficulty attracting talent in 2021, and 49 percent said that voluntary turnover had increased compared to previous years.
The survey also highlights which benefits have become more common, such as:
A 25 percent increase for remote-work options (now being offered by 65 percent of surveyed employers).
An 8.3 percent increase in work-from-home stipends (offered by 15 percent).
A 7.7 percent increase for flex-time options (offered by 37 percent).
A 7 percent increase in mental health or total wellness programs (offered by 66 percent).
Nearly 140 countries agreed Friday to the most sweeping overhaul of global tax rules in a century, a move that aims to curtail tax avoidance by multinational corporations and raise additional tax revenue of as much as $150 billion annually.
But the accord, which is a decade in the making, now must be implemented by the signatories, a path that is likely to be far from smooth, including in a closely divided U.S. Congress.
The reform sets out a global minimum corporate tax of 15%, targeted at preventing companies from exploiting low-tax jurisdictions.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the floor set by the global minimum tax was a victory for the U.S. and its ability to raise money from companies. She urged Congress to move swiftly to enact the international tax proposals it has been debating, which would help pay for extending the expanded child tax credit and climate-change initiatives, among other policies.
“International tax policy making is a complex issue, but the arcane language of today’s agreement belies how simple and sweeping the stakes are: when this deal is enacted, Americans will find the global economy a much easier place to land a job, earn a living, or scale a business,” Ms. Yellen said.
The agreement among 136 countries also seeks to address the challenges posed by companies, particularly technology giants, that register the intellectual property that drives their profits anywhere in the world. As a result, many of those countries established operations in low-tax countries such as Ireland to reduce their tax bills.
The final deal gained the backing of Ireland, Estonia and Hungary, three members of the European Union that withheld their support for a preliminary agreement in July. But Nigeria, Kenya, Sri Lanka and Pakistan continued to reject the deal.
The new agreement, if implemented, would divide existing tax revenues in a way that favors countries where customers are based. The biggest countries, as well as the low-tax jurisdictions, must implement the agreement in order for it to meaningfully reduce tax avoidance.
Overall, the OECD estimates the new rules could give governments around the world additional revenue of $150 billion annually.
The final deal is expected to receive the backing of leaders from the Group of 20 leading economies when they meet in Rome at the end of this month. Thereafter, the signatories will have to change their national laws and amend international treaties to put the overhaul into practice.
The signatories set 2023 as a target for implementation, which tax experts said was an ambitious goal. And while the agreement would likely survive the failure of a small economy to pass new laws, it would be greatly weakened if a large economy—such as the U.S.—were to fail.
“We are all relying on all the bigger countries being able to move at roughly the same pace together,” said Irish Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe. “Were any big economy not to find itself in a position to implement the agreement, that would matter for the other countries. But that might not become apparent for a while.”
Congress’ work on the deal will be divided into two phases. The first, this year, will be to change the minimum tax on U.S. companies’ foreign income that the U.S. approved in 2017. To comply with the agreement, Democrats intend to raise the rate—the House plan calls for 16.6%—and implement it on a country-by-country basis. Democrats can advance this on their own and they are trying to do so as part of President Biden’s broader policy agenda.
The second phase will be trickier, and the timing is less certain. That is where the U.S. would have to agree to the international deal changing the rules for where income is taxed. Many analysts say that would require a treaty, which would need a two-thirds vote in the Senate and thus some support from Republicans. Ms. Yellen has been more circumspect about the schedule and procedural details of the second phase.
Friction between European countries and the U.S. over the taxation of U.S. tech giants has threatened to trigger a trade war.
In long-running talks about new international tax rules, European officials have argued U.S. tech giants should pay more tax in Europe, and they fought for a system that would reallocate taxing rights on some digital products from countries where the product is produced to where it is consumed.
The U.S., however, resisted. A number of European governments introduced their own taxes on digital services. The U.S. then threatened to respond with new tariffs on imports from Europe.
The compromise was to reallocate taxing rights on all big companies that are above a certain profit threshold.
Under the agreement reached Friday, governments pledged not to introduce any new levies and said they would ultimately withdraw any that are in place. But the timetable for doing that has yet to be settled through bilateral discussions between the U.S. and those countries that have introduced the new levies.
Even though they will likely have to pay more tax after the overhaul, technology companies have long backed efforts to secure an international agreement, which they see as a way to avoid a chaotic network of national levies that threatened to tax the same profit multiple times.
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The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which has been guiding the tax talks, estimates that some $125 billion in existing tax revenues would be divided among countries in a new way.
Those new rules would be applied to companies with global turnover of €20 billion (about $23 billion) or more, and with a profit margin of 10% or more. That group is likely to include around 100 companies. Governments have agreed to reallocate the taxing rights to a quarter of the profits of each of those companies above 10%.
The agreement announced Friday specifies that its revenue and profitability thresholds for reallocating taxing rights could also apply to a part of a larger company if that segment is reported in its financial accounts. Such a provision would apply to Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud division, Amazon Web Services, even though Amazon as a whole isn’t profitable enough to qualify because of its low-margin e-commerce business.
The other part of the agreement sets a minimum tax rate of 15% on the profits made by large companies. Smaller companies, with revenues of less than $750 million, are exempted because they don’t typically have international operations and can’t therefore take advantage of the loopholes that big multinational companies have benefited from.
Low-tax countries such as Ireland will see an overall decline in revenues. Developing countries are least happy with the final deal, having pushed for both a higher minimum tax rate and the reallocation of a greater share of the profits of the largest companies.
—Sam Schechner in Paris contributed to this article.
Desai, Mihir A.; Foley, C. Fritz; Hines, James R. “Labor and Capital Shares of the Corporate Tax Burden: International Evidence”. CiteSeerX10.1.1.364.4867.
See. Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln IV, Is Incorporation Really Better Than Central Management and Control for Testing Corporate Residency? An Answer to Corporate Tax Evasion and Inversion, 43 Ohio N.U.L. Rev. 359 (2017).
Strong company cultures are the heart of a successful workplace...getty
