I'm Outta Here: The Battle Over Employee Identity
In an overview of research conducted by LinkedIn and Microsoft, this CNBC article paints an interesting picture.
*46% of employees currently want to quit their jobs
*In 2021 (The Great Resignation), that number was 40%)
*In 2021, 47.8M people quit their jobs
*In 2022, 50.5M quit their jobs
*Today, around 85% of professionals in the US are 'eyeing up a new job'
What does this tell us?
While there has been quite a bit of regret among job leavers over the past few years (the grass is not always greener), this broad discontent, I think, is telling.
The Battle for our Identities
Three reasons are given for the current state of discontent:
1. Burnout
2. Lack of learning opportunities
3. AI
No doubt all of this is going down.
However, I think something larger and deeper is also going on, perhaps even driving this new, emerging social contract of work.
For generations, work has subsumed much of our personal identities. For some, it still does. However, during the 18 months of at-homeness during the pandemic, something profound changed.
Despite the financial downsides of leaving jobs, many people have wrested control over their personal identities and organized them around their own values--not those of their employers.
I'm coming to understand all of this through the lens of the sociological frame of symbolic interactionism (SI), which provides a simple language for making sense of 'the presentation of self in everyday life' (Goffman).
*Ideal self
*Situational selves
*Identity hierarchies
*Roles (at work and home)
*Commitments (to various identities- at work and home)
The RTO Red Herring
It seems to me that, despite all the other chatter about productivity, culture, collaboration, mentoring, etc., what traditional managers really want is the commitment of self, and identity. They resent the identity independence that was gained during the pandemic--The Great Domestication.
All of this job movement and rotation seems to be a massive litigation of how we see ourselves and what organizations--and their values--either do or don't endorse our ideal selves. Financial consequences aside, few resources are as valuable as our sense of who we are when we look in the mirror.
#workplacestrategy #cre #rto
https://lnkd.in/gM5r44af