Though challenges still exist in the wake of the pandemic, some employers are optimistic about the changes that COVID-19 has brought forth, including expanded talent recruitment, technology implementation, and downsized office spaces.

BY JENNIFER LESSER, CONTRIBUTING WRITER ON MAR 7, 2022

As the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in New Jersey back in March 2020, nobody could have predicted the ongoing impacts on local businesses and industries. Two years later, some of the changes brought forth by the pandemic may continue for the foreseeable future, from increased numbers of remote employees to decreased demand for office space. The good news is that number of new COVID-19 cases, at press time, is dropping and that this pandemic has or will evolve into an endemic.

It would be impossible to discuss the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic without highlighting the ways in which companies, both big and small, have had to embrace technology to conduct their business remotely, from virtual Zoom meetings to online storefronts and digital payments.

Culture, Technology & Workspaces

Stacey Goodman, executive vice president and chief information officer at Prudential Financial, asserts that the most significant shift over the past two years has been both the cultural and technological changes required for employees to adapt to this new working environment. “One of the biggest challenges has been maintaining engagement and fostering collaboration as employees continue to work from home,” she says.

That’s why Prudential launched a formal technology-experience program, listening to employee concerns and communicating early and often about new technology. “We engaged with more than 8,000 employees via listening sessions to demonstrate best practices and answer questions live,” she explains. “These efforts resulted in nearly 100% adoption of the new tools and an 18 percentage-point increase in favorable employee sentiment towards technology.”

Another one of the ongoing impacts for state businesses is the way many employers have had to either realign or postpone their reentry timelines to the office, thus extending the flexibility for their employees to work remotely or on a hybrid basis. According to Susan Mason, senior vice president at real estate firm NAI James E. Hanson, as a result of many businesses implementing the flexibility to work remotely, companies have been reevaluating their overall footprints in the office.

“They have been focusing not only on the reduction and consolidation of their office environments, but also on integrating certain redesign parameters of the space to achieve less densification of their layouts,” she explains.

Not surprisingly, commercial real estate has been one of the most significantly impacted industries in New Jersey, as many companies found themselves with workforces at home and unused office spaces. And as some businesses continue to allow their employees either a fully remote or hybrid schedule, Mason notes that many companies are taking advantage of aggressive lease packages and concessions being offered by owners of class A office space; in some cases, reductions in tenants’ overall office footprints have allowed them to secure space in upgraded, fully-amenitized buildings.

Childcare Challenges

However, as both employers and employees have grappled with relying on technology in order to remain connected over the past two years, parents across the state were juggling working from home with their kids because daycare centers and schools were closed. Additionally, New Jersey’s childcare industry continues to try to rebound from months of lockdowns and decreased enrollments.

“A lot of childcare centers are still struggling; they may have had some government assistance come through, but they rely on tuition payments to pay bills. Meanwhile, centers were shuttered during the lockdown and have since been operating with decreased enrollment – all while dealing with staffing shortages,” explains Lynette Galante, president of the NJ Child Care Association (NJCCA) and executive director of Future Generation Early Learning Centers, who notes that the pandemic caused the permanent closure of some 20% of all childcare centers throughout the state.

While New Jersey’s remaining daycare centers and early education centers are currently operational, Galante notes that enrollment still isn’t where it was.

The industry has also been struck by the staffing challenges that are impacting businesses across the state. When teachers are out sick, it leaves the rest of the staff scrambling to come up with solutions on how to remain operational while still meeting state regulations.

Galante sees the lifting of the mask mandate for childcare centers and schools – as of March 7 – a major step in the right direction toward reclaiming normalcy. “Lifting the mask mandate will help so much. It’s been stressful for our staff to be the mask police, and we all just want to get back to focusing on what’s important: the care and education of the children and families we serve,” she says.

Childcare centers, at press time, are awaiting further guidance from the New Jersey Department of Health. Galante is hopeful that there will be a relaxing of other restrictions that have been in place during the pandemic. “We need to start making changes so that we can build a solid educational foundation for the children – because they are our future,” she says.

More Flexibility

A positive impact the pandemic has had on companies is that it has opened employers’ eyes to the necessity of allowing their employees more flexibility, and has taught employees how to strike a better work-life balance. According to Steven Fleischer, senior director of DEI, talent acquisition and HR operations at Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), his company has been able to maintain its workforce throughout the pandemic and was committed to expanding benefits to support employees during these challenging times, such as time off for childcare needs.

“We also pivoted to remote work for employees whose jobs can accommodate it; we have some employees who have to dig up streets or work on poles, but many of our employees were able to shift to a full-time remote schedule or only come into the office if there is a business need,” he says. PSEG has also implemented an employee COVID-19 hotline for questions as well as a company-wide social media channel to address employee concerns.

“We’ve found that engaging employees and getting their direct feedback and incorporating what we’re hearing from them has helped tremendously with our decision-making,” Fleischer adds.

Daybase CEO Joel Steinhaus agrees that perhaps the most significant positive change as a result of the pandemic is that both employers and employees are recognizing and appreciating the need for autonomy and flexibility in their lives. “We’re at a moment in time when companies are rethinking the how, when and why of work – and how to be responsive and flexible to the needs of both their workforce and their customers,” he says. As employers have reconsidered how much space they actually need to conduct their operations, Daybase offers flexible, on-demand workspots. “We believe the notion that the office is dead is false, but I do think it’s going to get used very differently in the future since the pandemic has completely flipped behavioral norms,” he adds.

Other positive changes he notes are that people are shopping and interacting more locally than ever before as the pandemic has emphasized the importance of supporting small businesses. Additionally, with more people working closer to home there’s more of an opportunity for those local transactions.

A Broader Reach for Talent

Another major benefit for employers has been the ability to expand their talent recruitment to include potential employees who don’t necessarily live in the immediate area. “From the perspective of the employer, they’ve had the opportunity to widen the aperture of their talent base in a way that was never possible pre-pandemic. They can hire the best talent from anywhere in the state, the country, or even the world to join their workforce when most or all of their employees are already working remotely,” he adds.

As the nation continues to recover after these past two years, many local employers are recognizing the positive changes in their businesses and are optimistic about what’s to come. “Though this period in time has been terribly traumatic for so many people, it has also become a moment of opportunity for all of us to rethink the ways we’ve been operating as a society and in our businesses,” Steinhaus concludes.

POSTED IN EARLY EDUCATION

A state-funded pre-K program led to ‘significantly negative effects’ for kids in Tennessee

In some pre-K programs, ‘something is not better than nothing,’ study shows

by JACKIE MADER  January 24, 2022

By sixth grade, children in Tennessee’s state-funded pre-K program did worse than their peers who did not attend the program in measures of academic achievement and behavior, according to a recent study. 

Credit: Lillian Mongeau/The Hechinger Report

Children who attended Tennessee’s state-funded voluntary pre-K program during the 2009-10 and 2010-11 school years were doing worse than their peers by the end of sixth grade in academic achievement, discipline issues and special education referrals. The trend emerged by the end of third grade and was even more pronounced three years later.

These are the latest findings of a multi-year study that followed 2,990 children in Tennessee schools to look at the long-term impact of the state’s public pre-K program. The results, which were released earlier this month, could bring more scrutiny to public pre-Kindergarten programs and raise the question of whether they adequately set low-income children up for success.

“At least for poor children, it turns out that something is not better than nothing,” said Dale Farran, a professor in Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, director of its Peabody Research Institute and one of the authors of the study. “The kinds of pre-K that our poor children are going into are not good for them long term.”

The latest study is part of a series of reports by Farran and fellow researchers at Vanderbilt University about Tennessee’s voluntary pre-K program. The team’s past findings surprised early childhood experts and advocates who herald high-quality pre-K as a necessity to help prepare children, especially those from low-income families, for kindergarten.

The first part of the study of Tennessee’s program was released by the Vanderbilt University researchers in 2015. The results, said Farran, were “alarming”: The positive effects of the state-funded pre-K program faded out by the end of kindergarten and turned “slightly negative” by the end of third grade.

In the most recent study, the researchers found that children who did not attend the program fared better down the road academically and behaviorally. They compared two cohorts of low-income children, including one group that had been selected to receive a spot, at random, from applicants for the state program and one group of children whose parents applied for a spot but did not receive one. Some of the children who did not receive a spot in the program attended Head Start, center-based child care or had home-based care.

By the end of sixth grade, the children in the study who had been randomly selected to attend the pre-K program were more likely to be referred to special education services than their peers who had not secured a spot. Students who attended state pre-K were more likely to have discipline issues than students who did not attend the program. The graduates of the state program also performed worse on state academic tests.

Previous research suggests that the quality of the teachers and elementary school that children attend after pre-K may boost or undermine long-term effects of pre-K. But pre-K graduates and students in the control group of this study experienced schools and teachers of similar quality, Farran said, which suggests school quality cannot explain the negative effects.

The latest findings “should be much more alarming” than previous studies on this cohort of children, Farran said, because the negative effects became much more pronounced as children aged. “We’re choosing to enact [pre-K] as a policy and if it’s not working, we need to think about, well, what do we need to do for poor families to support them and their children so they do better in school?”

The quality of the state’s pre-K program could be partly responsible for the negative results. Although Tennessee meets 9 out of 10 quality benchmarks set by the National Institute of Early Education Research, Steven Barnett, director of the institute, has previously said those standards are minimum guidelines; in practice, all classrooms may not be meeting those standards. A 2014 study, for which Farran was a principal investigator, found that when classrooms across the state were evaluated using a widely accepted research tool, there was “great variation” in their quality scores. The vast majority, 85 percent of the classrooms studied, scored below the level of “good” quality.

In a 2015 article in The New York Times, Farran suggested Tennessee’s program lacks a “coherent vision” for pre-K, and leaves its teachers to “their own devices” to invent pre-K on their own, factors that may have contributed to the problems researchers discovered. The state has since taken measures to improve the quality of its program.

By the end of sixth grade, the children in the study who had been randomly selected to attend the state’s pre-K program were more likely to be referred to special education services than their peers who had not secured a spot in the program

During the 2020-21 school year, 44 states, the District of Columbia and Guam funded public pre-K programs. But most spend too little per child to support a high-quality, full-day pre-K program, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research.

Low funding, poor quality and a lack of support in elementary schools could be leading to poor outcomes after pre-K

The recent Vanderbilt University findings add to the conflict in early education research over the benefit of state-funded pre-K. Many studies find that providing early learning opportunities for 4-year-olds has positive, long-term effects. Research that tracks children over longer periods of time has linked high-quality pre-K to better employment, education and health outcomes as adults, although some of the programs studied had unique aspects, like offering home visits and social services. But other studies have found pre-K to have miniscule or disappointing results on children’s outcomes.

Farran said much more research into state pre-K programs is needed. She urged other researchers to control for family characteristics, as she and her colleagues did. Other studies that look at long-term pre-K effects may simply compare children who go to pre-K with children who do not, Farran said, without looking at the effects of knowledgeable or motivated parents who are seeking out pre-K programs.

That parental factor could impact student achievement and outcomes.

“We would argue that parent motivation is a critical factor to look at in terms of trying to evaluate how effective your pre-K program is,” Farran said. “In our study, all the parents were similarly motivated because they all applied [for a pre-K spot].”

“The kinds of pre-K that our poor children are going into are not good for them long term.”

Dale Farran, Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College

Despite the disappointing findings in Tennessee, Farran said there are some positive aspects of the state’s program, especially when it comes to supporting teachers. The program pays pre-K teachers the same rate as K-12 teachers and provides benefits like health insurance and a retirement plan, rarities for early education teachers outside the public school system.

However, the negative outcomes in Tennessee’s voluntary pre-K program suggest a need to rethink pre-K, Farran said. The lackluster results may be related to the way America approaches pre-K and educating young children.

Ideally, she said, pre-K should involve more play, with teachers frequently interacting with students and encouraging them to explore their interests. Based on years of observation and visits to classrooms, however, she worries that pre-K involves too much whole-group instruction, rigid behavioral controls, not enough time spent outside and too much time in which teachers are speaking, instead of listening to children.

“[We] have let ourselves get into the idea that what these children need is a lot more academic instruction.” Farran said. “And I would say, no, it’s just the opposite. What you would like to give poor children is a feeling of being cared for and being successful.”

The Pandemic Has Compounded the Turnover Problem in Early Childhood Education

By Emily Tate     Feb 9, 2021

For six years, Ernestina Fuentes had been building out her early childhood program, hiring trained staff, developing a model tailored to children with trauma and eventually earning a four-star quality rating from the state.

Fuentes, the founder and director of Herencia Guadalupana Lab Schools in Tucson, Ariz., had mostly avoided the high turnover rates that so often plague the early childhood sector. She found a steady staff of qualified teachers, many of whom had been with her program for years.

That consistency is important to any program for young children, but especially for hers, which primarily serves children who live in poverty and are, as Fuentes puts it, “wounded”—often moving through the foster care system, carrying experiences of neglect and abuse.

Before the pandemic, Guadalupana had 14 employees, all of whom, Fuentes says, were dedicated to the program’s mission to transform the lives of children and send them into kindergarten “verbal, confident and brilliant.” But by the end of March 2020, she’d lost nine staff members, all for reasons relating to threats or challenges created by COVID-19.

“It’s not just the loss of staff, but the loss of quality. ... That’s gutted.”

“It left a big hole in the quality of our program, the strength of our program,” Fuentes said by phone in mid-January, during her program’s third 14-day closure due to multiple confirmed COVID-19 cases. “It’s not just the loss of staff, but the loss of quality. It’s a hard job to build quality. We pride ourselves on that. That’s gutted.”

Staff departures were a major problem in child care long before the pandemic. While firm numbers are hard to find, studies estimate annual turnover rates between 26 and 40 percent for early childhood educators in licensed facilities. The risks and burdens of COVID-19 have made it all the more difficult to both retain high-quality early childhood professionals and replace those who leave.

In December 2020, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, which represents and advocates for early childhood professionals, published the results of a November survey of more than 6,000 home- and center-based child care workers. Among its findings: 69 percent of respondents said “recruiting and retaining qualified staff is more difficult now than it was before the pandemic,” citing reasons ranging from fear, anxiety, the need to protect themselves and their families, low compensation and lack of respect.

A Compounded Problem

Absent the threat of a global health emergency, child care providers still had a hard time bringing on—and keeping—trained teachers. The median pay rate for preschool teachers is $14.67 per hour, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. For child care workers, who often serve in supporting roles such as assistant teachers, floaters or aides, it’s even lower, at $11.65 per hour. Employer-provided benefits such as health insurance, vacation time and sick leave are scarce, due to the thin margins many programs operate on.

In many cases, early childhood professionals—the vast majority of whom are women, and disproportionately women of color—could make more money working elsewhere, with fewer stressors and less effort, as half a dozen providers explained in interviews.

“We are kept at a high standard—all this pressure to get these kids ready, keep them healthy and safe ... and then it’s like, ‘Here’s your minimum wage.’”

There’s also a respect problem in the field.

“We treat these people like they are meaningless, like they’re babysitters, like the work they are doing is not important,” said Heather Siskind, CEO of Jack and Jill Children’s Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “We are kept at a high standard—all this pressure to get these kids ready, keep them healthy and safe, be mandatory reporters. There are all these things put on us, and then it’s like, ‘Here’s your minimum wage.’”

Combined, it’s a tough sell across the spectrum, from a college graduate to an hourly worker— the latter of whom, Siskind acknowledged, might actually make more money behind the counter at Burger King.

“It has always been a challenge to find new staff,” she said. “You can imagine that, coupled with the coronavirus, it’s even more challenging now.”

Sudden Departures

For Fuentes, the departures happened early and in quick succession. Three of her former employees are the parents of infants and toddlers and “were really frightened” by the early reports of the virus outbreak in the U.S. Given how little was known at the time about how the virus was spread and how it might affect small children, there was a lot of fear and uncertainty.

“They said, ‘We can’t stay. We need to take our babies and go home,’” Fuentes recalled. “We understood that. But they were some of our most awesome teachers.”

The other six employees who left were older—in their 50s and 60s—and at higher risk for complications from COVID-19. Fuentes described them as “hard core, old-school people, totally dedicated to children.” She was sorry to see them go, but again understood the calculation they had to make.

Fuentes herself is 73 years old. She said she thinks “all the time” about the risks she’s taking by continuing to go to work, “but when I think about the consequences, there’s no way I could [stop]. This is a vision we have, to change the lives of children. Until I’m not able, I’m going to continue doing so. … To close this program completely, I would never do that.” (Fuentes said she did get very ill in early March, and later learned through an antibody test that she’d had COVID-19.)

Fuentes’ staff left for the same reasons many others described: heightened health risks, fear of possible long-term effects on children, their own family’s child care demands and a general sense of self-preservation.

Lucinda Ross, the executive director of St. Michael’s School and Nursery in Wilmington, Del., had some staff tell her, “I can’t do it. I’m too nervous. I’m anxious,” she recalled. A handful had to leave the center when K-12 schools reopened in the fall, to stay home and support their remote learners.

One staff member’s reason for leaving, Ross said, is burned into her brain: “She was a great infant teacher, and what she said to me—she was all set to come back to work—was ‘I have just been to my fifth funeral.’ She lost five relatives between March and June, and said she just couldn’t do it.”

Ross doesn’t blame her staff for leaving, however hard it is to see them go. The teachers are the ones up close with the children every day, enduring their coughs and sneezes—even if it’s from behind masks. One teacher told Ross that they needed to have more masks on hand for the little ones, because “for some of these kids, by 10:30 a.m., you could wring the saliva out of it.”

“They are putting themselves in harm’s way every single day,” Ross explained.

Hiring Replacements

Jaime Kotter, director of Trinity Presbyterian Church Preschool in Clearwater, Fla., has lost three employees since last summer, and she’s been looking since August for their replacements, with little success. “Trying to find teachers even before the pandemic was horrible,” Kotter said. “It’s been a little bit more challenging since COVID-19.”

In the last six months, Kotter has not seen a single applicant with a Child Development Associate—the most widely recognized credential for those pursuing a career in early childhood education. She gets a lot of applicants from the fast food, grocery and factory industries, many of whom, if she grants them an interview, will demand $13 or $14 an hour. That’s a non-starter, she said; her program usually pays new hires who lack experience in early childhood $10.50 to $11 an hour.

“When I meet with potential employees, I tell them, ‘This is something you have to love. There are days you want to pull the hair out of your head,’” Kotter explained. “I’m not looking for someone for a few weeks. I’m looking for someone who is invested, long-term.”

Siskind, who works at the center in Fort Lauderdale, sees plenty of applicants from the restaurant and retail industries too.

“You might get the [occasional] fast food worker, but if you pry a little bit, you might hear them say, ‘I love kids.’ It’s not, ‘I can’t wait to teach this child and watch them grow developmentally.’ So we ask, ‘Can this work? Can we teach them to want to teach kids?’”

Recently, Siskind was trying to hire someone who worked as a manager at Walmart and has a degree in early childhood education. But the Jack and Jill Children’s Center couldn’t afford to pay her what she was making at Walmart, and she needed the money. The woman walked away from the offer.

“What we’re experiencing now is nothing we’ve ever experienced before, in regard to staffing,” Siskind said, emphasizing how critical it is to keep the staff who have not already left, lest providers “find ourselves in a worse crisis.”

For Fuentes in Tucson, even since her original nine staff left, she’s experienced a revolving door of departures and new hires.

“Hiring is one of the hardest things during this pandemic. They just don’t stay,” she explained. “They have to decide if they want to take the risk—because it’s high risk. Then, do they want to do the training? It's a lot of training.”

Fuentes added: “Our turnover is horrific. In a month, I’m guessing we have three to four people leave.”

“It’s deflating to have them walk out, [but] if they couldn’t last a day, they don't belong here.”

The ones who come and go, she said, don’t stay long—maybe a few days to a week. She had someone in early January show up for one day before quitting. Siskind recently hired a woman who went on her lunch break on the first day and never came back.

“It’s deflating to have them walk out,” Fuentes said. “I have a bit of anger, but also a bit of, ‘Thank god,’ because if they couldn’t last a day, they don't belong here.”

That rate of turnover is more than frustrating. It’s costly. Many providers have to conduct background checks, process fingerprints and spend their own time interviewing and onboarding new hires. Fuentes estimated each hire costs $200 to process (tuberculosis tests, COVID-19 tests, fingerprinting, transcripts and more), and that’s not to mention the cost of her time. It is no small matter to invest that kind of money only to lose a person a week later, especially with the tight budgets most child care programs have to stick to.

“We’ve not had people who come and go like that before,” Fuentes noted. She prefers using word-of-mouth or even signs posted in the neighborhood over hiring sites like Indeed. Kotter, in Clearwater, Fla., said she has had greater success posting about teacher openings on her Facebook page than she has through any other means.

“You have to believe in the philosophy. You have to be committed, dedicated,” Fuentes said. “That takes development and training and modeling and exposure.”

The turnover has been a huge drain. The training required to bring on a new person is intensive. The inconsistency of it all, especially, has taken its toll. Fuentes is exhausted.

“It becomes really tense—the education and health piece. It’s a lot of stress on people,” she acknowledged. “The people who stay are incredible. We’re building back, but slowly.”

 

Research Says There Are 16 Covid-19 Personality Types. Leaders Have to Plan for Them All

Understanding the diverse ways people respond to a pandemic helps leaders make better plans.

BY JESSICA STILLMAN@ENTRYLEVELREBEL

Getty Images

The pandemic is extraordinary not just because it's a once-in-a-century event, but because it's a challenge literally every human on the planet has faced. To some degree at least, each of us has been impacted by Covid-19 this year. We are all in this together. 

But rather than the species pulling together to face a common threat like in some sci-fi alien invasion movie, instead we've often turned against each other, hoarding supplies, bickering about masks, and concocting wild conspiracy theories. 

History tells us this is far from unprecedented (outbreaks of plague, for instance, often prompted horrific pogroms against the local Jewish population), but why exactly do pandemics kick off such nastiness? And what does that mean for leaders who must manage diverse, mutually exclusive, and sometimes downright toxic responses to the pandemic? 

A rogue's gallery of pandemic responses  

That's the subject of new research from researcher Mimi Lam, who studies what happens when complex human and ecological systems collide. In a recent paper in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Lam breaks down people's response to the pandemic and explains how understanding the "16 Covid personality types" can help leaders design better pandemic plans. Here's her list of pandemic personalities: 

1. Deniers: who downplay the viral threat, promoting business as usual
2. Spreaders: who want it to spread, herd immunity to develop, and normality to return
3. Harmers: who try to harm others by, for example, spitting or coughing at them
4. Realists: who recognize the reality of the potential harm and adjust their behaviors
5. Worriers: who stay informed and safe to manage their uncertainty and fear
6. Contemplators: who isolate and reflect on life and the world
7. Hoarders: who panic-buy and hoard products to quell their insecurity
8. Invincibles: often young, who believe themselves to be immune
9. Rebels: who defiantly ignore social rules restricting their individual freedoms
10. Blamers: who vent their fears and frustrations onto others
11. Exploiters: who exploit the situation for power, profit or brutality
12. Innovators: who design or re-purpose resources to fight the pandemic
13. Supporters: who show their solidarity in support of others
14. Altruists: who help the vulnerable, elderly, and isolated
15. Warriors: who, like the front-line health care workers, combat its grim reality
16. Veterans: who experienced SARS or MERS and willingly comply with restrictions

You'll recognize many of these types from your Facebook feed and the nightly news. They're also not mutually exclusive. You can easily imagine a Veteran who is also a Realist, for instance. 

But while the fact that humans are behaving in weird ways in response to Covid isn't a revelation, those in charge are often still blindsided by the craziness and infighting. The value of Lam's work isn't in creating a characterization system to label your looniest colleagues (though go ahead and match acquaintances with numbers if that soothes you). 

Instead, it's to remind anyone charged with leading through this difficult time that humans react in diverse and sometimes difficult ways when faced with uncertain, invisible threats. You'll do a lot better if you expect all of these personality types to come out of the woodwork and plan for plenty of discussion, trust building, and differing responses, rather than counting on consistency and rationality.