Job-dropping: why employees are turning down high-paying promotions
Name: Job-dropping. Age: About a month. Appearance: A polite refusal of a promotion. What? You aren’t supposed to refuse promotions. And yet people apparently are
Name: Job-dropping. Age: About a month. Appearance: A polite refusal of a promotion. What? You aren’t supposed to refuse promotions. And yet people apparently are. A recent survey of 1,028 Americans found that 70% of workers would turn down a high-paying promotion if it was likely to have a negative impact on their mental health. But what about the career ladder? If you like what you do and you earn enough money doing it, why would you want to leave in favour of a better-paying job that you wouldn’t enjoy? For the love of striving! For the joy of management! Everyone hates their manager. No they don’t – do they? Are you by any chance a manager?
Might be. Thought so. Is this gen Z upsetting the corporate applecart again? You’d think so, since gen Z has made a cottage industry out of wanting to work less. They coined “quiet quitting” (sticking to their minimum contracted duties) and “the great resignation” (leaving their unfulfilling jobs to find something better) and “resenteeism” (staying in their unfulfilling jobs but being openly grouchy about it). So it’s the youth, then? No, job-dropping has been picked up across the board. Mental health isn’t the only reason people are stepping off the ladder: a swathe of respondents said that parenthood had helped them realign their priorities, with working to live preferable to living to work. Not being ground to death by an indifferent corporation?
I cannot compute. It certainly takes some adjustment. And job-dropping isn’t without its drawbacks. What drawbacks? Recently, Stylist published an article warning people of the dangers of job-dropping. What if a future employer sees that you turned down a promotion and remained in a job you were overqualified for? Won’t they think ill of you? Yes, they will, you slacker. Alternatively, you could say that you just want a job that suits your chosen lifestyle. Not that job-dropping is a perfect system. It isn’t? No, because if all the sensible people realise they don’t need to climb the career ladder, that means all the management positions will end up being filled by joyless workaholics. Who will crack the whip harder because they have no wider perspective on life.
Exactly! And then they’ll burn out after two years, because they always do, and they’ll be replaced by even more joyless workaholics. If that keeps up, we’ll have an entire strata of management who don’t care about employees at all. That sounds awful. So maybe more joy-friendly people should take the promotion to keep the workplace bearable. Crush yourself within the wheels of industry for the greater good? Yes. Isn’t that the dream? Do say: “A promotion will negatively affect my peace of mind.” Don’t say: “So with regret I will turn down the role of senior ice-cream taster.”
The BriefWire