Hey everyone. I'm Varun Rajan. Welcome to the Push Pull podcast where we dive into career transitions and specifically tap into the push and pull factors that inform those transitions. got another solo rant for you today. I've been interested in other people's career transitions for basically my entire career. Learning about why people make the decisions that they do tells me so much about who they are as a person, what matters to them, and how what matters to them changes over time, and really leads me to reflect so much more on my own history and the more discussions that I have with people and reflect on my own career. I'm starting to get drawn to other topics, not just career transitions, going from one job to another. And so you might see the structure of my conversations change a little bit and adjust focus, over the coming weeks. I'm starting to think a lot more about job longevity and job fulfillment, particularly how team dynamics and morale play into this, and I'm really curious why we don't seem to have that sense of longevity anymore. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a rant about how my generation and Gen Z have no loyalty to their companies anymore. I'm a millennial, by the way, if you couldn't tell due to my youthful exuberance. Um, the world is a lot smaller. Our pool of options as a labor force is larger and the payoff for long tenures at one or maybe two companies throughout the course of your career seems to shrink in ROI every single year. But Varun, you say incredulously. In our current environment, the labor market is tightening. Companies are forcing us back into the office and employees can't just afford to leave whenever they want and get a 30% raise. The great resignation is over. Get back to work. Totally understand that. And you're right, the great resignation is indeed over. What I'm more interested in is something that Gallup calls the Great Detachment, the great resignation is over, and all of these people they're seeing that their options for leaving their job is actually. Really shrinking, but at the same time, it's not like they're just doubling down and being happy with the work that they have. they are Feeling increasingly detached from their work. They're a lot more resistant to company initiatives. They're indifferent to the work that they're doing. this is a risk for employers too, because during the great resignation you saw a lot of employee turnover. and although those turnover numbers are no longer as high as they were one or two years ago, the concerns around employee productivity and you know, talent loss in the future when the job market picks up are still very much risks to those businesses. In December, they released a report having conducted a survey of over 20,000 employees, in the previous couple of months, and they found a lot of really interesting data. So 70% of respondents said that their org had experienced"some level of disruptive change in the past year." Uh, and so obviously that could mean layoffs and obviously that would be a huge hit to morale and team productivity and their willingness to want to stay and give it their all. But over half of those respondents talking about disruptive change, we're talking about just team restructures. businesses pivoting their strategy and reorganizing their teams in order to meet some new business goals. of those disruptive changes, 69% say that there are way more asks of employees. Nearly half of them say that there are budget cuts that are impacting their morale as well. Um, but that all kind of like goes into the disruption and change bucket. there's a few other things that they talk about, but uh, some of the things that stood out to me were hybrid and remote work challenges. The pandemic obviously made a shift a lot into hybrid and fully remote for a long time when it came to knowledge work. And so there is a combination of different factors here. So for hybrid work, people are feeling like they got used to a certain level of flexibility and now they're being asked to be less flexible to come into the office. And on the other hand, some of the people that have stayed fully remote, uh, also have challenges connecting to the company and their coworkers and the mission now. I find that a little hard to believe. Uh, I, I mean, I kill it as a remote employee. I love connecting with my coworkers and I think I can do it pretty well even over Zoom. Uh, but at the same time, I have to admit, I have been working remotely for the last five, six years, and I have found myself insanely isolated after a full day of back to back Zoom calls. So I could totally imagine that being a continued wear and tear on mental and emotional health of people in those roles. and then the other thing that I thought was really interesting was performance management. It seems like the approval of company's performance management processes. Has gone down over time. there was a survey of all of the chief human resource officers of Fortune 500 companies and only 2% of them. So what that's. 10, that's 10 out of 500, uh, said that their performance management processes actually inspired their employees to improve. So all in all, Gallup and I'll share the, a link to the article in the show notes. It's super, super interesting. Um, Gallup pins it on. Two things. Uh, clarity of expectations, which really ties into performance management and feeling connected to the company's mission and purpose. Of course, if you're going to have a lot of changes both in the kind of working environment, going hybrid, going remote, uh, as well as having all of these. Sense of uncertainty and layoffs and restructurings. It makes sense that people will feel a little bit less connected and if you are also constantly shifting teams or the organization around you is changing and you have manager after manager, I've talked to so many people who, and I've been in this situation too, where I've just kind of been swapped managers over and over again. Um. How are you supposed to grow and advance in your career? And so that clarity of expectations piece becomes really, really pronounced in that case. There's something else that I found here that I thought was really interesting. Gallup had another article, uh, another report that they put together about employee engagement, saying that with their measures of employee engagement that they've been doing since 2000, employee engagement is the lowest it's been in the last 10 years. So not since 2014 have we seen such low employee engagement, which is really interesting. I'm not exactly sure what was going on during that time to have such low employee engagement. And I don't know if we were actually talking about it at that time. I've, I had actually in 2014, made a giant switch in my career, uh, and still kind of early on. And so I see that as a, as a time where I got. Fully committed to, to what my new career was gonna be, uh, within tech, within education. Um, and so that actually doesn't speak to me at all. And so I'd be really interested to go back and see what people were saying about employee engagement during that time. But, um, they have a measurement for engaged and actively disengaged. And the numbers are 33% engaged which is, the lowest it's ever been, and 17% actively disengaged, which is. Maybe not necessarily as, as high as as it's ever been, but definitely up there, uh, amongst the, the higher rates of actively disengaged. Um, and this is a report that came out in January of this year. two things that they mentioned in their December report were clarity of expectations and feeling connected to the company's mission and purpose. Some of the dimensions where their survey saw the most declines in employees actually agreeing with them was that they clarity of expectations, but there were also a couple of things that they brought up, which is feeling that someone at work actually cares about them as a person. Um, apparently between 2020 and 2025 there was a drop of 47% to 39% of employees who felt strongly that somebody actually cares about them at work. Um, and also, uh, there's been a 6% drop from 36% to 30% of the survey respondents that say someone at work is actually encouraging their development. So, uh, people don't know. What their employers actually expect of them. They're feeling increasingly alienated from their work environments. They feel like they're being asked to do more, uh, even in a world where they've started to prioritize things outside of work a little bit more. Um, they don't feel like anybody at work cares about them as a person, and they don't think anybody's actually encouraging them to grow at their job. And this all seems like a recipe for disaster. What are we doing? Is everyone just gonna be quiet, quitting for the rest of their careers? That's insane. You can't just quiet, quit and find a new job. So what are you gonna do? Just quiet, quit and languish in the job that you have today. That sucks. And. I don't know what to do about that. We have, of course, tons of different companies that are working on, um, you know, workforce training solutions, mental health in the workplace, and I've been talking to some of them and, uh, it's super interesting what they're looking into. Um, so I have to continue to investigate what's out there. Um, just for my own learning, I, I'm really curious, what is it gonna take to actually make sure that people feel like they're fulfilled? Work and also moving towards some semblance of growth and progress while still doing so in a way that benefits the business.'cause you know, we're not just, obviously, I'm not here to make an argument for employee fulfillment at all costs. Business be damned. I mean, I, I am really optimistic that we can find. All three of those things, understanding what makes an individual light up, understanding how. Team dynamics can be improved such that people know what they expect of each other and what employers expect of employees, uh, and pair those things in a way where number three actually benefits the growth and success of the business long term. And hopefully leads to a little bit more of that job longevity, uh, that I was talking about a little bit earlier. I know we don't live in a world where we spend 20 years at a job, but as somebody that has. Spent, you know, two to four years at jobs and also six months at jobs. I would rather be in the two to four year camp. Heck, I'd rather be in the five year camp. I would be a lifer at a company if I could, if I felt like I was valued and I was actively engaged, uh, and felt like I was constantly growing. So. I think most people feel the same way. So how is this gonna change how I approach the podcast? I think I'm probably gonna be doing a lot more. Research sharing what I learn. I probably want to talk to more people who have successfully seen through org changes. Um, I, I probably want to ask more pointed questions about what. You know, positive team morale looks like. I probably wanna ask more about building trust in an organization such that once you go through inevitable hard times, like a layoff or restructuring your team and your employees and the people that report into you can, can recover from that. Uh, and not just recover from that in order to keep the lights on, but recover from that to the point where they feel like they want to dig in and push the mission of the company forward and push the purpose of their life's work forward as well. What do you guys think? If you have any questions, send them to me. Varun, V-A-R-U-N, at push pull podcast.com. I'm really excited, to, to see where all of this goes.