GAZETTE: What are the most common barriers to advancement these workers face?

FULLER: There is no pathway, there’s no program available through work that allows them to demonstrate their capabilities or to develop skills required to be considered for advancement. Either the mechanism isn’t in place or access is limited — the hours required, or the timing or location of the training, or there are out-of-pocket costs. Workers are also very nervous about making their own choices about what they should do to advance. Many want some input or direction from their employer — what should I learn and where should I learn it?

Another big barrier is lacking someone who’s taken active interest in that worker’s progression. Someone in a position of greater authority, a direct supervisor who says, “You’re a hard worker. Let’s talk about what your ambitions are. Here are the two or three things that, if you could do them, you might get a higher-paying job in the operation.” A big issue for a lot of low-wage workers is soft or social skills. It’s easier to verify technical or hard skills — they can either run that machine or they can’t. But what’s their capacity to deal with strangers or to work in teams with others who are unfamiliar to them? How good is their spontaneous written and oral communication? Those are skills for which there isn’t a lot of training available. The absence of such skills is very often a significant barrier to advancement.

Life circumstances and the resources that a worker can bring to bear also represent big barriers. That resource could be their time. If you’re leaving your toddler with your parents or a friend down the hall, you’re constrained by the caregiver’s schedule. And, obviously, a universal issue is the lack of financial resources.

A lack of confidence is another barrier. How do I know what I should do? Am I going to be good at that? That is why work-based learning is such an important part of the solution. Most learning and training in the United States is through school settings and a considerable number of people are intimidated by school — they weren’t good at it, they didn’t enjoy it, they’re skeptical that it’s going to give them anything that employers will actually value. Upskilling and reskilling is sometimes as much inhibited by the concerns and anxieties of workers as it is by structural factors.

GAZETTE:  The report found a pretty wide gap between employer perceptions of how they treat their workers and the obstacles to advancement workers face versus what the workers say about these things. How much of a problem is that?

FULLER: A very important finding, and a bit of a surprise, is the disconnect inside companies, particularly larger companies, between the understanding of senior executives about what’s going on, and what’s happening on the shop floor. Senior management give themselves pretty high marks. They do not have any doubt that they’re doing the appropriate things for their industry, appropriate for their size, for their workforce. That they’re doing the right things in the right way. But many are making a classic managerial mistake. They’re assuming because they established a policy and announced a plan, because they have binders on desks and posters in the cafeteria, that those policies are being implemented in a way that’s consistent with their strategy and intentions.

When you go down another couple of ranks in management, that certainty becomes, “Well, we’re trying. It doesn’t get implemented universally as much as we’d like. It’s harder than it seems.” When you get down to the frontline supervisors — the foreman, the branch manager, the store manager, and the shift supervisor — who are responsible for executing a lot of these policies, their evaluation of how frequent and detailed feedback is or how easy it is for workers to access advancement opportunities is a lot closer to reality than the chief human resources officer or the chief executive officer. In fact, the frontline supervisors’ evaluation of the support offered to low-wage workers is very close to that of the workers themselves. That’s hardly a surprise; they work together. But the disconnect between the senior management’s impressions and the reality reported by the supervisors is huge. So, there’s a big “walking the talk” issue that leads to frustration on a lot of people’s parts.

GAZETTE: Employers do seem to recognize that there are huge financial and organizational costs to this churn and that it’s hard to find skilled workers to fill jobs, and yet they’re not ensuring their own workers get that training or education. Why not?

FULLER: The entire system is essentially predicated on the idea that eye-watering rates of turnover are inevitable. The lowest rate of turnover reported by the industries we studied was 50 percent per year. And that has all sorts of impacts. You have to design the job to be very simple because you’re bringing somebody in with no experience and trying to get them productive fast. The United States has proven in recent decades to be a very good at creating large numbers of people with fairly limited job market-relevant skills.

Employers have this attitude that the cost of inertia is zero and that anything beyond what they do today is a “new cost.” Many employers seem to think, “The only people I can attract for this job are basic workers, and it’s not worth it to invest in them because maybe they’re going to go to a different employer who can pay them better after I paid for their training.” Our data doesn’t support that. What it strongly suggests is that workers will be more loyal to employers who invest in creating opportunities for them, more engaged in their work. Their relationship with that employer will be stickier. Even though they’ve learned this new skill and could go somewhere else for higher wages, there are other considerations like, “These people have been good to me. I have more friends here. I feel confident that I know what I’m doing.” And they’re gratified when their supervisor says, “I’m so proud you did that. Let’s talk about a next step.” People tend to think of workplaces as economic contexts, and they are actually sociological contexts.

Employers are going to be facing a constrained supply of workers indefinitely. Isn’t it smarter to invest in who you’ve got and give them upward mobility? A significant majority of the workers we polled, 74 percent, said they’d rather stay where they’re working today if there were opportunities for advancement. Make that possible for them. Start slowing down this turnover carousel and build more permanence in your labor force. That’s way better than going out and looking to replace half the people in your workforce every year.

The research was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.