In recent years there has been a number of workplace buzzwords you’ve probably heard about including ‘The Great Resignation’ and ‘quiet quitting’. These described the post pandemic working world, and acknowledged the growing trend of employees leaving their jobs, or becoming actively dissatisfied in their current jobs, wanting better work-life balance, more purpose in their working lives and reassessing their working motivations, priorities and lifestyles.
The newly emerging trend of ‘resenteeism’ recognises that due to the now unstable economy, the challenging costs of living, looming redundancy and recession fears, that those employees who were intending to leave their roles, are now resentfully staying in their current jobs. These are jobs that employees are very unsatisfied with, but employees feel restricted and frustrated with the reduced opportunity to move on for fear of job insecurity in the current economy and diminished lack of options available.
Resenteeism has been described as the successor to ‘quiet quitting’ (where employees achieve the bare minimum in their job). Resenteeism is characterized by employees feeling underappreciated, undervalued and actively resenting their current workplace or managers. Renteeism employees will be less subtle about their disregard and frustration in the workplace. With employees being negative, downcast and disengaged at work, sometimes even challenging towards people or processes. Both these trends can be seen as being reflective of a workplace’s culture and used as a general measurement of the workforce’s wellbeing and morale.
In the Gallup international survey ‘State of the Global Workforce’ 2022 poll, the UK was ranked 33rd out of 38 European countries for workplace engagement. With just 9% of UK workers being ‘actively engaged’ in their jobs. Its therefore most likely that your business currently has a significant proportion of disengaged and dissatisfied employees in your workforce.
With resenteeism being likely to decrease your business’ overall morale and productivity, how can you avoid it affecting your business?
- Understand the level of employee engagement in your business; knowing more about your business’ employee engagement levels is critical to making any improvements in the areas needed. Employee engagement surveys dive into different areas of workplace motivations and satisfaction including reward and benefits, communication and strategy, management and leadership, work-life balance etc. and identify the strengths for your business and areas that need improving. Creating an engagement strategy following a survey and communicating to your staff how you are making improvements, is fundamental to improving your employee engagement levels. The benefits of carrying out an engagement survey are increasing retention, staff engagement and productivity, and reducing issues such as absence levels and turnover.
- Increase communication about opportunities: communicating as much as possible with your staff will increase the likelihood that they feel valued, trusted and included within your business; decreasing their apathy and resentment. Send regular internal communication bulletins about job or promotional prospects, tell staff about training and development opportunities they are entitled to, recommunicate your benefit packages to ensure staff are making the most of any benefits and initiatives in place during the cost of living crisis.
- Make employees feel more appreciated: even the smallest of gestures can make an employee feel valued, recognised and appreciated. Whether that’s an acknowledgement for a job well done from the leadership team, the CEO going around and chatting to staff regularly, implementing wellbeing days, team lunches or small rewards (e.g. vouchers) for departmental or individual successes.
Nockolds HR provides strategic HR support for business including employee engagement surveys, reward strategies and employee value proposition planning. Please contact Kim Wallace, Senior HR Consultant with any questions or enquiries kim@nockoldshr.co.uk or 0333 400 7920.