Welcome to this month’s Wellbeing Matters bulletin, which has moved from weekly to monthly and will, from the next quarter, appear ‘as and when’. This edition looks at job hugging, the practice of staying in a role you might otherwise leave because vacancies are scarce, hiring managers are cautious and the economy has the general demeanour of a man patting his pockets for his keys. Some people call this fear. We prefer loyalty. Below are seven signs that you may be a job hugger. Please do not reply with concerns, as the mailbox is no longer monitored.
1. You have not updated your CV since 2017 and consider this a sign of commitment
The document still exists, somewhere on a laptop that was returned to IT in 2020. It lists your current role as ‘Assistant’, a title you have since outgrown by two grades and one rebrand. You tell yourself that leaving it untouched is a statement of faith. It is closer to an archaeological site.
2. You no longer open recruiter messages, and call this focus
There were eleven last month. You did not read them, in the same way that a person does not read the results of a test they are fairly sure they have failed.
3. You describe the team away day as a turning point
It took place in the staff car park, from 2pm until 3.15pm, and involved a flip chart and a single tray of flapjacks. You still refer to it as ‘the retreat’. Nobody has corrected you, because nobody has the energy.
4. You practise coffee badging in reverse
Coffee badging, as you will know, is the art of attending the office just long enough to be seen before going home. You have inverted this. You arrive at 7.40am, stay until the cleaners ask whether you are all right, and leave a cardigan on your chair overnight so that your absence is never technically recorded.
5. You have been quietly cracking for eleven months and have been told it is resilience
Quiet cracking, the slow and silent deterioration of a person at work, is widely reported to be on the rise. Helen Pritchard, Head of People Experience at a mid-sized logistics company, says her organisation has seen no evidence of it.
‘We do not see disengagement. We see colleagues who are staying very, very still. Our data suggests this is what commitment looks like when the alternative is a spreadsheet of other people’s vacancies.’
6. You thanked your line manager for the restructure
This was the third round. You sent a short email, copied to four people, expressing gratitude for ‘the clarity’. You used the word ‘journey’. Your manager, who had been looking at the same screen since lunch, replied with a single thumbs-up, which you have since printed.
7. You describe the 14-minute Monday all-hands as your ‘community’
It is a video call in which a director reads out numbers while eighty people keep their cameras off and their expressions neutral. Gareth Whitlow, a senior analyst who has attended every one since 2021, understands why this might seem thin.
‘It is the only place my name is said out loud during the working week,’ he says. ‘Usually it is mispronounced, but there is intent behind it, and I have learned to take that where I can find it.’ He added that he had recently been offered a role elsewhere with a better salary and a four-day week, and had declined it out of respect for what he called ‘the culture’. When asked to describe the culture, he said there was a laminated sign about it in the kitchen.
