Why Should My Business Care About The Economically Fragile Worker?
There are at least four good reasons to care about economically fragile workers:
(1) Business expansion is constrained by a lack of available labor and tapping into the talent pool of economically fragile people is imperative;
(2) Efforts to influence economically fragile people repeatedly fail due to the lack of understanding of this population segment;
(3) Brand connection with consumers is strengthened when that brand is actively making a difference in the world; and
(4) Helping low wage economically fragile employees to become economically stable creates a competitive advantage.
Workforce expansion is a bottleneck for business expansion in markets with few available workers. Enabling economically fragile people to become successful employees expands the workforce and provides a rich source of talent and innovation.
Many employers are innovating to improve the process for recruiting multitudes of new employees to offset turnover. In our experience, operating a business where employees want to stay and work for you makes recruiting much easier, increases agility, and makes the business more profitable.
In our experience, low-wage economically fragile people are very aware of the precarious existence that they have and mostly consider it undignified. From our standpoint, the opposite of poverty is not wealth, it is dignity. That is why the idea of maintaining people’s dignity and pride flows through everything that we do.
What Can I Do As A Business To Help?
Typical approaches to influencing the behavior of economically fragile people include offering financial handouts that are humiliating; implementing incentive programs that do not incentivize; or meddling into peoples’ lives with no invitation.
Economically fragile people are justifiably proud of the extreme effort they devote to carving out a life under difficult circumstances. They want to be engaged in the pursuit of meaningful goals and feel part of something that is bigger than they are. They seek and they deserve to live a life without unwanted outside interference.
Consumer research makes it clear that businesses must have a positive social impact. Vague claims about saving the environment are being replaced with specific, measurable social contributions.
Next week’s blog is titled, “Work for Me! Work for Me!” We talk about the hiring talent as the bottleneck for business growth.
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You can also subscribe to Dasher’s video blog on LinkedIn, titled 90 Seconds. Each week we have a different guest talking about the importance of helping economically fragile workers be successful in their life and their career.