UK unemployment falls amid record rise in job vacancies

The number of job vacancies in the UK soared to a record high of
953,000 over the last quarter, as employers battled severe worker shortages, data from the Office for National Statistics has revealed today.

As firms face challenges in retaining and recruiting staff, the Office for National Statistics figures also show evidence of inflation pressures from rising wages – with average earnings surging a recording 8.8% from a year earlier – as firms begin outbidding each other for staff.

As employers plan to save jobs and get people back into work, recent data from Future Strategy found that 57% still do not want to return to their 9-5 role, whilst 58% want flexibility in their current role. As such, firms must respond to this request and proactively develop their employee retention strategy to ensure longevity.

Future Strategy Club (https://www.futurestrategy.club) believes that Covid has fundamentally changed the power structure between employee and employer. Firms must now restructure how they think about their culture and ways of working, switching to a hybrid model to meet employee demands and build a team based on trust, the new currency in building teams that can help organisations work in disrupted times.

Justin Small, CEO of Future Strategy Club, – a network of the UK’s tier 1 consultancy talent – discusses:

“Employers need to understand that Covid has fundamentally changed the power structure between employee and employer. The diktat that working from home is less productive has been proved completely false – in fact, Covid has proven that working from home is more productive. Therefore, the talent is now dictating hybrid working terms to potential employers, and employers need to restructure how they think about their culture and ways of working.

Any large organisations that don’t trust their employees, and believe that if their employees are not at their desks they are not working, will struggle in this new post-pandemic world. The top-down command & control organisations have ignored the push for more horizontal hub and spoke organisational designs (where teams have more ground level decision making power) – but the chickens are coming home to roost as they find themselves with a distributed workforce due to Covid – and it’s horizontal or bust!

What is now key is hiring strategies and processes – these need to be recalibrated to hire employees that are more self-directed and independent thinkers – that can be trusted to make decisions. And line managers need to be retrained to enable talent to successfully deliver, rather than dictate how they work and what they should do. Trust is the new currency in building teams that can help organisations work in disrupted times.”