In 2023, there is a plethora of ways to describe being unhappy at the office — “rage appliers” are frantically looking for new jobs while those growing angrier while putting up with work problems can be called “resenteers.”
Those somewhere in the middle are known by the most viral term of them all: quiet quitters. In the summer of 2022, a Gen Z engineer named Zaid Khan inadvertently set off a chain reaction that went global when he posted a short TikTok video about how he was "quitting the idea of going above and beyond" at work.
DON'T MISS: A New Viral Term Is Replacing Quiet Quitting At The Office
This Is What It Means To Be A Boomerang Employee
A more recent workplace term making the rounds is the “boomerang employee” — a worker who quits or is laid off at one company and, after spending some time at a new workplace, comes back to the old one.
While those who rose up on the career ladder during earlier times may call this “bouncing around” or a lack of loyalty, the practice has become more common at a time of layoffs and the Great Resignation. According to one report, 50.5 million workers across the U.S. quit their jobs in 2022 while in some months nearly 5% of new hires had already previously worked at the company.
“Their presence and impact have gained recognition as a result of the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, rage applying, and recent tech layoffs," career coach Kyle Elliott recently told Insider. "Some workers are returning to previous employers after a stint at a competitor, while others are being laid off and then rehired at the same company."
It’s hardly a matter of “crawling back” since data from workforce planning software company Visier calculated that the average boomerang employee received a 28% pay raise compared to the jobs they had before leaving. As there is still a labor shortage across the country, many found better-paying work elsewhere and had to be wooed back with higher salaries from the old employer.
Copycat Layoffs Are A Problem For Many Industries
With a looming recession, the aforementioned layoffs have been common across many industries. The tech industry has made for particularly shocking headlines — Amazon (AMZN) laid off 18,000 workers between November 2022 and January and announced 9,000 more cuts on March 20.
Google (GOOGL)’s widespread layoffs also spurred protests in multiple countries.
These types of numbers risk what some HR experts and jobs market analysts are calling a chain of “copycat layoffs” — companies who have been mulling over different cost-cutting measures and, after seeing competitors announce theirs with what is in many cases minimal or quickly fizzling-out outcry, decide to bring down the axe.
“The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing,” Jeffrey Pfeffer, an organizational behavior professor at Stanford, recently told the university’s Insights magazine. “If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs, the reason is that everybody else is doing it.”
As the economic situation worsens, some warn that we may soon start seeing fewer “boomerang employees” and more “copycat layoffs” although drastically laying off talent often creates a circle reaction with the former.
“Companies sometimes lay off people that they have just recruited — oftentimes with paid recruitment bonuses,” Pfeffer said. “When the economy turns back in the next 12, 14, or 18 months, they will go back to the market and compete with the same companies to hire talent. They are basically buying labor at a high price and selling low.”
