When it comes to managing, planning, and staffing during significant transitions—here are some things to ponder.
In current times I feel a little like the character Alice, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, wherein she says, “I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards.”
Your HR staff may feel a little like Alice.
Corporate jobs are disappearing; some such downsizing may be overdue because of more utilization of technology and the fact that AI is here. I have advocated for years for my readers to automate 90 percent of their HR practices and save the human touch for direct contact with the employees.
As a reminder, your website, application tracker, onboarding, payroll, and benefits should be integrated into the system. Most of these systems also have integrated training modules for you to deal with legal compliance issues proactively before they happen.
On another note, I wrote back in the April article that I hoped we would not have a recession. I had also joked about a return to the Gilded Age. Not a week later, the Wall Street Journal mentioned the Gilded Age. There is a popular cable TV show about it; art often imitates life.
Except for the lack of regulations to protect employees, the Gilded Age was a time of tremendous innovation with little government regulation. Remember the oil industry in Pennsylvania and Standard Oil? Railroads crossed the country, and we flipped the switch for electricity. I must mention the telephone, even though I read that Mark Zuckerberg thinks smart glasses will replace the smartphone in the next ten years. What if you are too vain to wear glasses?
Returning to the topic of the Gilded Age, data suggest that there was almost a nonexistent middle class, and a few held most of the wealth. On the other hand, according to the economic historian Clarence D. Long, in terms of constant 1914 dollars, the average annual incomes of all American non-farm employees rose from $375 in 1870 to $395 in 1880, $519 in 1890 and $573 in 1900, a gain of 53 percent in 30 years.
To add another thought to what came with the Gilded Age, there’s this: lots of immigrants became Americans, and we had a decent mechanism for allowing them into the United States, no matter how it was recently portrayed in a popular cable show. We also needed the workers back then as we do now. Although the known history of both sides of my family goes back 300 or 400 years, by marriage, my great uncle’s family was like many Italian and Sicilian families who came through New Orleans and enriched the culture of all that we love about Southern Cuisine. His nephew was a well-known orchestra conductor in San Antonio. They, too, were escaping the corruption of Sicily, and as family folklore goes, the mafia was after his father. Have you ever read about the Maceo family in Galveston?
However, as a note of caution, annual per capita income in the United States in 1914 had slipped to a modest $377, with Britain following in second place at $244, Germany at $184, France at $153, and Italy at $108, while Russia and Japan trailed far behind at $41 and $36. We all know what followed for the next 30 years.
As a minor footnote to the Gilded Age, employees did start getting benefits, they became more well-educated, and, of course, bureaucracies grew. Also, labor unions came into being, and the rest has been a thorn in the side of many businesses since.
Circling back to Alice in Wonderland, which Lewis Carroll published in 1865 in the onset of the Gilded Age, there is the matter of Alice falling through a rabbit hole and wondering about falling through the earth. If you remember, Wonderland was a place where logic and reason were often quite different than the reality Alice knew. It is also a tale of her growing up, when one’s sense of reality and view of the world may be very different.
Arguably, the reality of business-as-usual is making a dramatic shift. I cannot judge whether it is good or bad or somewhere in between, but we may have already fallen through the Earth, and without a doubt, we need some stability to move forward.
Planning for the future brings worry to many, in light of looming tariffs and the price increases that the American people might need to endure. I need to stop now and say that I am a lifelong Republican. However, it is not good when the United States lacks affordable and well-built housing. I was looking at arguably two of the top home builders for tract homes in Houston in early March, and they plan to eat any uptick in costs, at least temporarily.
We still need more housing in the Permian Basin. There are not enough houses for sale, and the well-built ones do not sit on the market for long.
We also need employees of all kinds; but after living here for 21 years, I know we want our employees to have some form of permanence here. To me, that is home ownership. If construction costs go up much more, it will be a renter’s paradise—or, shall I say, a banner era for those investors who own apartment homes.
Next, where will we find more workers? We will have many government workers laid off and filing for unemployment. There will be private industry workers also filing for unemployment in droves.
Now is the time for your HR folks and your CEOs to plan for aggressively hiring folks who may not be used to the pace of private industry. That means using social media campaigns that also automatically link back to your online HR platforms. Take advantage of folks that want to work. Government pensions are not always as high as what you read about on social media.
Let us also try to get these recently unemployed people off unemployment. Buyout or not, they can still file and will file for unemployment. It is not the Gilded Age yet. As the HR Lady, I worry about paying billions of dollars in unemployment claims. Executive Orders cannot change laws. There are lots of lawyers, lots of loopholes, and lots of levels of courts.
Ultimately, we should consider history while considering what is going well. Mark Twain wrote The Gilded Age in 1873. It was written as a satire about the times following the Civil War. I never read it, but it will be my next Audible listen. As a history and government major and a pretty good HR lady, I am ashamed to have waited so long.
I also suggest an excellent read for managing the transition. I have never forgotten that William Bridges wrote some terrific resources and he gave us this memorable quote: “If the past isn’t how you thought it was, then the present isn’t, either. Letting go of that present may make it easier to conceive of a new future…. First, there is an ending, then a beginning, and an important empty or fallow time in between.” Additionally, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Not in his goals but in his transitions, man is great.”
Michele Harmon
“Your employees are the heart of your organization.” Dr. Michele Harmon is a Human Resource professional, supporting clients in Texas and New Mexico that range in size from five to more than 3,000 employees. Email: micheleharmon1@gmail.com
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