Malta’s traffic congestion is making it increasingly difficult for employers who don’t offer hybrid working arrangements to attract and retain staff, recruiter Marco Lia has warned.
“People who are actively searching for a job are rejecting offers that require them to drive on a daily basis to areas like Sliema, St Julian’s and Valletta,” Mr Lia, who works with Castille Resources, tells WhosWho.mt.
“They aren’t rejecting the employer or the salary but the daily commute to and from work.”
He said it is even tougher for employers who require fully office-based work and don’t offer parking to their employees, stating such people are “setting themselves up for failure”.
Even higher salaries aren’t always enough to convince some people to take on a job that requires a daily commute through Maltese traffic.
“This very week I offered a candidate a job which came with a higher salary than her expectations, but she turned it down simply because the company doesn’t offer hybrid working.”
He said some employers are so inflexible with their work conditions that they even expected their employees to report to the office when Storm Harry hit Malta last January, despite official warnings against unnecessary travel.
“Some employees subsequently left their jobs as a result of this,” he pointed out.
Mr Lia went on to argue that even when employers manage to recruit staff for fully office-based work, they ultimately still risk losing them to competitors that offer hybrid conditions.
“These employees could be approached by someone who offers them the exact same salary but two days of remote work a week, and they end up leaving their job,” he said.
“Employers who don’t offer any remote work are losing very suitable candidates and facing longer vacancies, and will ultimately face higher recruitment costs.”
He added that employers shouldn’t leave hybrid work as an option only to effectively guilt-trip their staff into constantly working at the office.
“They might say things like ‘People like working the office here’ or ‘But we have nice offices’… so the implication is that, while hybrid work is an option, it is actually frowned down upon.”
The situation has led him to question whether some of Malta’s recruitment difficulties are genuinely the result of a shortage of workers.
“When I keep seeing employers losing suitable candidates due to a lack of flexible work options, I start asking whether we are genuinely facing a talent shortage or whether some vacancies are becoming hard to fill simply because of the conditions attached to them.”
His advice to employers is to allow staff to work remotely for at least one or two days a week if the nature of the job permits it.
Besides aiding in recruitment and retention, he argued that it could ultimately help businesses deal with administrative backlog.
“From my experience working in banking, my admin work would struggle when I was working at the office because I was expected to deal with customers, calls and emails, which, and I ended up with a growing pile of loan applications.”
“When I worked from home, I could easily focus on these applications, which obviously helped the business and our customers.”
Mr Lia believes that employers should stop treating hybrid working as a potential employee benefit, Mr Lia believes businesses must view it as a necessity.
“It’s not even a perk these days,” he said. “Some jobs, such as in tech, are highly sought after, and potential staff could easily accept an offer from an international company that offers remote work arrangements.”
