It’s as if America’s workforce is experiencing a collective midlife crisis. Indeed, Professor Anthony Klotz of Texas A&M University has dubbed what’s going on the Great Resignation given the pent-up desires of employees to leave their current jobs. In April, 2021 nearly 4 million people or 2.8% of the workforce resigned. Certainly, workers’ concerns about their physical, mental and emotional health have been gathering steam for a while now. From the unpleasant to intolerable conditions that working women have experienced—as lampooned in the 1980 movie “9 to 5”—to today, issues like a lack of genuine empowerment to burnout to wanting to create a new work/life balance have led employees to re-evaluate their career paths. It’s as if the mental health challenge that caused Simon Biles to pull out of most of her Olympic events is being enacted in households across America.
As workers return to office and/or hybrid arrangements are enacted or continued, what could and should the future of the workplace look and FEEL like? There’s nobody better to address that topic than Dan Hill. He’s the author of both Emotionomics and now Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo—with its implicit call for reforms, using humor to highlight inequities and a lack of productivity alike.