Employers might have to change their measures of productivity to fill job openings, suggests a recent HRDive report.

Companies unable to find sufficient skilled employees to fill vacancies might have to look to the ranks of the disabled, of older employees and those who need more flexible working arrangements in order to find the talents and skills they need. In short, they might have to become more accommodating.

Related: HR: Face your fears

Employees who had to leave the workforce due to disability might want to return, given the opportunity, according to John Yent, director of vocational services and benefits advisor at Allsup. Yent is quoted in the report saying, “The real incentive is for employers to realize they have a person who may be going on disability and if there is any shot at all of this person eventually returning to work, you want that employee to be a part of a program that does it.”

Often, if an employee applies for Social Security Disability Insurance, Yent points out, many employers assume their relationship with that worker is over. However, stepping in early in the process can provide those workers a path to healing and a way to return once they are ready.

“The folks who have disabilities want to go back to work,” Yent says in the report, adding, “People who apply for SSDI wanted to stay working. The chance to do that, they feel, is mostly out of their hands.”

According to Leslie Caputo, head of enterprise strategy at Werk, an online job platform focused on flexible work, employers have been willing to go as far as total plan design changes, including a shift to high-deductible healthcare plans and improved focus on employee shopping skills, in order to keep the cost of health care plan in check. But in the report, Caputo says that they have to be as willing to transform the structure of the workplace in their quest to close the skills gap.

“I think a lot of people are worried about this,” Caputo says of the talent gap in the report, “and I think what is so interesting about that is that a lot of time, people look at other solutions but very rarely look at how work is structured itself.”

And according to Kate Donovan, SVP of ManpowerGroup, providing more flexibility in the workplace is something workers want, with approximately 40 percent of all candidates, regardless of gender or background, saying that flexibility is one of the top three reasons they choose to go to an employer.

Defining flexibility as a benefit can be tough, and Werk created the “flexiverse”, a framework that explains and defines six different forms of work flexibility: remote work, DeskPlus, TravelLite, TimeShift, MicroAgility and part time—each of which describes a different means of distributing work time and location to provide flexibility to workers.

But the creation of a more sustainable work model now, the report says, “will survive when technology, the economy or both require quick reactions and innovations.”

Instant Insights /

To beat talent shortage, change productivity measures

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