Trouble at Home: The Kids are Not OK
By Dr. Brett Trusko, Contributing Author/ April 23, 2023
Brett Trusko is a speaker, writer, consultant and educator. He has appeared at hundreds of conferences, radio and TV as well as written extensively and helped fortune 500 companies as well as local and national governments prepare for an innovation oriented future.
The Pre-Pandemic Crisis Missed
Managers and executives are reporting a troubling trend that appears to have started prior to COVID, more often with young employees, but spreading to more seasoned and experienced employees during and in the aftermath of the pandemic. The problem seems to be that many employees have lost the will to work as hard, nor show much respect for their company, co-workers, or supervisors.
To make matters worse, we really do not know what is going on.
Going back to the early days of 2002, I completed my doctoral work in “satisfaction factors and distributed work” (telecommuting). At the time, I lived and worked in Silicon Valley, so it was easy to envision a time when everyone worked from home. At the time, unfortunately, no one really seemed that interested in the research I had done, so I moved on to bigger and better things.
The Work-From-Home Dream Turned Nightmare
When COVID hit in 2020, not only were we unprepared for the accelerated alternative work arrangements, but the entire world found that we were all unprepared for how to work remotely.
Now that COVID is starting to slowly decline, new problems are emerging that no one saw coming. My interviews with business executives have revealed a consistent and disturbing trend; people appear to have lost their will to work. Not all, of course, but a significant number.
On a personal level, I am of a certain age and for a while missed what was going on because I thought I was the only one re-evaluating my work and personal life after a major trauma like COVID.
I sold my large house in a suburb of Houston and headed for a quieter, simpler life in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I didn’t try as hard to sign new consulting projects and I even turned a few down. After all, my younger siblings were retired, and they were asking why I was still working so hard (they should have seen me before COVID).
What I didn’t expect was my clients calling to ask me why so many of their workers were no longer interested in working.
Trauma and the Psychic Shutdown
This led me to start to interview clients, employees and dusting off my doctoral dissertation (that was a humbling experience), and I have identified a few possibilities and potential answers for my clients.
First, there seems to be a real and potentially long-lasting change in the work ethic. We know that after people go through a significant trauma, their life sometimes changes in profound ways. For many of us, the only trauma we have experienced in our life was 9/11, which really didn’t personally affect many of us, and COVID, which affected us all.
Trauma affects all of us in different ways.
Some of us withdraw, some of us change our lifestyle and many people, especially those with near-death experiences re-evaluate our choices, goals and objectives. According to Pew Research, only 20% of employees worked from home before the pandemic, 71% worked from home during the pandemic, and 54% want to continue to work from home. During and after the pandemic I started to notice more ads and discussions about addiction and psychological problems, and of course our politics, while already not great before the pandemic, took a serious turn for the worst.
Where They Went
My clients started questioning where the employees went as it became harder to find and retain employees. Surely stimulus money wasn’t paying the bills any longer, and the employees that they are able to hire came to work with a chip on their shoulder on day one. Employers have been complaining that employees of all ages, not just the younger ones, are acting more entitled and don’t seem as motivated to perform as they did before COVID.
One might say that they don’t want to work any longer. One executive whom I interviewed holds a brief meeting every morning for 15 minutes just to set the team on the priorities of the day and to ask questions. After one of these meetings, an employee boldly explained that he would no longer attend the meetings, because they were irrelevant.
In one of my companies, I asked an employee (a seasoned executive) to assist with an urgent assignment and he just declined to help. Needless to say, both of these people were fired, but in this market, likely found another job quickly.
So, what might be the reasons behind this sudden change of attitude and what can we do about it?
A Mental Health Crisis
Homelessness has increased at an alarming rate in the last few years. There is a significant increase in drug use of all kinds but mostly in opioids and benzodiazepines (Xanax). Suicides are up and in the United States, the life expectancy has dropped, while the rest of the world has continued to increase.
Armed with intelligence and reason, humans understand what is happening in the world and are running away to early retirement (for which they may not be prepared), tribalism and drug and alcohol abuse. In other words, your employees are a “hot mess” after COVID, but many of us are just expecting them to resume life as normal.
Giving Up
Most of us were raised to believe that if you “showed up” and worked hard, your life would be great. Over the last 30 years, that seems to have changed. Your workers showed up for work and thanks to the implied employer-employee contract changing from lifetime employment to regular layoffs, just prior to COVID, an employee never knew if they were going to have a job from one day to the next.
Employers expected employees to sacrifice for the company but offered no reciprocal security. Employees put up with this for 20 years, mostly by changing jobs every couple of years, but they still did their best and soldiered on. During COVID, the imbalance became much more pronounced as employers laid off employees who were worried, sick and traumatized by the world around them.
It seems that this may have been the breaking point for many workers.
Balance Off Balance
Prior to COVID, there was a balance between employees and employers that implied that if I pay you well, you will work hard for as long as I could keep you around.
This was an equilibrium, or truce that was reached between employers and employees leading up to the pandemic. During the pandemic, the equilibrium shifted, and employees were essentially told that even hard work wouldn’t be enough. In other words, we had a really pissed off work force that apparently finally reached their breaking point.
New employees in many industries are trying to unionize, and have lost most of the respect they held for supervisors, the company, and fellow employees. Starbucks was once a coveted job amongst a certain demographic but is now a regular union target. The interesting thing about the pre-COVID equilibrium is that every time an employee left, they made more money and it cost employers more to hire replacements.
Perhaps employers would have all been better off honoring the original contract?
Discontent might be summed up in a government report that says that more than half of the employees still missing from the workforce were people who retired early.
Loss of Muscle Memory
During COVID, those who were able to keep their jobs discovered that when they worked from home, most managers didn’t know how to supervise them any longer. This was one of the findings of my original doctoral work.
The classical management training most managers went through relied on looking over someone’s shoulder to be sure they were working. We didn’t know how to set measurable, achievable goals and how to hold employees accountable. In the old system, we checked the clock when they came and left, without much regard to what they accomplished between those arbitrary times on the clock.
Sure, there are plenty of jobs with direct rewards for accomplishing things including sales and other commission-based jobs, but most jobs are difficult to measure and have traditionally been measured by time at a place. I was just at a state university who has adopted a flexible classroom schedule and now classes with 30 enrollees are only attended by three in the classroom with a majority in their dorm rooms just feet away from the room where instruction is actually taking place.
Employees found out that when they were not in the office, they could get away with doing a lot less work because the reality was that even when they were in the office, productivity had been slipping for years. The difference now is that they are empowered to use the time they had been visiting, surfing the web, and taking long lunches to take naps and avoid the boss by losing internet connections or being sick.
The equilibrium was and is out of balance.
What Can We Do?
The social contract will find a new equilibrium, but both sides are going to have to meet in the middle. Employers need to redefine what it means to do work. If a manager cannot find ways to measure remote workers, then they need to be retrained to do so.
If an employee is insubordinate, they may be having mental health issues or lost their work “muscle memory”.
Today, we have flatter corporate organizational charts. This has been hailed as a shorter path to feedback and innovation, but if the manager isn’t available or ignores employees, maybe it’s better to have more layers of management to pay attention to employee performance or at a minimum to act as a shoulder to cry on.
We all know that children who are deprived of love have more emotional and behavioral problems than those who are raised in a stable loving household.
One could argue that business is not family and “I am not your mommy”, but especially in professional jobs, many employees spend more time at work than they do at home, and their fellow employees are almost family. When employers abuse workers, then should they be surprised that workers act up?
Rebalancing to a New Equilibrium
Finding the new equilibrium will not be easy, but it is incumbent on the employer to lead the effort.
In most organizations, when someone joins, they attend orientation. After a traumatic event, perhaps it is time for all employees to go through “re-orientation?”
Managers should be retrained to consider productivity and accountability instead of how many hours you spend at work. Most importantly, emphasis should be placed on all of us being in this together. Employees should be heard as well as employers.
Customers should not be ignored, but not necessarily given priority over the needs of employees. Professionals should be respected for what they know and be invited to work with managers to achieve a new equilibrium that serves employers, employees, and customers.
It won’t be easy, but we have done it before, and we can do it again.