For over a decade employers in the UK have become used to the fact that employees have a great deal of choice in the job market. Talent could leave to jobs with more money and benefits and in the USA and the Far East.

To fight this trend employers in the EU have been encouraged to “engage with their staff”, provide training and development opportunities and ensure that their talent is at all times happy and well managed. This trend has been encouraged by the UK Government as well as EU legislation providing employees with redress for any unfair treatment. In fact for ten years “niceness” has been in vogue.

However, has the tide begun to change? With the financial downturn employers would expect to see employees become less demanding so as to protect their jobs.

That will probably depend upon what happens to inflation. Already at its highest for ten years and predicted to increase to above 4%, employees are likely to expect increases in salary in order to keep up. Petrol tanker drivers are possibly the first in a series of high profile wage demands that will run through the coming autumn and winter.

Employers will feel constrained by increasing costs and an inability to increase their product prices and cost savings will result in “regretted layoffs”. The time to know that a recession is upon us is when the daily news bulletins begin to report redundancy figures as happened in the 1980s.

The trick for forward thinking businesses will be to identify those employees that are essential to survive the downturn, identify the skills that are needed and to develop a strong team that can ride out the storm.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Job Satisfaction, Retaining Top Talent.