Prince Achileas-Andreas and Isabella Massenet attend the American Ballet Theatre Fall Gala at David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on October 24, 2023.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images. Picture for illustration only.
Question from Mr. Reza:
Dear GC Editors,
Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Reza and I am a vice president in a HR department of a private company. I am not that high in my rank as I still report to our chief human resource. I wanted to use my office email just to be genuine but due to company policy, I am not able to. Hope you would understand.
I was formerly with another private firm with 400 total staff. My current firm has about 450 staff and the numbers is increasing. Part of the HR activity is to perform study on our staff so that we can fine tune our benefits / salary and bonuses to meet their needs. What is interesting here is that your issue on marital affairs, based on the influx of emails on marital problems, seems consistent with our HR study.
In my previous organization, we did an employee survey to assess staff level of stress by answering a few questions that were arranged by an external consultant who is an expert in mental health. The survey was mandatory and would contribute 3% to everyone's KPI as we wanted all 400 staff to participate. We had about 150 staff who were single and 250 were married. When the survey came back to us, we were quite amazed that approximately 70% of 250 married staff responded that marriage was their main stress contributor. And approximately 20% of single staff claimed that they have stress and it was due to their boss while the remaining 80% were happy. Out of that 80%, 15% were divorcees who have turned single, who responded they are now happy because they left a stressful marriage.
We did a few more studies focusing on these 70% staff & it turned out that approximately 50% of them did not perform well in their work deliverables because their marital issues had affected their work performance and had disrupted the companies overall scorecard performances.
I did a similar survey in my new company and the results were pretty much on-point from my previous firm, where a majority of staff whose work performance was not up to par was because of marital problems. We did not delve into what the marital problems were as it would be too personal. But the bottom line here is, marital problems can significantly affect a person's quality of work.
I raised this to our management committee a while ago. The Committee comprised of the CEO, CFO, Chief of People (hr), COO and directors. They are now mulling over ways to prioritize hiring experienced staff who were single (e.g. 35 above who are unmarried for jobs) rather than married staff.
The Committee is also keen to explore ways to improve company benefits offered to singles so that the benefits are fair to both singles and married staff and to attract more single staff in apply. This is also to cater to a workforce that is expected to be increasingly unmarried.
The Committee also sees the value of hiring singles as they do not apply leaves or sick leaves frequently. They are able to stay back at work and complete their work efficiently. They are also seen as mentally healthy where they are more active, more articular and less prone to sickness due to lesser commitments and debts. There are also views by the Committee on cost effectiveness where a married staff would need more money and has a tendency to leave the job because of financial constraints while the singles would be able to sustain longer in an organization.
All of this points are being re-looked by the Committee from a very interesting angle. If more companies were to conduct surveys like this, they could be thinking the same approach where focus would be on attracting singles as a long term cost investment as well as staff optimization. It could be seen as a danger to married staff as they may not be able to land a job. But from a C-level perspective, this is their job scope which is to think of ways to increase profits to their shareholders especially during this extremely challenging world. If they think that focusing on singles is beneficial to the company, then they would enforce that into practice.
I wanted to share this with you for your awareness / input / research / publication because this is a trending topic that is affecting everyone in the world. You may use my data in your articles. I notice that your site is trending on forums that touch on marital problems and hr. You marital complaints were featured in our office's intranet portal.
Something to look out for in a not so distant future as the increase of singles and the increase of divorce rates continue to rise.
Regards
Reza.
HR VP.
