Following the Great Resignation, many workers who stuck with their
jobs subsequently became mired in what is being called the Great Gloom.
How gloomy, and where is the gloom greatest? BambooHR, a human
relations software platform, created an Employee Happiness Index to
measure exactly that.
Judging by the overall results, perhaps the measurement tool should
be renamed the Employee Unhappiness Index. Job satisfaction is on the
decline, and the rate of that decline is increasing. At the end of the
last quarter, BambooHR recorded the lowest worker happiness levels in
four years, down 10% from December 2020, the close of the first pandemic
year.
To determine happiness or lack thereof, BambooHR relied on a Net
Promoter Score based on whether an employee would refer their employer
to a job seeker.
Much of the decline was driven by significant dips in two industries:
tech and nonprofits. But three industries bucked the trend and saw
increases in contentment: construction, travel and education.
Construction, already in first place, picked up 2 points. Education,
previously ranked sixth, picked up a point and rose to fifth.
Travel had the greatest increase and greatest lift, gaining 3 points and rising from fifth place to second.
Anita Grantham, head of human relations at BambooHR, told me that
they hadn't analysed comments to determine why happiness increased for
travel employees but suspects it may be connected with the lifting of
pandemic-related restrictions. Travel industry employees whose job was
to make customers happy had suddenly became enforcers of unpopular
pandemic protocols.
The easing of pandemic-related stresses may well account for travel's
dramatic one-year leap. But I think there are also overarching reasons
for the jump that have to do with the nature of travel industry
employment.
When the pandemic was declared and travel companies shed 50% of their workforce, one of my first professional worries was that Travelweekly.com would suffer a similar decline in traffic. As a business-to-business website, page views might easily be halved, as well.
As it turned out, traffic remained robust in 2020 and continued to
rise through the pandemic and beyond. It appeared that people may have
been out of a travel job, but they were not interested in leaving the
industry.
Although compensation is closely correlated with job satisfaction, the Travel Weekly Travel Industry Survey, published late last fall, revealed both a long road to six-figure compensation and
a long-tenured workforce. The willingness of people to stick with
travel when they could make more money elsewhere reflects, I believe, a
level of job fulfillment that is exceptional.
Rebooking, refunding and chasing future travel credits for clients
wasn't particularly rewarding for travel advisors during the pandemic,
but the fact that so many endured that slog to stay linked to travel
reinforces the notion that it's a very difficult industry to part from.
Despite what can be years of low pay, there's a positive societal
status related to a travel industry job. On a panel I moderated during a
World Travel & Tourism Council Summit, AIG Travel Guard CEO Jeffrey
Rutledge joked that, at travel conferences, he feels he's regarded as
the least-interesting person in the room, but that at insurance
conferences, he's the most interesting.
And it's no less true for travel advisors at cocktail parties, should
the choice for an attendee be to chat with a travel advisor or an
insurance salesman.
However, Roger Dow, co-founder of the job placement firm FutureWRX
Solutions (and former CEO of U.S. Travel), told me "there's a sea change
in demographics" that the industry isn't preparing for.
"The attitude used to be, 'Put me in the game, coach, I'll do
anything.' The word cloud for that generation was 'experience, growth,
money.'"
The word cloud for younger generations -- Dow reckons up to age 40 -- would put emphasis on "flexibility" and "my control."
"They don't want to work six days a week, including weekends, when
they start," he said. "Every hospitality management school enrollment is
down significantly. Our reputation is low pay and high risk."
For hospitality service workers, he said, add "dead-end job."
Post-pandemic, "wages are up 20% to 25% [for hotel service workers] but
are still $10 an hour below the mean average."
The Bureau of Labor Statistics also tracks "quit rates," and Dow said the national average is 2%. For hospitality, it's 5%.
It may be that travel industry satisfaction is tied closely to the
opportunity to travel. That's possibly why low-paid travel advisors stay
in the game, but there are, according to Dow, still 1.2 million vacant
hotel service positions. The dropping enrollment in hotel management
schools is certainly concerning, particularly if that results in a drop
in traveller satisfaction. That would be a threat to advisors.
For the moment, travel is booming, and travellers appear eager to hit
the road. But without a pipeline of fresh talent, particularly in
hospitality, it may prove difficult for travel to maintain second place
in the long run.
Source: Travel Weekly