What's Hot in Small Business – Chris Crum

Conference Board Survey: Small Businesses Facing Worker Shortage Challenges

Conference Board Survey: Small Businesses Facing Worker Shortage Challenges Construction worker

Small businesses continue to face hiring challenges as they struggle to find workers. According to a recent survey by The Conference Board, businesses that hire industry and manual services employees are having a particularly tough time. This includes businesses in industries like construction, extraction, farming, installation, maintenance/repair, production, transportation, material moving, food service, healthcare/personal care, and cleaning.

The report concludes that, despite a significantly higher willingness to hire remote workers compared to a year ago, most organizations in this category are finding it difficult to find qualified workers. Eighty percent of them indicate this, compared to 60 percent of businesses who employ mainly professional and office workers.

Organization worker1

Image via The Conference Board

These industry/manual service-based businesses are also having a significantly harder time retaining workers compared to their professional/office counterparts. Forty nine percent from the former group have had a somewhat difficult or very difficult time retaining workers, while only 28 percent of employers from the latter category have had this level of difficulty.

Organization worker2

Image via The Conference Board

"These findings are consistent with other labor market measures that indicate historic labor shortages in the US because of a rapid reopening of the economy and a huge increase in demand for workers— especially for in-person services, where working was restricted due to the pandemic— coupled with pandemic-related labor supply constraints," The Conference Board says in its report. "One potential strategy to ease hiring difficulties in office-related jobs is to expand into new pools of labor by hiring full-time remote workers who live farther away from the office."

According to the survey, 55 percent of organizations are willing to hire full-time remote workers if they can occasionally commute into the office. A quarter said they are willing to hire full-time remote workers anywhere in the US. Seven percent will even consider hiring remote workers on a global basis. As you can see from the graph below, the pandemic has led to a major shift in this attitude among employers. Before the pandemic, the idea that so many would be willing to embrace remote workers was quite unlikely.

Organization worker3

Image via The Conference Board

The survey found that nearly 40 percent of organizations expect a significant portion of their employees to work remotely for as long as a year after the pandemic ends. Three quarters of those polled had less than 10 percent of their employees working remotely before the pandemic began. Interestingly, the survey also found that the perception of increased productivity over the past year was a key factor in employers’ increased willingness to adopt remote work for employees. It remains to be seen whether this perception will continue when the pandemic is over.

Data for the report was gathered in April and was compared to data gathered from a similar survey a year earlier, when the pandemic was still in its early stages. An additional survey was conducted in September. Utilizing data from this group of surveys, The Conference Board deems remote work to be the "most significant organizational legacy" of the pandemic.

Read other business articles