Back in 2019, I had a client whose daily commute to work was 5 hours round trip. That’s 25 hours per week and a little over 52 (24 hour) days per year spent traveling to and from work. Add in an 8 hour work day and her job was taking up 13 hours of her day, 5 days per week.

By the time I met her, she’d been doing this for three years and she was miserable. She had very little time for family, friends or herself, and she was too exhausted and burnt out to enjoy it when she did.

She wanted to leave but was caught in a vicious cycle that didn’t afford her the time and energy necessary to look for a new job, and she was afraid to quit before she had something else lined up.

So that’s where I came in.

We held our sessions over the phone while she was commuting. I helped her clarify what kind of role she wanted, updated her resume, made a list of people she wanted to network with plus some warm and cold outreach email templates, and identified a bunch of open positions that matched what she was looking for. She still had to apply for jobs herself but I made it much easier for her to do that.

Within two months, she landed a new job that was 15 minutes away from her home and came with a nice pay bump as well. It was a game changer.

Not only is she exponentially happier with her personal life, but she’s also become a more productive and higher performing employee. Plus, thanks to the pandemic, her role is now hybrid and she only has to commute 1-2 days per week.

My client’s situation was extreme but my point in sharing it with y’all is this: the employee experience matters and companies need to take it seriously if they want to stay competitive.

Long commutes that negatively impact a person’s work life balance will negatively impact performance, increase turnover, and make it hard to attract or keep top talent. Yet many companies are implementing mandatory return to office policies.

Some leaders claim they’re doing this for productivity reasons but what they’re actually communicating is that they don’t trust their employees and care more about their productivity than their wellbeing, which is costing them their high-performers (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/return-to-office-mandates-how-to-lose-your-best-performers/).

As it should.

Expecting employees to be grateful because you give them a paycheck for jobs that over work them, under value them and make them miserable is egotistical and out of touch. And when these employees leave, it’s not that people don’t want to work anymore, it’s that they don’t want to work for you.

But if you take care of your people, they'll take care of your company.

A lot has changed since 2019 and the bottom line is that companies that aren’t willing to be competitive when it comes to talent aren’t going to make it long term.

There is no going back to the way things “used” to be.

So adapt or get left behind.

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