A month before Axios declared this, Maven’s VP of People, Karsten Vagner, took to BenefitsPro to talk about how HR leaders have been rising to the occasion:
The crises of 2020 are many—the pandemic and its horrific toll, the devastating economic recession, this summer’s painful reckoning with racial injustice. For businesses, they are also all fundamentally human, and have resulted in wave after wave of people-related challenges, none of which we’ve fully addressed. HR has necessarily been front and center in responding to these crises as they arose, but putting out fires is not the sole function of a good HR team. It’s anticipating the challenges still to come, putting policies in place that demonstrate empathy and seizing opportunities presented by crisis, building trust with employees at every step.
Indeed, as companies have struggled to navigate the crises of this year, HR teams are operating like the nervous, cardiovascular, and immune systems all in one: ensuring employees feel supported to do their jobs and stay healthy, while helping push the business forward in a volatile economy during a divisive election cycle.
Innovative HR and benefits leaders have risen to the occasion, enacting flexible policies and offering new benefits and policies to drive engagement and maintain productivity, reduce turnover from particularly vulnerable employee populations, and fill gaps left by COVID-19, whether for help with child care, mental health support, or access to telemedicine. They are taking decisive action because they understand the stakes to the business:
- Employees experiencing burnout are 2.6 times more likely to quit their job
- At least 13% of U.S. parents have had to quit a job or reduce working hours due to lack of child care caused by COVID-19
- Women are leaving the workforce at four times the rate as men, and more than 2 million women are considering taking a leave of absence or leaving their careers altogether
- Replacing an employee costs employers up to 213% of that employee’s salary
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