10 Mar IWD – CUPCAKES DON’T CUT IT; SAYING GOODBYE
Welcome to this week’s round up of insights and commentary, brought to you by Team Cannings.
IWD – CUPCAKES DON’T CUT IT
International Women’s Day (IWD) has been celebrated for 120 years, but is the day in need of a new approach?
This week’s celebration of IWD has seen some commentators argue that the day has been overly corporatised, with companies hosting IWD breakfasts, morning teas and lunches. In fact, they argue, what women really want is for their bosses to take meaningful action towards equal pay and creating a more inclusive workplace.
While there’s been improvements for women in the workplace over the years, the gender pay gap still sits at 13.3 per cent, and women still makeup just 23 per cent of C-suite positions among ASX 200 companies.
SAYING GOODBYE
The tech sector has been hit by mass layoffs in recent months, with Meta, Microsoft, Atlassian and Amazon all saying goodbye to large numbers of their workers.
Now, finance, consulting, and car-making companies are announcing global redundancies as executives prepare for a possible recession.
The Financial Times spoke to management experts about the “best” way to lay off employees without damaging company morale and future growth.
Their top tips included not letting the process drag on, to focus on non-core business units for possible redundancies, and not to lay off new arrivals as it wastes the money just spent on their recruitment and training.
NO MORE TIKTOK
Social media platform TikTok has been banned on work-issued devices by 25 Australian government departments amid privacy and data collection concerns. This follows similar moves by the Canadian government, US Senate, and European Commission.
So, will big corporates do the same?
Not necessarily. Some US companies have found another solution: providing employees with secondary work phones to keep corporate data secure instead of requiring workers to remove TikTok from their personal phones.
Maybe it’s time to dust off those old Blackberrys.
COVID CONCERN
New data released by Actuaries Institute, a Cannings’ client, this week shows that Australia recorded nearly 20,000 more deaths than expected in 2022, largely because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Karen Cutter, spokeswoman for the Institute’s COVID-19 Mortality Working Group, told The Australian Financial Review the numbers were “extraordinarily high” and beyond normal levels of fluctuation in non-pandemic times.
The Institute has been tracking the death toll closely since the pandemic began. You can access a copy of the report here.
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