In the beginning, there was a virus of undetermined origin, and all workers everywhere were turned into zombie remote workers…
No, this is not the start of a horror movie by an indie film company. It is what the mass media (they have mass but lack gravity…) would have you believe is what happens to the workforce. They act as one giant infected swarm. The workforce is not monolithic, and workforce trends are based on simple—and I mean simple—economics. In my opinion, it is a mix of utility theory and expectational behavior. But I left our story at the beginning. Let's go back to the pandemic.
Workers could not go to CVS let alone the office. Hardly a time for job changes, though it did happen. Justifiably, in the midst of the economic turmoil, many workers were forced to changes jobs due to reductions in force decisions by homebound executives. It was generally a lousy time to change jobs unless you were forced to do so. The workers who thought they were ready for the next challenge waited. The workers who thought they were underpaid (aren't we all???) waited and the workers who thought their boss was a jerk waited. And time wore on the workers and so on and so on. After the pandemic lockdowns ended, all that pent up "let me get to the next job" energy was unleashed and the business press called it The Great Resignation and the business press congratulated themselves again, for nothing. It wasn't a great resignation—it was two years of overdue resignations. The key part of the story isn't the resignations, actually, if you think about it. It was the workers' willingness to wait. We'll come back to that in a moment.
After the pandemic, dark forces gathered in distant lands and once again the global workforce was enveloped in the grip of sorcery and they stopped working hard and were victims of, oh no, "quiet quitting." No, they weren't, but once again, the media saw their work and declared it good. In fact, we have always had quiet quitters. We call them lazy. In more ancient times, we wrote them up and fired them. But today, in the never-ending popularity contest that management and HR are trying to win, we fight to re-engage the quiet quitters when we should help them out the door.
Today we have a new phenomenon, and it is the subject of the cover story of this issue. "Job hugging" is actually something I have been warning companies about for a year. It is not job hugging. The workers don't love their jobs more than in days of yore.
My warnings have not been to be on the lookout for more mass media nonsensical labels (though that may have been appropriate). I warned about preparing your TA function for when the dam breaks, and it will break. What does the mass media think? That workers love their jobs so much they treat the job like a childhood teddy bear. That is silly. They are afraid of leaving during uncertain times. We are all seeing the impact of economic uncertainty. Haphazard communications about economic trends, bad data, and an as yet indecipherable global trade agenda have made workers all over the world less likely to move. The U.S. economy is a swiss cheese, the European economies are slow, and even areas of APAC are at recent lows. Voluntary attrition is at historically low levels. In fact, this is a rare time when the labor market uncertainty has manifested itself by employee behavior. Usually, it is the employers who send HR to do RIFs, not the employees hanging on for dear life. Some of this may be demographic as well. Employees and younger workers who lived through the pandemic may be less likely to move than earlier generational cohorts.
So, what is HR to do? I have had CHROs complain they cannot get the employees they want to shed to leave. We know from recent history that employees can wait it out. When the circumstances improve, The Great Stagnation (where do they come up with these names?) will end, and the pent-up demand will release, leading to another mass exodus. Be ready. Until then, why not do some "top grading" and send your most marginal performers packing while you have the luxury of performance management in a labor market that is not overheated.
In the interim, you could always get a job in the mass media coming up with silly names for perfectly reasonable behaviors by our employees.
Elliot S. Clark
CEO