NOTE: This is a guest post by Bas van de Haterd. I will be back next week.
Employees are partners
Last week this newsletter wrote about employees being viewed as assets but we don’t treat them like assets anyway. Because if we viewed an employee as an asset it would be on our balance sheet and we would need to depreciate it when it loses value, for example when we don’t invest in it. Or we would need to write it off when we have layoffs and that would totally turn around the business case for layoffs. So we don’t treat them like assets and let’s stop calling them that.
But some might feel weird about calling them investors like suggested last week, so maybe we should call them partners. And let’s make comparisons with romantic partners.
Dating
Let’s say we had our first dates, we call that the recruitment process, and we like each other. Weirdly enough after the recruitment process we immediately ask a person to marry us, we sign the papers and go into a full-blown relationship. Weird from a relationship point of view, so maybe we should be dating longer. I’m not saying we should extend the recruitment process, but sometimes it’s good to have Matej Matolin calls a pre-recruitment process where you get to really know each other. In their case, this was via a newsletter, events, drinks, webinars, and maybe even a side project. At Zappos, they had their talent community where the activity and the way you reacted was the way to get hired.
So maybe we need to think about dating before we think about a relationship. And in this dating process, we know it’s important to be honest with each other about what we expect out of life. In dating, this would be if we are looking for a long-term commitment, marriage, or friends with benefits for example. It’s much easier to be honest if there’s no expectation yet, no open job, on what you expect and want from the partner. In normal dating we might want to ask if the other person wants children, is open to moving, and what lifestyle the other is looking for, from ambitious in work to more time with the family. Things that are not crammed into a single interview that takes an hour, but in a working relationship usually are. And if we already know each other well, from the pre-recruitment process, the recruitment process shouldn’t take to long, right?
Relationship
After the dating we might go into a relationship, maybe moving in together, but we agree on what we do and do not want and we are aligned for the future. In several European countries, this would be a fixed-term contract for 1 or 2 years for example. With American at-will contracts you probably never talk of marriage as, well, it’s never really comparable to marriage. But we agree we’ll get into an exclusive relationship. This relationship should be based on trust and should be mutually beneficial and it should be understood that if either one feels underrated or abused, they might leave. The relationship should be one of equals, which doesn’t mean both have to do exactly the same, just like in any relationship both partners don’t have to bring in exactly the same money, do exactly the same amount of shopping of take the garbage out the same amount of times. It’s about balancing in a way both parties feel respected and feel their contributions are valued.
Open relationships
This is not for everybody, but there are people that like and can deal with an open relationship. This means you have one main employer, but the employee is allowed to have side gigs. Of course, in an open relationship, it’s about the short hustle and not about true feelings, so these side gigs are always very short-term and have fixed start and finish dates. If both parties can agree on this and live with this, this could work out great. Having a side hustle every now and again might help the employee stay longer as they see the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the street and it does give them the chance to let out their creativity and maybe even learn a thing or two they can bring back to the steady relationship. An example of this is the TV anchor that is also an MC on events.
Polyamorous relationships
Again not for everybody, but for some people polyamorous relationships really work. The difference with an open relationship is that in this case feelings do come into play and you just have multiple relationships at once, but all in the open. This might be more freelancing with several contracts running simultaneously, but there is no reason this needs to be contract work. Take for example the full professor that’s also the chief science officer at a start-up or for example the consultant that helps multiple clients at once improve their talent acquisition. One might even argue that you average RPO has a polyamorous relationship with their clients and some of them lend out some of their staff to several of them. I’ll let you think of the word you might want to call the RPO in this case.
Prostitution
Of course, we need to talk about gig workers, especially the low-level gig workers that just do the task and get on with the show, we might want to call them prostitutes. Legal in some countries, illegal in others, in a grey area in many nations, so depending on your stand on this you might want to think if you have a moral dilemma hiring gig workers. And to be clear, it is a part of the economy and should be, just like prostitution is in every country, but we might want to ask ourselves if the amounts we are seeing now are sustainable for a healthy ecosystem.
Marriage
And finally, there’s marriage. The fixed contract, in many European countries, is indeed fixed and takes a long and expensive process to lose, at least for the employer. With quit rates, as they are questions need to be asked if this is the contract we should be building our social systems on. This should not be taken lightly or it should be agreed upon upfront that divorce is actually expected.
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