From Quiet Quitting to promising job market data amid layoff reports, it’s been a busy summer.
Before we begin the fall season — one where many employers actively map out their growth strategies for the next year and assess their budgets — we wanted to take a moment to aggregate some of the major workplace themes and trends that we’ve seen take shape over the summer.
Here are some key trends and highlights from today’s ever-evolving workplace:
Job switchers reap the biggest raises
Surprise, surprise. Perhaps it’s one of the oldest tricks in the book, but the most efficient and fastest way toward achieving higher compensation is switching jobs. According to ADP Research, company payrolls grew by just 132,000 in August, but there’s good news for job switchers who saw pay bumps of more than twice as much as those who stayed put in their careers. The report also found that job switchers won, on average, a 16.1 percent pay roll increase since the start of 2021, which ADP suggests signals that high inflation and rising borrowing costs are affecting hiring.
Hiring begins to level out; but job market remains strong
Even though a large number of companies across industries have reported layoffs this summer, LinkedIn’s Workforce Report found that hiring jumped 6.5 percent in August — the first monthly increase since April. New job placements across the U.S. were also 0.2 percent higher than the pre-pandemic level in February 2020, according to intel from the platform’s 191 million U.S. members.
The latest job report data released Friday indicates that the U.S. added 315,000 jobs in August. While this number exceeded estimates from economists, it was well under July’s surge of 526,000 jobs. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported that the nation’s unemployment rate rose to 3.7 percent from 3.5 percent.
Quiet quitting is about the employer, not the employee
People don’t leave bad jobs, they leave poor management. In one of the latest articles on the subject of quiet quitting, Harvard Business Review authors Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, who have conducted 360-degree leadership assessments for decades, say that quiet quitting is simply a newly coined term for old patterns of behavior. According to the article, “quiet quitting is usually less about an employee’s willingness to work harder and more creatively, and more about a manager’s ability to build a relationship with their employees where they are not counting the minutes until quitting time.” In other words, managers have an influential impact on whether or not an employee decides to ‘quietly quit.’
Freelance is the new full-time
Freelance, side hustles, and gigs are in and they’re here to stay. More Americans have become independent workers over the past few years and there’s data to prove it. According to the American Opportunity Survey, independent work is booming — 36 percent of employed respondents (equivalent to 58 million Americans when extrapolated from the representative sample) identify as independent workers. This number is a notable increase from 2016 data that estimated the U.S. independent workforce represented 27 percent of the employed population.
From a growing gig economy to an increasingly disengaged workforce amid employee burnout, today’s workplace is hectic at best. The key for employers will be to lean on leadership to stay on top of and ahead of these workforce trends and learn to troubleshoot accordingly.
