How times have changed. Four years ago there were reports of law firms inviting staff to bring their dogs to the office, while some bankers enjoyed “summer Fridays” — characterised by one Wall Street analyst as: “Log into Teams, check email, then live my life.” Now, the news is generally of perks being withdrawn, and even of companies requiring staff to put their mobile phones in lockable pouches to improve security, “remove distractions and build discipline”.
It is always possible to find some sociological, technological or managerial explanation for these changing trends. But the waxing and waning of workplace perks is usually an indicator of one key thing: the shifting balance of power between employers and employees. In more normal times, this looks like a gentle push and pull in line with the economic cycle. Over the past five years it has been more like a whipsaw.
The best metric to follow is the rate at which people quit their jobs voluntarily. I have always been fond of the name given to this dataset by Nick Colas and Jessica Rabe of DataTrek Research: they call it the “Take This Job and Shove It” index. After the pandemic, a shortage of labour gave workers an unusually strong bargaining hand. The “quit rate” — the number of people who left their jobs voluntarily as a proportion of total employment — was about 2.3 per cent in the US pre-pandemic, and shot up to about 3 per cent in 2021. UK data shows a similar pattern, though statistics on quit rates in other countries are hard to come by.