There is a word for what I have been doing since the spring of 2014, and I am pleased to learn that other people have started using it. The word is job hugging. According to recent surveys, a growing number of British workers are staying in their current roles rather than venture into a hiring market that has cooled considerably. I would like it noted that I was there first. I was there so early that nobody has yet asked me to leave.

A Strategy, Not a Rut

I am a Senior Coordinator of Process Alignment, a title I was given in 2013 and have since grown into, or perhaps around. People assume that staying put is passive. It is not. It requires daily commitment: arriving, sitting down, and declining to be restructured. Over eleven years I have built up a body of institutional knowledge, chiefly concerning where the good stapler is kept and which meeting rooms have a working HDMI cable. This sort of thing does not transfer to a new employer, and I would not wish it on one.

The peace lily on my desk has outlasted three line managers. I raised this with Gary Tilsley, a facilities coordinator on our floor, who has watered it every Thursday for as long as I can recall.

“It was here before Deborah, and it was here before the man who replaced Deborah, and it was definitely here when we had the one who used to sit in the car park with the engine off. Nobody has ever told me to stop watering it, so I haven’t.”

I take this as evidence of stability. Others might take it as evidence that the plant is the only member of the department with a secure contract.

Assets

On the partition beside my monitor hangs a laminated certificate naming me Employee of the Quarter for the third quarter of 2016. I regard it as a long-term asset. It has been protected against damp and sunlight, and unlike my pension, it has never been revalued downwards. My wife has suggested that it is not, in the legal sense, an asset. She works in a different field and I do not hold it against her.

Helen Pryce, a recruitment consultant I contacted in what I described as a market research capacity and she described as “a Tuesday”, was broadly supportive, if cautious in her phrasing.

“Most people are staying put because the alternative is forty applications, three rounds of interviews and a personality test about fruit. I’d call that caution. I wouldn’t call it a strategy, but then I’m not the one with the certificate.”

The Wider Lexicon

Job hugging does not travel alone. There is also coffee badging, which I understand to mean turning up at the office for just long enough to be seen holding a coffee before going home. I have done a version of this since 2019, although in my case the coffee is from the machine on the second floor and nobody has ever looked.

There is also quiet cracking, which describes a person who is privately miserable at work but continues to attend. I am told this is considered a problem. I had always thought it was called the commute.

A friend from my old university days, a man who has changed careers four times and now makes small wooden boats, suggested over a pint that what I am describing used to be called having a mortgage. I have considered this carefully and cannot fault it. People once stayed in the same job for thirty years because of two children, a semi-detached house and a Vauxhall on finance, and nobody wrote a column about it. They simply lacked the vocabulary, and possibly the laminator.

My LinkedIn profile still lists me as Open to Opportunities. The photograph shows me with a fuller head of hair and a lanyard from a building the company no longer occupies. I have decided to leave it as it is. Opportunities know where to find me. I am at the third desk from the window, next to the plant, and I am not planning to go anywhere.