Yahoo Finance Home workers lack social skills, warns recruitment giant
The world is facing a “soft-skills crisis” as home working leaves millions of workers struggling to interact with colleagues, the head of one of the world’s largest staffing companies has said.
Christophe Catoir, global president of Adecco, said lockdowns and the rise of home working had left millions of people struggling with empathy and creativity.
Mr Catoir said: “Social skills are more important than ever. Empathy, the ability to create a warm relationship, trust, creativity, those things will be more leveraged by companies than ever before.
“One damage from Covid – and it’s something very serious that we don’t talk about a lot – is you damage the human skills of people. For young people joining a company, you need to have mentorship. And if you don’t have this appetite for people and you don’t create the ability to learn from each other, you can really damage the potential of a candidate.”
He said the continued legacy of lockdown, in the form of persistent working from home, was creating a “soft-skills crisis”.
His comments come as City bosses ramped up a crackdown on office shirkers reluctant to return to pre-pandemic working habits.
Magic Circle law firm Clifford Chance has announced plans to monitor staff office attendance in a crackdown on home-working refuseniks who won’t to come in.
The London-based law firm said that tracking individuals will help managers “better understand and support their team’s adherence” to its minimum in-office requirements.
The law firm requires UK staff to work from the office at least 50pc of the time over a two week period, equivalent to five days in a fortnight.
Staff who are not coming in enough will be reminded it’s their job to help build company culture as well as completing their day-to-day transactional work.
Rival law firm Slaughter & May, which is an adviser to the Bank of England, earlier this month told employees they will be monitored when they enter and exit its offices.
Staff will be “asked to comply” if they do not return to their desks at least three days a week.
Meanwhile, Bank of America recently sent “letters of education” to home-working staff threatening disciplinary action if they don’t meet minimum office requirements.
Martine Ferland, the boss of Mercer, the world’s largest HR consulting firm, said there were growing generational differences in the workplace.
Ms Ferland said Gen Z workers found it harder to pay attention than Baby Boomers because they had grown up using social media such as TikTok and Instagram.
Ms Ferland said: “My experience is when Gen Z spend time on something, they dedicate themselves and want to succeed. I think what they have less than we did is attention span.
“It’s the overload of information [and] fear of missing out that means when you’re reading something and suddenly your phone pings, you immediately think: oh, there’s something else I need to do.
“I know I sound like a dinosaur and a doomsayer, and I don’t want to generalise, but there’s definitely a risk of people not paying enough attention.”
