Back in the before times, it was a company world and workers were just living in it. You could hear it in the phrases we used when we talked about work: “multitasking,” “working vacation,” “inbox zero,” “bossing up.” 

“That language reflects a very management-centric view, where the power dynamic heavily favored employers,” said Eric Anicich, a professor of management at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. “People used to brag about the number of hours they worked, almost like a badge of honor.” 

In short: hustle culture.  

Of course, all of that changed profoundly during the pandemic, when there were suddenly two open jobs for every available worker. Wages soared, perks were plentiful and places like McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts were offering signing bonuses.

Workers felt confident, even cocky, and the language around work changed. 

This was the “great resignation,” the days of quiet quitting, lazy girl jobs — positions where you get paid for not doing much — and acting your wage. 

“These phrases communicate very different concerns and aspirations,” Anicich said.

For the first time in decades, workers were questioning the hustle, and it wasn’t just talk. Employees were quitting in record numbers and working fewer hours.

Yongseok Shin, an economist at Washington University in St. Louis, decided to measure exactly how much less we were working. “The hours people were working went down by 2%,” he said. “That is a fairly big number.”

Shin pointed out the number was even bigger — more than double — for many top-earning, white-collar workers, many of whom started working remotely during the pandemic.

“These were the people who realized that they could be doing about the same amount of work without spending all the hours in the office,” Shin said.

Bottom line: Workers were working less, and companies were fighting over them. 

Pay was soaring and so were perks. You want to work from home? No problem! If you do want to come in, there’s free pizza and we turned the copy room into a meditation lounge!

This was the corporate carrot era. But about a year ago, the sticks came out. Eric Anicich said you can sum it up in three little words: “return to office.”

“Return to office, or RTO. I started seeing it everywhere last year,” Anicich said. “It sounds like a command, like you’re being scolded. It’s like, ‘OK, playtime is over. Return to office.’”

Last year, the job market cooled a bit. Unemployment is still near historic lows, but it is rising, and the number of people quitting has plunged. Just like that, RTO orders went into place, the pizza dried up and meditation rooms across the nation were converted back into copy rooms.

“It does feel like we’re kind of at a crossroads,” Anicich said. “I think both sides are starting to recognize the power that the other side has.”

Workers are resisting hustle culture, but they’re also staying in their jobs. Companies are putting back-to-office mandates in place, but enforcement is spotty.

It’s being called the Big Stay, but really, it’s like high noon in the American workforce, albeit a very passive-aggressive high noon.

Anicich said some of the new phrases around work reflect this stalemate: “quiet vacationing” (secretly going on vacation but Zooming in to meetings like you are at home), “bare-minimum Mondays,” “rage applying,” “resenteeism” (staying in your job, but with maximum crankiness) and “coffee badging.”  

“Coffee badging is really the art of showing up in the office to check a box, because your office has some return-to-office mandate,” said Frank Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs, a workplace technology company that coined the term “coffee badging” after its quarterly workplace survey found nearly 60% of workers said their response to the RTO mandate was to badge in, get a coffee, say hi to everybody and leave. 

The term went viral, along with some more ominous phrases like “quiet cutting” — that’s the current trend of companies is cutting workers’ hours and replacing full-time with part-time positions — and “ghost jobs,” postings for jobs that are never filled and sit on LinkedIn for months. These are intended to build a cache of qualified candidates for the future and make burned-out workers feel like help is on the way, when it’s not. 

“We’re in the middle of this tug-of-war between employees and employers,” Weishaupt said. “Especially, large companies are setting these return-to-office mandates, and employees don’t want it. They want flexibility.”

So, who will bend the knee? That depends on the economy.

If unemployment rises, RTO mandates will likely get tougher, quiet cutting will get louder and hustle culture may rise again. 

But if unemployment stays low, though, those RTO mandates may soften into recommendations and, who knows? The copy machine might be wheeled back out of the meditation room. 

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