work – carloienna.com

Vaccines are working, cities are full again, the dust is settling, or is it? Over the last six months the press and the media have emphasized furthermore the problem of empty cities due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the need for shops, restaurants, and venues to reopen.

Despite the great hopes of going back to our 2019 life and routine, we have to be honest with ourselves and admit the post-pandemic reality won’t be the same as yesterday. Too much has changed and this whole terrible period is now a trauma on our body and soul.

But how are we going to fend the next six months and eventually the whole 2022? Do we have a strategy beyond what governments and health experts have already told us? Apparently not. We are scrambling amidst the lack of exit plan from the pandemic, masks will continue to be part of our lives, hand sanitizers will be everywhere like smartphones, but what about people and their workplace?

I’ve seen a struggle of public relations coming from politicians and CEOs on the topic of working from home, or working away from within the walls of their companies both in the public and private sector. Smart working saved countless lives and brands were praised for the effort taken by their workers staying away from their offices, finding the living room environment more productive than their cubicle.

Let’s not just make smart working a publicity stunt by rushing workers to immediately go back to their desks or else. It already happened at the Washingtonian Media where employees stopped publishing for a day in protest of their CEO’s message on the consequence of not coming back to the office.

The worst strategy leaders can pull off is to publicly threaten their employees. Threatening workers to remove their healthcare, 401k, and other fundamental benefits that are essential to any individual is as cheap as it sounds. A shot below the belt that will cripple the fragile situation many are still facing due to the effects of Covid-19.

So what can companies do to facilitate the transition to “normality”? CEOs should first admit to themselves the world has drastically changed. We cannot turn back the clock just like it was two years ago. The post-summer period will be chaotic as flu season will cycle back threatening the global healthcare, offices will risk to become again hot spots for any disease to spread.

Employees who are threatened to go back to work from the office will look at their leaders under a whole new different light, CEOs will lose that precious trust from their workers that allows performance and confidence to strengthen their success, and trust has become a rare commodity to treasure. Many will leave and seek new and more hospitable companies to work for, places that can offer even better conditions by hiring talented professionals from high-ranking companies.

Brands should talk to their employees by offering options to keep work schedules flexible. Let workers give back by extending that trust that was placed on them when working remotely and keep it that way, allow them to choose by not forcing on them. This will create even stronger bonds between the management and employees, many will choose on their own will to work again from the office.

Workers have faced traumatic experiences getting ill or having a loved one becoming affected by the pandemic. Stressing this scenario will backfire immediately upon companies ignoring this element. People want normality back and working with less stress as possible will help them through the transition, many will take longer to adapt and that’s fine, we can’t rush certain things especially since their lives have been touched forever and companies are not today what they were yesterday. –

During a hot July in Milan in 2009 I was scheduled for two job interviews in one afternoon three hours apart. I still remember that day because of the heat exhaustion I got along with the stress of performance for trying to land a job, those types of meetings can really dissect you on the spot giving you no room for poor choice of words when asked a question.

You are nervous and afraid of making a bad impression because in the back of your head you know the person interviewing is x-raying you, paying a lot of attention to your speech and the way you sit and move. They want to know how you behave under certain quality of questions, there’s a script they are following to obtain specific answers and reactions from you for their right profile to hire.

The first interview took place downtown Milan in a very fancy and historical building, one of those places that are a few hundred meters away from the Duomo cathedral, near pricey lawyers studios that only assist large corporations and bill by the thousand per hour. I was around 25 years old at the time and without the confidence I have today at 39.

I sat in front of this lady who was in charge of interviewing candidates for a sales position and foreign client relations. One of the major requirements beside the standard ones for the position was good written and spoken English and I knew I had it, I also fit the profile. So I sat in this large office with a tall ceiling and the interview began with the usual questions: my education background, my previous job experiences, and so on.

As the interview developed I managed to catch a glimpse of the time gone by through the clock on the wall without looking at my wrist watch for obvious reasons. We were twenty minutes in and yet no questions to test my English proficiency, the set of questions of the interview was more of an interrogation than anything else, there was no goal to what I was supposed to work for if hired and the lady wasn’t interested in understanding my skills but rather to let me know the terms of the contract weren’t flexible, the pay for a full-time job was €800 gross per month. Gross.

Such nefarious low wage has been proposed in Italy fifteen-something years ago when government implemented new rules and new contracts under the false pretense of “contract flexibility”. A whole new ‘rebate strategy’ had been used to save money by hiring overqualified candidates willing to accept full time positions for a part time salary. No holidays and no benefits of any kind. Recruiters would prey on the candidates’ desperate conditions of being unemployed for long times or being their first job, so they would sign these type of below minimum wage contracts out of desperation.

Somehow I knew there was a trap along this meeting like there always are. With that salary I wasn’t able to cover any rent and so I had to delay moving out from my parents’ home. That sum didn’t reflect any of my skills, time spent learning them, commuting costs, and so on. I politely made the case for a higher salary highlighting my experience abroad, my high level English, to no avail, the recruiter was impassable and I knew that moment they were hiring on rebate to save money rather than investing on their employees to grow.

I thought they would invest in me, or at least partially, to build the skills they required in order to have the right candidate by training. I was wrong, they were looking for some ‘pick and choose’ candidate as if they were choosing a product off the shelves, as if they were selecting their snack in front of the cold glass of a vending machine.

The second interview was more disappointing with the recruiter in front of me asking generic questions and eventually closing the meeting in the most unprofessional way: he admitted he didn’t have any opening available yet they were setting up interviews yet I was there investing my time in the hope for a position. I went back home tired, almost getting a heat stroke and while sitting on the train thinking about the day, I felt disappointed because of the poor quality of job recruiting done by people who had no idea how to invest in candidates to improve their companies. It wasn’t the first time I sat through that kind of interviews and my fear was that this had become the new norm, the new standard, the way things are after the 2008 financial crisis struck and that’s how it was going to be.

I had the hunch things weren’t going to get better from there on with companies posting constant losses throughout Europe, and an unstable political landscape that gave little hope for the job market to get back on its tracks in the best of shape. However a bad day has always something to teach you, it was clear I had to shake the disappointment off quickly and focus back on the next interviews. I didn’t mind not getting the job, but it would have been worse getting it with a bad company who is there to exploit you asking you way more than they’re paying you without leading or inspiring their workforce in the wight direction.