No employee wants to feel like a number that can be easily replaced. But as the divide between employers and employees widens, worker loyalty is rapidly fading. When I turned to Gloria St. Martin-Lowry for answers, she told me, “They’d replace you before your body’s cold.” The president of HPWP Group asked, “How’d we get so disposable?” She went on to share the story of a Google software engineer who dedicated twenty years of his life to the company only to be laid off by email with no personal goodbye. And she says there are hundreds of similar stories.
Treating Employees As A Commodity
Just last month Fortune reported that the CEO of Frontier Airlines claims workers have gotten “lazy” as a result of the pandemic, complaining that people are still allowed to work from home. Allowed to work from home? This view of workers as simply a set of hands to do the work comes amid sweeping return-to-office mandates, as employees across the country are ordered back to the office. “When you view people as a commodity, it is only natural to treat them as such, St. Martin-Lowry observes. “People are seen as interchangeable, and you can always hire another set of hands when you need to. I have heard numerous leaders say that turnover is just ‘a cost of doing business.’” A survey from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) shows that these blanket mandates often result in higher levels of employee dissatisfaction and attrition; yet many employers are cracking down, arguing that in-person collaboration is crucial for a thriving workforce.
Employee Reactions To The ‘Disposable Phenomenon’
The workforce—especially younger employees—has retaliated against hard-lined demands with passive reactions from “quiet quitting,” to “loud laborers” to “coffee badging” to keep from feeling disposable as companies ramp up return-to-office mandates. A recent report shows 90% of companies plan to implement return-to-office policies by the end of 2024, and nearly 30% will threaten to fire employees who don’t comply. But employees aren’t giving up the return-to-office war any time soon with nearly seven in 10 employees reporting they’d rather look for a new job than return to the office, and 66% say they’re ready to leave jobs if mandated to five-day workweeks.
I also turned to David Chadwick, CEO of RealResponse, for answers to the ‘disposable employee phenomenon’. He believes the overarching factor is employers who turn a deaf ear to worker issues and the employee’s inability to share concerns, suggestions or complaints without fear of retaliation from the company. Workers start to feel replaceable, and they vent their resentment on company chat groups to air grievances because they don’t feel safe to direct their concerns to the corporate honchos. And that has a trickle-down effect across the entire organization, Chadwick points out. “By demanding a return to the office, employers are not ‘shooting themselves in the foot necessarily,’ but they are definitely having to navigate a newfound sensitivity as remote work options are becoming more of an expectation from employees—especially among younger generations who tend to expect employers to adapt to their needs and are becoming less likely to settle.”
Solutions To The ‘Disposable Phenomenon’
What solutions can employers implement to mitigate the “disposable phenomenon” among the workforce? “The bottom line is that employers are beginning to see (or are just now drawing the line) that fully remote work is unsustainable in maintaining productivity levels across their workforce,” Chadwick told me. “That’s why many companies are landing on an office/remote hybrid model.” He states that many employers recognize that going back to five days in the office won’t appeal to current or prospective employees, but he points out that employers have alternatives.
“There are several methods in place for employers to collect and aggregate employee feedback, and that communication channel will only grow in importance as workplaces revert to older modalities,” he explains. “It is critical that employers are aware of their employees’ concerns surrounding return-to-office mandates and other matters. Employers must recognize that employees react differently depending on their own unique circumstances, so it is just as important to be sensitive to personal situations and to try to alleviate their concerns. Communicating the return-to-office policy should be handled strategically and thoughtfully.” He insists that many employers have added insult to injury, sharpening employee strife because they have not consulted with workers before implementing return-to-office mandates. “But with the proper tools, employers can make more informed decisions based on feedback from employees, and subsequently employees feel respected and heard, even if they disagree with the decision.”
There’s a reason why Matt Mullenweg’s employees don’t feel disposable. The founder and CEO of Automattic told me his company has employed a distributed workforce versus under-a-single-roof requirement for 20 years. “It works for us because it allows us to recruit the best talent in the world,” Mullenweg explains. “Autonomy and productivity can be achieved at home. You have to instill a culture of trust, kindness, open communication and transparency. What people are getting wrong about distributed work is that they aren’t doing in-person meetups right. We invest in focused, personal time together. Our meetups aren’t like team off-sites, which big companies already do. We travel to beautiful places together and spend time bonding. It helps us build trust and makes it easier to collaborate.”
Cameron Yarbrough, co-founder of people development platform at Torch, agrees that knee-jerk demands for a full return to the office are stultifying. “The logic, such as it is, of ‘this is the way we’ve always done it’ ignores the transformation in leadership styles away from the old military-industrial Command and Control approach that many leaders are still clinging to, and towards a trust-based style,” he argues. “We need better ways of managing that take into account how modern technology has transformed the way knowledge is shared, how people now want to work together and how their performance is best measured and managed. The reality is that without capable, human-centered leadership, you will create an unhealthy company culture that will be counterproductive, encouraging your best people to leave and ending up needlessly part of a trillion dollar problem.”
Yarbrough emphasizes that it’s the leader’s responsibility to meet employees where they are by creating a culture of accountability, providing clear guidelines and establishing effective communication channels. “This will all deliver greater organizational effectiveness, but sadly it is easier to blame workers for things like wanting to work where it suits them than it is to put these leaders and structures in place.”
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