Idaho bosses’ top worry: keeping employees

Many of Idaho employers’ biggest concerns center around labor, and their biggest gaps in employee skills are considered more “soft skills,” results from a new Idaho Department of Labor survey show.

IDOL economists Tuesday presented in a webinar a snapshot of some of the results from the department’s Idaho Employer Climate Survey, which was conducted in March; the full results will be released in July.

Craig Shaul, research analyst supervisor at the department, said the survey was done to ask questions about remote work, how employers are feeling amid the nationwide economic climate the past few years, and other information that national data doesn’t include.

“As everyone knows, we’ve been going through a kind of turning point in the labor market. There’s lots of changes that’s been happening, especially after the pandemic,” Shaul said.

About 2,300 employers responded, said Matt Paskash, a labor economist in the department.

From those respondents, around 31% said high labor turnover was their main concern, and 22% said supply or cost of workers.

“With ChatGPT and other AI applications coming out, (there’s a) lot of talk about how much they’re going to be displacing workers and very disruptive to industry,” Paskash said. “We still need flesh-and-blood people showing up in some capacity to do certain tasks which simply just cannot be automated and probably will not be able to be automated any time soon. Labor is still a very necessary input to the economy and that’s being reflected here.”

The primary reason for the reported turnover was employees leaving their employer for a different job and leaving to go to another employer for a similar job, at 25% and 19%, respectively. Retirement accounted for 13.9% of departures. In total, around 85% of the respondents reported the employees leaving based on their own decision, and 10.7% were because of discharge or termination.

Given the tight labor market, it’s not a surprise workers are moving around, Paskash said.

“What we’re mostly seeing right now is just the churn of workers trying to find the best match for them in terms of work arrangements, compensation, so on and so forth,” he said.

Asked which skills would need to increase over the next five years, many employers mentioned supervisory and managerial skills as the top needs, with time management, teamwork and work ethic close behind.

Basic computer software skills were also a common expected need over the next five years.

Although the pandemic moved a lot of work to remote or hybrid, the vast majority of Idaho’s employers are in-person only, the results showed. Across all industries that responded, nearly 89% reported an in-person work arrangement with 5% hybrid and 6% remote.

However, in the professional, scientific and technical services industry, 53% had a remote work arrangement with 18% hybrid and 29% in-person. The information sector reported 45% with remote work arrangements, 22% hybrid and 33% in-person.

The department’s survey also collected demographic data for business leaders in the state.

Results showed the median age of owners or leaders at employers is 50 years old; the median age of Idaho’s workforce is 40.

The majority of Idaho’s business leadership is male, with 58.6% men and 39.6% women, the survey found. A small percentage either chose not to respond to the question about gender or reported nonbinary or gender nonconforming.

Most entities reported having mixed genders in leadership positions and 36% had only men as leaders; many of the male-only respondents were sole proprietorships, economist Lisa Grigg said.

Women-only employers were primarily in education, health care and professional, scientific and technical services. Men-only leadership was reported mostly in construction, wholesale trade, and agriculture, forestry and hunting.

The percentage of respondents with at least one Hispanic leader or owner was close to proportionate with Idaho’s population; around 14% said there was a leader with Hispanic ethnicity, and Idaho’s population is about 13% Hispanic.

More information gleaned from the survey will be released in July.

“What we’re giving is perhaps just a slice of a much larger pie, so to speak, of what all we found in the survey,” Paskash said of the information presented Tuesday.

The department is scheduled to host another webinar on July 11.

Guido covers Idaho politics for the Lewiston Tribune, Moscow-Pullman Daily News and Idaho Press of Nampa. She may be contacted at lguido@idahopress.com and can be found on Twitter @EyeOnBoiseGuido.