Is the “Employment change” grass a little less green today?

July 16, 2024/Business/

We’ve all heard the saying, “The grass is greener on the other side of the street“. And, what that pertains to is that wherever you are, in whatever situation you are in, it always appears that life would be a little easier somewhere else. However, until you have tried that “somewhere else” do you really know?

The flip side of that “greener grass” thinking comes from Shakespeare and is a saying that I’ve always taken to heart. . . .”Why leave these ills we have for those we know not of?” That portrays a little more cautionary take and one that I’ve thought of many times. I’ve thought about that statement when I contemplated changing banks and even changing some things that are even less consequential to one’s being like changing cable to streaming for my television watching. . . Quite frankly, I think about that saying almost any time I’m making a permanent change in something.

In any regard, coming out of the pandemic in late 2021 seemed to move people into the thought process of “Am I living in the right place?” or “Am I doing the right work?” or both of those thoughts together such as “Am I working in the right place?”. . . . And, at that time some people had cocooned from employment during the pandemic and when the world started opening up again, partly because of this cocooning that brought many people out of the workforce, many employers simply needed employees in all walks of employment, including funeral directors.

I don’t have any statistics on how often this happened with funeral directors and I would wager, because most funeral directors were needed and continued to work during the pandemic, that it happened less in funeral service than many other occupations. However, there was no doubt that funeral directors were in demand by funeral homes all over North America at that time. . . and some funeral homes needed them really bad.

And because of that phenomena, employees in virtually all occupations who ventured out and switched employment were rewarded, in general, with better pay and benefit packages than those who stayed at their present employer. As you can see from this recent graph, that trend is changing and that should be welcome news to employers going forward.

Employees, especially great funeral director employees are a valued commodity. For all those “job changers” right after the pandemic I hope that the change was all that they thought it would be. . . However, I’m guessing for some the employment conditions, even with a higher salary, was not worth it.. . . .maybe it turned out that “the grass was not greener on the other side of the street”.

If you are an employer you should be looking at all that you can do to keep good employees. In researching for this article I found a good article titled “Retaining your employees” from Rollings Funeral Service. You can access it here.

If you are an employee I would caution you to think about Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the words that were written over 400 years ago in about 1601 . . . . .you know what you don’t like about your present job. . . . maybe it is easier to talk to the boss about the situation and try to collectively improve it rather than simply leave for what may be “. . .ills you know not of“.

Related — From job-seeking site Indeed.com, here’s an interactive web-page for funeral director salaries across the United States.

Related article — Wage growth nears three-year low in June as “labor market” enters different regime. Yahoo Finance

Related article — More than 60% of funeral directors nationwide are about to retire. Do you want this job? Carolina News & Reporter (SC)

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