What follows is a story I can’t believe I’m taking seriously but in our new age, inclusive world, which I admit has many positives, workplace ‘experts’ are concerned about a ‘depressing’ trend called, wait for it, “job hugging”! That’s right, alleged experts think people staying in a job for longer than usual is a bad thing.

While I have to confess I’m not a trained workplace psychologist, I did work as an employee 15 years before being an employer for over 25 years. Given that, I feel that I can see this story from two sides. And if any group has a good reason to be depressed, it’s employers.

But let me return to the scene of the crime, which is a concern that young employees in particular are being weighed down by having to stay in one job for a longer-the-usual amount of time.

News.com.au has looked at job hugging with the headline that says: “Grim new work trend is already impacting Aussie workplaces.”

I have to ask: grim for whom? More on that later.

This is the guts of the story:

1. Job hugging is staying in a job even if you’re unhappy and feeling unfulfilled.
2. Experts say this could be a threat to employees’ mental health.
3. It’s a consequence of “economic anxiety and a global hangover from pandemics, restructures, fears that AI will take over, and everything in between,” said BoldHR recruitment firm founder Rebecca Houghton.
4. One in three managers are burnt out.
5. While during covid, 9.6% of employees went mobile and changed jobs, this number is now 7.7%.

What I find fascinating is how we can have such simplistically different views on the same thing.

One side, as News journalist Ally Foster notes: “Not too long ago, trends like quiet quitting, acting your wage and bare minimum Mondays were sweeping offices, as employees fought back against what they deemed to be unrealistic workloads.”

Clinical psychologist Dr Kaitlin Harkess sees problems with job hugging.

“Misaligned jobs and workplaces can erode confidence and motivation. From disengagement to burnout, our health suffers,” Dr Harkess told Foster. “From a psychological lens, the danger is that the longer you operate from fear and sunk costs, the more helpless and trapped you feel.”

That’s one side and I understand this could be a problem for young workers because they got used to job hopping, “acting their wage” and even “bare minimum Mondays”, which was a trend that I’m surprised about.

Interestingly, in the era of job hopping both here and in the US (and I dare say every Western economy), mental health problems have soared. This is how abc.net.au saw this really worrying trend in October 2023: “Mental health disorders among young people have soared by nearly 50 per cent in 15 years, new data shows, as experts warn the health system is struggling to cope with the growing complexity and demand.”

While there are many reasons for this, you have to wonder whether the era of job hopping, obsessive mobile phone preoccupation and even intolerant views of old-fashioned values and people found in the workplace, hasn’t been good for younger workers. "Isolation [has been] a major factor in the development of anxiety and depressive problems," Angelo Virgona, from the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, said COVID-19 had been a major trigger for young people.

For a parent with kids who lives two hours from their workplace, working from home might make sense for the employee and even the employer, if the worker is more productive. But you have to worry about young people living in their parents’ basement or attic left to their own devices.

My early workplace experiences meant I had to learn to deal with unusual and unlikeable characters, but I had to front up. I learnt to cope with ‘pains in the neck’, who, despite their pathetic ways, still taught me stuff.

I also learnt how to cope as I saw others who had different ways to deal with both the negatives and the pluses of interacting with the complexity of humanity in the workplace. It’s called progress and becoming mature. Many young people need to be influenced by older mentors rather than their tribe, which has been a new age trend.

You can like your tribe because they’re like you in many ways — just like a football team. But a team has a coach, which is usually an older person with experience, knowledge and an interest in helping develop their players.

By the way, few people seem to care about the mental health of employers who’ve had to deal with job hopping, the cost of recruiting, the terrorization of tax offices, excessive regulation, the litany of reasons why employees can be compensated for problems in the workplace, the cost of technology, as well as the cost of paying for protection from hackers. And then there’s the mental health issues of their employees.

Job hugging might be a chance for employees and employers to get to know each other better and respect their differences. And rather looking at each other and complaining, instead both sides should start looking in the same direction to work together for both the progress of the individuals involved and the business they work in.