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Newly hired and already disengaged
In which a new generation of professionals starts to show signs of disillusionment
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Welcome back.
I am Avy Leghziel, an organizational consultant and trainer with a knack for unorthodox ideas.
Every two weeks I share here on Masters of Babel insights on how we work, learn and manage.
If you would like to have a chat, reach out here.
Let’s dive in:
Disengaged young professionals are here to teach us what needs to be fixed in the workplace
Your face is changing, and for unexpected reasons
A website to turn your spreadsheets into dashboards.
Like the guy on Silicon Valley who lives on the roof
You know that colleague of yours that will always try to do the least amount of work possible? The academic definition for that kind of people is “actively disengaged employee”.
The percentage of actively disengaged employees has been rising steadily in the past 9 years, especially among younger professionals.
Also, do you know anyone in ages 18-24 who is not working, learning, or doing anything productive? There is a name also for them: NEET (“Not in Employment, Education, or Training”). The number of NEET individuals is rising as well, apparently.
The generation who is entering the job market in these years seems to have a pretty low motivation to be an active part of it.
We can dismiss this data with the same old tired slogans: it’s always been like this, the new generations don’t know the meaning of real work, wait until they’ll need more money for their toys, etc. That’s not helpful.
The years of Covid have deluded us into thinking that the world of work is changing. For a moment, it seemed that most people would work from home. The power play between management and employees appeared to have been reversed, and a new respect seemed to have emerged for junior workers who kept things running during a global pandemic.
Then the waves of Covid ended (or they didn’t, but we don’t seem to care anymore) and the waves of economic crisis began: layoffs, recessions, inflation, etc. The changes turned out to be reversible: return to the office, work hard, or we will soon find someone better than you.
The old labor market laws have come back into effect, and the young generation that hoped to enter a more humane labor market, stripped of the rules and formalities that had burdened it before Covid, would have welcomed them with open arms. It didn't happen, and the research we mentioned above shows that generation’s disillusionment.
Those who benefit from this situation are the workplaces that have seized the opportunity to restructure the way they handle hiring, human resources, management, work processes, and professional development.
We can call them thoughtful organizations: those that have found the right balance between working from home and truly productive presence in the office; those that favor managers who can both deliver results and generate commitment from the team; those that prioritize the success of the product/service over organizational politics; those that know how to offer real professional development opportunities and not just silence employees with free food and fun outdoor days.
If enough organizations will notice this shift and adapt, we might witness the evolution of work we never really received during the pandemic.
What are your thoughts? |
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One more thing
I recently came across this AI tool (yes, another one. This is our life now, folks) that allows to easily turn spreadsheets into dynamic dashboards. A great way to visualize data, with no need for fancy development teams to drive us crazy only to get a few graphs. It’s called spreadsite.ai (not sponsored).