As I write this, the headline on Stuff is “New Zealand officially in recession”. Reason to panic if you are a job seeker? Reason to breath a sigh of relief if you are a hiring manager? Not so much in my view.

Recession or no recession (and I realise this will affect many sectors significantly), unemployment remains stubbornly low, at 3.4% at the last count. This is still way below economic zero and we know from past economic downturns that unemployment lags other indicators by some months. Also at 3.4%, there is a lot of room for upwards movement in this rate before we equalise the market. An unemployment rate of 4.5% - 5.5% is considered “normal conditions” for the labour market.

And because of these factors, employers still cannot relax their views on flexible working and other candidate attraction strategies. What has become the norm is a 2 and 3 (2 days per week from home, and 3 days per week in the office) for most corporate environments and being the norm, it is now expected by employees rather than a ‘nice to have’ benefit.

Employees who are required in the office 5 days per week, and elongated hours or unusual hours have other options in this market and if this way of working and commuting doesn’t suit them it can be the push they need to enter the job market. If you don’t want to lose key people, it’s worth assessing the risk vs the flexibility you offer.

Here at Find we have a design your week approach, and most of our team have a day at home, and 4 days in the office, but a few have 2 WFH days, and 3 in the office, and others have full remote working lives (100% from home). We have found that this is a very personal thing for people and to be able to tailor flexibility to suit the person is the best approach.

We also have 4 Find days per year, one per quarter. These are designed to be circuit breakers, effectively increasing annual leave beyond the statutory 4 weeks and our team are encouraged to use them to take an extra days break every so often to recharge and have a rest. We’ve been doing this for many years now, and they are very well received and utilised.

Ultimately in this supply/demand challenged market, the more flexibility you can introduce the better, there seems to be little downside, however – full remote working is showing signs of fatigue and employees working 100% from home with no centralised office are talking to us about feeling isolated and missing in person contact with their teammates. It appears there is a happy medium!

If you would like to discuss the trends in employee benefits and candidate attraction strategies, feel free to call me on 021 844 076 for a catch up and I can let you know what I’m seeing out there in the labour market – right now.