“What happens to a society and its industries if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers overnight?”
I read an article yesterday about the worker shortage crisis. It explains why so many people are backing away from more traditional careers with larger, more established companies and instead opting for seemingly less secure options like gig work. It focused on the tech industry, but, actually, I think we’re seeing this situation throughout the workforce at the moment.
At least twice a week I hear from an exasperated HR representative or business owner. They spend more and more of their time trying to fill their ever-growing list of job openings, only to land a new employee who quits after just a few weeks. What gives?
If you’ve been paying attention over the course of the last 5-10 years, the reasons are not all that hard to tease out.
Consider that roughly seven years ago every one of us literally stared death in the face as Covid ravaged our communities. Living through a pandemic can certainly put some things in perspective, among them, whether the work you’re doing day in and day out is actually serving you. How many of us took that time we spent stuck in our houses binge-watching old sitcoms to stop and take stock of our lives and thought, huh … maybe I’ve been dedicating an awful lot of my time to a job that extracts value at every turn and gives little in return? Hint: it’s not a small number.
And then there’s the recent shift in almost every industry toward automation and even greater extraction. AI is the obvious example here, but it’s not just happening in our tech workplaces. It seems that most employers have finally admitted what they’ve valued all along; Not innovative solutions to the world’s toughest problems, but unvarnished greed. Their main goals seem to be to turn the screws on the rest of us (both consumers and employees) while they pull another couple of pennies out of our pockets to instead deliver to shareholders.
Those of us who had a choice chose our jobs because they provided not only a living wage and a stable, reasonable quality of life, but because they provided an opportunity to solve a real problem with other equally invested people. We wanted to put good into the world and to stretch our brains, and we knew the best way to do that was by working together.
Unfortunately, today, we find that our jobs no longer provide this opportunity. The natural result of this situation is that we no longer value our jobs like we once did. The question, then, is where do we go now for our “fix”? That is, how do we replace the serotonin hit we get when we do meaningful work with other creative people, solving challenging problems for real people?
Sadly, some (many?) are turning to a quick hit of dopamine instead. “We achieve this through empty, brainless activities like binge-watching TV, mindless scrolling on social media, ever-shorter video clips, video games, food, alcohol, and even drugs. Anything to numb what we’re really feeling and to give us a break from reality. And because of the short “half-life” of a dopamine hit, we’re back at it sooner rather than later, seeking our next hit. This constant up and down leaves us lonely, empty, and lost, which leads us to seek even more “quick fixes”.
The real answer, of course is to get back to “work”, whether in the traditional sense or not, where we exercise our brains, contribute to a common purpose, and collaborate with other real, live, human beings. But if we’re not finding that in our workplaces, than we’re naturally going to go looking for it elsewhere. And then the only reason we’re turning up at work is a paycheck … which is getting less and less valuable as wages stagnate and the cost of living continues it exponential climb.
Given all of this, explain to me again why anyone in their right mind would opt for a “regular” job these days if they had even one marginally better option?
If we want to attract top talent and keep them coming back, we’re going to have to do the hard work of building a place worth coming to. A place where people feel that they belong, like they’re building something better, something that contributes positively to their community, where they can use their brains in challenging ways to solve real problems for their neighbors.
Huh. You know what else I just described? It’s a community. That’s right, the ideal workplace is not a family, a business, or even a partnership. it’s a community. And as the other places in society where we find community continue to recede, our workplaces have a unique opportunity to fill the gap. This would would naturally keep their talent pipelines full.
The question is whether our employers are willing to do it. Will we circle back to building workplaces where people want to work? Where employees are valued and rewarded accordingly? Or will we continue the march to the bottom that an extractive business model creates? The answer is up to our business leaders and owners. The rest of us will have to wait and see. But in the meantime, don’t be surprised if we’re opting out of the traditional workplace and into new, more community-minded ones.
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