Job Security is Dead... and Nobody Cares | How Money Works

0:00When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast, terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Propel Fitness Water With Gatorade Electrolites, Zero Sugar, and Vitamins, Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolites Fall has never looked or tasted this good. Sweet Greens Fall Harvest Menu is back with seasonal favorites dressed to impress and made to be devoured. Storm roasted sweet potatoes, crisp apples, maple glazed Brussels, and crave worthy flavors

1:02in the autumn harvest bowl, maple glazed salmon plate, and roasted bacon Brussels side. The season's most desirable menu has returned to sweet green. Featuring falls best dressed. Make your move. Order on the sweet green app. Jobs are not what they used to be. The average time an employee spends with their company is now at the lowest level ever, and that's by design. We have gone from full time to part time to casual to gig work, lowering the expectation of a long-term professional relationship every step of the way. If this didn't do enough, studies have shown that many workplaces are now intentionally promoting the fear of job losses and an attempt to motivate workers and keep costs down. But this is usually a really dumb idea. The death of job security is bad for workers and bad for companies, but nobody cares anymore. So, we have immediately seen Andrew layoffs. We have seen price increases, so that's inflation. Teachers and staff at schools from coast to coast could soon be out of the job.

2:0215 million new jobs in just three years. A record. The Musk said the company would look to reduce headcount by around 10%. The plan is already piling up this year, and we're just a few weeks into 2024. Up until the 1980s, it wasn't unusual for workers to spend their entire professional careers working with just one company. Company loyalty was highly valued by both employers and employees, and the threat of getting laid off or fired was incredibly low. If you ever watch old films and see someone getting fired as a major plot point, just remember it actually was a big deal back then. But according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those days are long gone. The average tenure of young employees these days is less than a third of the baby boomers exiting the workforce. I don't want to sound too old here, but back in my day, people actually cared about losing their job. But today, getting fired or laid off from your company just makes good content to post on TikTok. This is a bad trend for companies, because it takes away their biggest stick.

3:03The fear of getting fired is always going to be a motivator in the workplace. There really is no way around that. If you don't do your job or cause too much trouble for the company, you're going to lose your job along with the paying benefits that come with it. And as the great Peter Gibbons would say, that will only make someone work just hard enough to not get fired. The death of job security means that people just expect to lose their job at some point in their career these days. But there are three big reasons why it was allowed to get this bad. And three reasons why nobody really cares anymore. The first reason is that companies give up on training their own staff. There was an old joke about company staffing that goes something like this. The CEO and head of HR are arguing about the cost to train staff. The CEO asks, what would happen if we spent all this money and they quit? Which the head of HR responds, what would happen if we don't spend the money and they stay? But as more people move jobs more often, the CEO's argument is actually starting to make sense. Research conducted by Peter Capelli, the director of the Wharton School Center for Human

4:03Resources, found that the time and money spent on staffing within companies has fallen drastically. In 1979, the average worker received two and a half weeks on the job training every single year. By 2004, it was just 11 hours and most of that was safety training, not developing new skills. A more recent follow-up survey conducted by the same team in 2011 found that only one fifth of workers received any on the job training at all within the last year. Companies don't want to train people because they are leaving their jobs more frequently than they used to, so they are only willing to hire employees that are already able to do the job. Standardized systems have made this a lot easier for them to do. If you are a professional office worker, it's almost a prerequisite to have a basic proficiency in Microsoft Office, especially Excel, and every profession now has its own industry standard productivity programs. If you are a creative, you use Adobe Suite. If you are in sales, you use HubSpot or Comparable CRM. And, if you are in marketing, you need to know your way around a box of crayons.

5:04Oh, in the advertising analytics backend of Google, Meta, and LinkedIn. Since these skills have become the standard for all employees, companies can hire people that are already ready to work on day one. Where in the past, they would need a lengthy training program on the unique in-house systems of that particular company. But standardized programs have also meant that people can find a new job that they are qualified for with less barriers, which means they switch jobs more often, which means companies invest less into training on loyal staff, which creates even more need for industry standard systems. The ultimate incarnation of this trend is platform-based gig work. The professional relationship for this kind of work lasts as long as the app is running, and writers often work between multiple apps at the same time to maximize earning and minimize downtime. If you want to get ahead in a professional career these days, I'm sorry to tell you, but you are going to have to invest some of your own time and money into training yourself, even if it's just a tick-a-meaning-less qualification box. Companies aren't going to train you anymore, which means if you quit or get laid off, it's not as big of a deal for either party.

6:05But the decline of on-job training is just the first reason. So it's time to learn how many works, to find out why job security is dying, why nobody cares, and what happens when nobody has a job for long enough to be good at it. This week's lesson is sponsored by Manscaped. Just in time for Father's Day, Manscaped introduces the must-have-guests for every dad, meet the handyman and the weedwacker 2.0. First up, the handyman, the face shaver designed for dads who can handle everything but they're unruly facial hair. Featuring a dual blade system including a standard foil shaver and a long hair leveler blade, the handyman ensures a close, smooth shave tackling up to three days of growth effortlessly. What makes the handyman exceptional is its skin-safe technology significantly reducing the risk of nicks and cuts, and its waterproof design making it easy to rinse under the faucet. Now onto the weedwacker 2.0. This nose and ear trimmer is perfect for dads looking to manage those tricky areas. It features a 7,000 RPM motor and a 360 degree rotary dual blade system for efficient grooming.

7:05The weedwacker 2.0 is cordless waterproof and it comes with a high performance battery that lasts up to 45 minutes, ensuring it's always ready when dad needs it. Don't settle for it. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use indeed sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at ande.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast, terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for indeed sponsor jobs. Propel Fitness Water With Gatorade Electrolites, Zero Sugar and Vitamins, Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolites Water is never looked or tasted this good. Sweet Greens Fall Harvest Menu is back with seasonal favorites dressed to impress and

8:09made to be devoured. Warm roasted sweet potatoes, crisp apples, maple glazed brussels and crave worthy flavors in the autumn harvest bowl, maple glazed salmon plate and roasted bacon brussel side. The season's most desirable menu has returned to sweet green. Featuring falls best dressed. Make your move. Order on the sweet green app. For ordinary gifts like coffee mugs this Father's Day. Opt for something from Manscaped like the handyman or the weed whacker 2.0 and helped dad elevate his grooming game from caveman to gentleman. Head over to Manscaped.com and use promo code HMW20 and get 20% off plus free international shipping. Make this Father's Day 1 to remember with Manscaped. The death of job security is bad news for companies, even if they were the ones that caused it. The fact is that when you get a new job you aren't going to be very good at what you do until you learn your new role. Standardized systems have made it easier to transfer basic competencies between companies, but even little things like who you talk to about authorizing your expense reports, the

9:11names and faces of clients or how the office printer works. They all take time for new people to learn. According to a study conducted by Gallup, a business analytics company, it takes the average employee 12 months before they reach their full performance potential in their new role. Other studies have suggested that new employees are not fully autonomous in their responsibilities for the first 18 months of their employment. If new entrants into the job market are only spending 3 years in their jobs on average, that means they are going to be spending a third of their career just getting up to speed in their new role. That means a loss in productivity for the companies they work for. Right? Wrong. Worker productivity is actually at all time highs, so that begs the question. Is this in spite of lower job security or because of it? The second reason that job security has been dying is that it's a great motivation tool. If the fear of losing your job is only enough to motivate you to do the bare minimum to avoid that tap on the shoulder, then you should know that companies have responded by moving those goal posts. A study conducted by economists at Manchester and Cardiff University looked at the motivating

10:11factor of what they called a manufactured job uncertainty. In this report, researchers tried to work out why fears of job security was going up, even when the rates of people being fired from full-time positions was stable. We did this by comparing companies in America and the UK, who are very happy to lay people off to a piece shareholders, to companies in Japan which has a strong culture of never firing people. A small tangent, but Japanese businesses actually take firing people so seriously that they have an alternative practice called Oidashi Baya, but this loosely translates to workers' purgatory. According to Japan Intercultural Consulting, a firm that advises businesses operating in the Japanese market, workers' purgatory happens when an employee chronically underperforms in the role. Instead of getting fired, they are typically placed in a room often windowless where they have nothing to do. In many cases, their business cards are taken away, and they are forced to do menial, mind-numbing tasks or given nothing to do at all. So yeah, Japanese companies would rather put their workers in solitary confinement than fire them, making them a pretty good contrast to companies in America and the UK.

11:15What the economists found was that even when job tenure wasn't actually being reduced by layoffs or firings, changes to corporate control, and especially company mergers or acquisitions raised uncertainty. Companies noticed that by hyping up this uncertainty and making workers compete against each other to maintain their position in a theoretical downsizing, they could get people to work harder. Companies doing this would rank the performance of their teams and compare them to one another, highlight staff errors, and downplay strong performers so that managers and their teams always felt like their job was at risk. The Japanese firms, despite actually having shorter tenures for managers and operating with more business uncertainty thanks to a weaker overall economy, had a higher sense of job security, mainly thanks to a culture of protecting workers even at the expense of shareholders. In a wonderful twist of fate, though, the study also found that this is not really working on younger employees. Decades of well-publicized layoffs means that younger managers have no expectation of job security, and aren't afraid of losing their jobs as much as older managers who come from a time when people could spend their entire careers with one company.

12:16The rank and yank strategy only works to boost productivity for so long. A company should get rid of bad employees, but if it makes everybody feel on edge about their jobs forever, then even the best employees are just going to look for better opportunities elsewhere. Younger workers have also realized that changing jobs more frequently, especially early in their career, is the best way to move up the corporate ladder and secure pay increases. I will say it in every video I can, but if you want to increase your earnings in your career, multiple studies suggest that the best way to do this is to change jobs roughly every two years, and always be on the lookout for better opportunities. Companies do not value staff loyalty anymore, because they can't. And that's the third reason why job security is dying. It costs businesses a lot of money to hire new employees, and then more money to pay them while they're getting good at their job. If they are hiring externally for a more senior position, they will also need to pay that new hire more than an internal promotion. So if it makes no sense, then why do companies keep doing this? Well, it's easier. An internal promotion means someone else needs to be promoted to fill that person's

13:18position, and someone else needs to be promoted to fill theirs. Now instead of your company having one employee in a new job, it has five. Hiring managers could do this, or they could just hire an external candidate that already knows the systems and then get back to scrolling Reddit in their office. Workers also don't believe in job stability either. Companies like employee pension plans and career development are all the responsibility of the worker now. And if they are accepting that responsibility, they also want the freedom that comes with it. Some companies like consulting, legal, and accounting firms have built their entire workforce around limited time employees. Overworked underpaid graduates will stick it out in entry-level roles because they know it looks good on the resume when they apply for a real job in two years. Companies can attract high-performing workers by bragging about how secure they are. Hiring companies that were considered American institutions have fallen apart too many times for people to think that their job is secure. And job security isn't a selling point worth taking a job for because people have learned not to care. So congratulations corporate America, you kind of played yourself.

14:21There's so much more I want to say on this topic, but it wouldn't make for a good YouTube video. For things like that, make sure you're subscribed to my totally free email newsletter compounded daily if you want to get articles that can't be made into videos. The bonus fourth reason that job security is dead is this man right here. Go and watch my new video to find out how an unremarkable chemical engineer worked his way up to personally reshape corporate America into what it is today, all while destroying his company in the process to keep on learning how money works. Fall has never looked or tasted this good. Sweet Greens Fall Harvest Menu is back with seasonal favorites dressed to impress and made to be devoured. Home roasted sweet potatoes, crisp apples, maple glazed Brussels and crave worthy flavors in the autumn harvest bowl, maple glazed salmon plate and roasted bacon Brussels side. The season's most desirable menu has returned to sweet green. Featuring falls best dressed. Make your move.

15:21Order on the sweet green app.