Pull up a chair, young’un, and let me tell you about how it used to be.
Way back then — last Thursday, really, but who’s counting? — people who hated their jobs had three choices. One, you were an Active Andrew, constantly polishing up your resume and haunting the job sites, unrelenting in your search to find that perfect job. Two, you were a Passive Polly, perfectly content to sit on your resume and wait until that perfect job found you. Or, three, you were a Do-Nothing Norbert, clinging to your hateful job through thin and thinner until you retired, were fired or died. Or all three. (With a job as awful as yours, it could happen.)
Of course, way back then, nobody did No. 3. Today, nobody is doing anything else. Say “good-bye” to job hopping and say hello to “job hugging.” Like tree hugging, it’s 100 percent ecological. Jobs today are an endangered species. Job hugging is all about survival in the hostile environment that is the workplace today.
I learned about this new phenomenon in “Job Hugging is the Newest Trend,” a Grace Snelling article on fastcompany.com. Snelling cites a Korn Ferry report that lays out the situation in no uncertain terms. “At an alarming rate,” writes Korn, or maybe Ferry, “more and more employees are displaying what is colloquially known as ‘job hugging’ — which is to say, holding onto their jobs for
dear life.”
You know why. Economic uncertainty, rising inflation, faltering sales, sluggish job growth. And that doesn’t even figure in AI — the employee-helper that has turned out to be a very efficient employee-replacer.
Is job hugging the right choice for you? My helpful suggestions below will get you started. No need to thank me. It’s my job and I’m hugging it.
No. 1: Become Essential.
If you’ve already convinced management that the business cannot run without your unique skills, congratulations. For the rest of us, hanging on by our fingernails, this would be a very good time to establish yourself as essential. You could start working really hard, peppering management with an avalanche of good ideas to grow the business, but that sounds exhausting. A better way to prove your value is to develop a deep, personal relationship with an important client.
The fun clients, if you have any, are likely to already have their coterie of admirers, so you will have to settle for being bestie to an unfun client, someone who is never satisfied and always complains. The strategy is to not only agree with everything they say but amplify it. If they think they are being overcharged, burrow into the depths of the HR department for documents showing the outrageous salaries and obscene perks the client is supporting. If the suspicion is that your company’s products are inferior, do an analysis on competing products to prove they are right. If you’re caught, someone up the org chart will certainly want to cut down your career tree, but they won’t dare when your new client bestie puts the kibosh on your firing.
No. 2: Become Likeable.
It won’t be easy, but if you really worked at it, you could get a few of your co-workers to like you. Possibly. Those deeply held opinions you hold about who should run the country or who makes the best burgers in town, forget them. No matter what anyone says about anything, you agree. Also, it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to become the person who brings in food treats for the office. You could focus on healthy snacks, like pickled Brussels sprouts. Yum! Or go the other way and become your team’s direct hotline for all-things carb. How about you become the Snickerdoodle Person? No one fires the Snickerdoodle Person.
No. 3: Be Invisible.
If your job calls for business travel, or if you can convince your manager that it does, this is your ticket to ride. Stay as far away from the office for as long as possible. Let your boss go on glamourous trips to Cincinnati and Buffalo. You volunteer to go to the places no one wants to go, like Paris. If you can’t justify getting out of the office, you’ll simply have to find places to hide inside the office. The supply closet is lovely in the fall and everyone enjoys a tour of the outer reaches of the parking lot. If none of these job-hugging strategies work, just crawl under your desk and stay there.
Remember — if they can’t find you, they can’t fire you.
Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at
bob@bgplanning.com
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