Four years after a pandemic changed the world
The pandemic changed how I think about work.
Four years ago, it was a Saturday. The state of Illinois, where I live, had effectively shut down the day before due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Our schools and daycare closed. Most non-essential businesses were closed.
At the time, I thought it would be a few weeks. We could “flatten the curve.” I’d read about lockdowns in places like Italy lasting 90 days. That seemed like a worst-case scenario.
My kids didn’t see the inside of a classroom for 362 days. Our family remained mostly isolated.
I’ve written about what it was like to parent during that time. I even wrote in the midst of our lockdown, feeling helpless and overwhelmed. Looking back, those days are a blur.
But the pandemic sharply changed how I think about work. My days were so difficult with remote learning and parenting without a break. Dealing with the bullshit of my job became intolerable. I looked hard at what exactly made my job unbearable and realized that nothing would change. So I quit in early 2021, an “early adopter” of The Great Resignation, you could say.
Clearly, I wasn’t alone.
The years since the pandemic in 2020 have been a roller coaster for employees and I don’t think we’re done with the ride.
March 13th, 2020, is a day burned into my memory. It was the day our world changed permanently. For a while, it felt like progress, but now it feels like an absolute regression.
2021 was a year of possibilities.
In many respects, I was lucky to quit in early 2021. Many companies were in a hiring frenzy. Businesses were growing at an unbelievable pace, especially if they offered technology that facilitated remote work. Venture capital money was free-flowing.
I’m not sure I would have been able to pivot to a new career if it hadn’t been that exact time and place. A marketing agency hired me, even though I had almost no experience. The agency went from 30 employees in 2020 to about 130 fifteen months later. The demand for content marketing, my newly chosen field, was really, really high.
I started this newsletter in late 2021. I could feel the energy of worker empowerment. Friends were quitting bad jobs and bad bosses. Their new roles paid substantially more money. I called The Great Resignation a new labor movement, one I was sure would be a disruptive force in the job market.
It was disruptive. It was also short-lived.
2022 was a year of contraction.
In early 2022, the mass layoffs started. I remember some of the early casualties. Better.com laid off thousands as the real estate market contracted amidst rising interest rates. Klarna, Netflix, Shopify and other tech companies, large and small, followed. (Layoffs.fyi has been tracking tech layoffs.)
My friends were laid off. I lost my own job in October 2022. My job was a bad fit for me, but it was a bad fit in part because the role changed due to the industry unrest.
At first, the layoffs were understandable. Also infuriating, but I could track what happened. Companies were flush with cash and overhired. The increase in their profits was a blip rather than a changed trajectory. Shopify admitted this in its layoff announcement. The company saw a huge surge in e-commerce. People were stuck in their homes and shopped online more. But as the country re-opened, that shopping behavior cooled.
2023 was a year of backsliding.
What started to happen in 2023 felt more sinister.
Layoffs continued, including mass layoffs from companies like Google and Meta. Clearly these companies did not have a cash problem. Other companies laid people off, even after posting record profits. It was a year of cost-cutting… and a lot of it felt unnecessary.
Jeremy Pfeffer, a professor at the Stanford School of Business, called this a form of social contagion: companies are imitating the behavior of others. “If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs, the reason is that everybody else is doing it,” he said.
It’s causing real harm to working people. Outside of the financial impact on employees, fear is spreading. No jobs feel safe.
In addition, many companies are mandating that employees return to the office, even though the evidence shows that people are more productive when they work from home. A friend was promised work-from-home forever when he joined a company in 2021. The company was committed to remote work. And has now changed its mind.
Promises have been broken. Trust has eroded. Everything feels like it is getting worse for working people.
… and now what?
Can we continue on a downward trajectory? Eventually, the mistreatment of employees will backfire. Maybe people will take a job, but they won’t be motivated to work. Innovation and creativity will stagnate. These are hard to quantify, but they’ll emerge in the coming years.
I think eventually we’ll hit a bottom. Forward-thinking companies will grow. Companies that are trying to go back to “the way things were” will start to decline. But this could take a decade or more.
I’m inspired by Gen Z and their convictions around work. They’re comfortable saying “nope” to long hours, toxic work culture, or being asked to do work outside of their job descriptions without compensation. Eventually, this will become the dominant workforce.
I also stood in strong solidarity with the writers’ and actors’ strikes in Hollywood last year. Collectively, people have power.
But right now, it’s rocky. I’ll be the first to admit that I was surprised by the rapid decline after seeing so much opportunity for change in 2021. I’d underestimated how much people in power will fight to stay in power.
Why am I thinking about this on the anniversary of Covid shutdowns? Because I think the pandemic had a lasting impact on how people feel about work. They want more balance and flexibility. And now, after 2022 and 2023, they trust employers less. They’ll be unwilling to give to a company that provides no security in return.
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