CFOs Share Labor Day Lessons on Worker Supply, Demand

It’s been a job seeker’s market post-pandemic, and as the seasons turn and we observe Labor Day 2022 in the U.S., labor shortages persist.

Not only has that challenged corporate management, it has also given many employees the upper hand in questions such as wages and where and when to work. Management, including chief financial officers (CFOs), has had to focus more than ever before on employee morale, recruitment and retention.

PYMNTS discussed the issues with CFOs throughout August. Here’s what they had to say.

Mariana Coontz, CFO of DigniFi, said her company is remote-first, which helps it nurture a robust, energized, diverse team.

“The digitization of the general economy has made for a virtual world. You must make sure that you’re being inclusive and making sure that people feel that camaraderie and that culture, even though you’re sitting in different places in the world.”

Vic Russo, CFO of ReachDesk, said it’s important from a cultural perspective to make sure employees feel good about what the company is doing.

He added that the company’s unlimited paid time off (PTO) benefit contributes to the corporate culture and hasn’t crimped productivity. “It’s a fantastic benefit. We have a problem with getting employees to take their PTO. So, we’re trying to find times throughout the year where we’re just saying everybody is off,” Russo said.

Daniel deHaas, CFO of iBASEt, said it has become very difficult to find qualified people at a time when heightened global tensions have increased the business and thus the need for additional human resources — payroll is by far the company’s biggest expense.

“When COVID hit, we were looking at what we should do with our people, but it was actually an accelerator of growth, and we needed a lot more people,” he said, adding the company has increased staffing by 50% in the last year alone. To meet the demand, the company has found them in non-traditional locations, including overseas.

Mark Himelfarb, CFO of Accolite Digital, said most of the company’s human resources are in India. There, core operations have been bedeviled by wage inflation well before the current bout in the United States.

“It’s a very competitive area,” he said. “Virtually every year the wage inflation in India means that if you don’t maintain pace, you’re going to lose people. Demand is so high, and supply is just way below that.”

The company’s strategies to address the staffing issue revolve around culture — maintaining a collaborative, transparent environment, providing generous benefit packages including healthcare and extensive training programs.

In addition, the firm uses its global enterprise resource planning software to manage human resources vis-a-vis the client workload.

Joel Jeselsohn, CFO of Tangoe, said: “We are fighting even more over talent because companies are going hybrid or even work remote 100% like we do. So, you can hire people anywhere, and the fight over talent is not only now in your local territory, it’s actually global. That’s an issue we deal with on a day in, day out basis.”

To cope with the problem, the company has made efforts to keep remote workers engaged by keeping them up to date, providing transparency about results, creating excitement around the product and what the company does, and making sure that every individual understands exactly what they do and how they contribute to the success of the company because if they don’t, they will check out, Jeselsohn said.

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