Johnny Paycheck was perhaps most famous for his 1977 recording of the tenderly entitled song, Take This Job and Shove It. In it we hear the plaintive cry of a man feeling under-appreciated and poorly treated by his boss.
In times of job scarcity most people feeling that way won’t speak up, but the desire to utter those words might be just under the surface. Paycheck’s song was, after all, hugely popular, perhaps revealing a larger pool of frustration than was commonly recognized. It turns out that the findings of sophisticated and extensive HR studies are accurate:
Employees (aka “People”) really don’t like being poorly treated – and they get to define what that means.
Here’s where that gets more interesting for you today.
When the tables are turned and jobs are plentiful it’s easy for people to say sayonara to a job with poor pay, lousy working conditions or to a boss who is frequently identified in private as “the jerk.” We have such conditions today, with 10 million jobs unfilled and employers needing people to fill them. That means that people like the guy in the song realize, “I don’t have to take this . . . stuff.” Indeed, there is so much job changing now that it has a name: The Great Resignation. Read about it here and here and here. If you want more, just do a search on the term.
My genius friend Richard Hadden (he agrees with me – that’s how I know he’s a genius) dropped a blog post recently, reporting the results of a Slack “Future Forum” survey, pointing out:
- 76% of those surveyed want flexibility on where they work
- 93% want flexibility on when they work
- 56% are open to new job opportunities that provide them more flexibility
- 21% are likely to jump ship in order to get that flexibility
One of the big challenges now is to figure out the work-from-where challenge – the “how to be flexible” thing. The word “hybrid” is commonly used in such a context and with way more frequency than in the worlds of agriculture and car manufacturing, where they actually make hybrids.
If one in five workers is likely to jump ship in order to get flexibility and now the employment landscape makes such a thing easy to do, employers better figure this flexibility thing out before there are yet more empty slots on the org chart and Johnny Paycheck’s song haunts their ears (ear worm).
As Richard likes to say, “It’s your people, stupid!”
Like I said, Richard is a genius.
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