Promotion? No, thank you. More employees step off corporate ladder
Employees are rethinking ambition, prioritizing something other than promotions.
Climbing the corporate ladder used to be a great motivator for employees, but today’s workers are increasingly rejecting promotions in favor of a healthier work-life balance.
Employees are rethinking ambition, prioritizing something other than promotions. According to Randstad’s global 2024 WorkMonitor survey, 39% of respondents don’t want a promotion because they’re happy in their role, and 54% are content to stay in a role they like, even if there’s no room for career progression.
It seems that fancy titles, bigger paychecks and corner offices have lost some of their allure for employees who experienced a different way of life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many are unwilling to give up the freedom and flexibility they gained for a new title and a small raise that comes with more stress and restrictions.
Puerto Rico is experiencing similar trends, Daisy Aguilar, vice president of the board of directors for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in Puerto Rico and president-elect for 2025, told News is my Business.
“Puerto Rico usually is a few years behind the U.S. because we have fewer opportunities, but we’re definitely seeing those same trends here,” she said.
Aguilar, a 30-year veteran in human resources, noted that while aversion to promotion has existed for decades, the reasons have changed. Back then, she said, employees often rejected promotions because they didn’t want to manage their co-workers.
“People with technical degrees didn’t want to manage people but they felt pressured because they didn’t have other opportunities for economic or career growth,” Aguilar said.
By 2015, innovation and globalization showed companies that tech knowledge was as important as managerial skills. Consequently, they created two different compensation structures for managerial and technical roles, communicating to employees that they didn’t have to go into management to advance, she explained.
But then the pandemic came, and everything changed — again.
“People discovered they needed and wanted flexibility and started assigning more value to non-monetary rewards,” Aguilar said.
Work-life balance gains ground
Multiple studies indicate that work-life balance is increasingly becoming a top priority for employees. Here are other key findings of Randstad’s survey:
- 94% rank work-life balance as highly as pay on their lists of priorities.
- 60% consider their personal lives more important than their work lives.
- When looking at their next career move, work-life balance is more important (57%) than higher pay (55%).
- 56% would not accept a job if they thought it would negatively affect their work-life balance.
- 48% would quit a job if it prevented them from enjoying life.
- 39% said being able to work from home is non-negotiable.
- 37% would consider quitting if they were required to spend more time in the office.
During the pandemic, more people, especially men, realized they wanted to be more involved at home, Aguilar said.
“Workplace structures were set decades ago under the premise that women would stay home with the kids and men would be the breadwinners. Now, you have men who want to be involved parents and not get home from work, tired, after the kids are in bed,” she said.
When offered a promotion, many of today’s employees see a new role that will limit their flexibility and negatively impact their work-life balance because it will require them to be more present at work and sacrifice more personal time.
“For a 10% raise that will be eaten up by inflation, they say, ‘I’m not getting anything out of this. What you’re giving me is more work, more traffic, higher commuting costs, more stress. Where is the reward in that?’ So, it’s easy to see why they would reject a promotion,” Aguilar said.
A paradigm shift
The anti-promotion trend is confusing to business leaders who for years strived fiercely to climb the corporate ladder. The prospect of becoming managers or C-suite executives drove them to work long hours, navigate office politics and make big sacrifices.
A recent article by Business Insider makes an interesting point: There hasn’t always been a corporate ladder to climb.
Two-hundred years ago, most Americans were self-employed as farmers and artisans. In 1820, 80% of the workforce was self-employed. When the Industrial Revolution entered the picture, more people ended up working for someone else. By 1870, the 80% had shrunk to 33%, and by 1940, only 20% of the workforce was self-employed.
Because self-employed workers were self-motivated, employers had to come up with a system that would establish a new work ethic and motivate wage employees to work hard for them.
By serving as loyal soldiers for their companies, employees could expect to gain more prestige, better job security and bigger salaries, according to Business Insider’s report. “Help the boss, professionals were told, and maybe you can become the boss. The new ethic took hold among the managerial class in the 1950s. By the 1970s, it had spread to the entire workforce.”
Now, “cracks are starting to appear in that system, with many workers no longer willing to make the trade-offs required by America’s hustle culture,” Business Insider reported.
No doubt the Tech Revolution is driving the anti-promotion trend, as it allows people of all walks of life to easily set up low-risk e-commerce businesses or promote them online.
“I think we’re at a turning point in which a new generation of workers is questioning the systems and structures established in the 1940s — stemming from the Industrial Revolution and focused on control — which explains why many employers want employees to go back to the office now,” Aguilar said.
No pension, no loyalty
Aguilar highlighted the negative effect of the lack of pension plans on the local workforce.
“The biggest change I’ve seen in my 30 years in the field is the elimination of pensions. When organizations eliminated defined-benefit pension plans, employees had no reason to stay. They realized there was no long-term benefit in staying anywhere; they were now on their own,” she said.
Companies began moving away from pension plans in the 1980s, mainly because of rising costs as life expectancy increased. Economic pressures triggered by stock market volatility and interest rate fluctuations also made it harder for companies to predict pension costs.
Eventually, employers replaced pensions with 401(k) retirement plans, which shifted the investment risk to employees. Today, traditional pensions are more common in public-sector jobs than in private-sector employment.
“Pensions were a primary reason for staying at a job. People stayed 20, 30 years with the same company, and they would endure whatever because each year they were closer to that pension,” Aguilar said.
It’s no wonder, she added, that the newer generation of workers has an attitude of “doing it for myself, not for the company.”
The lack of pensions has taught millennials and Gen Zers not to expect employers to take care of them when they retire, contrary to what baby boomers and early Gen Xers experienced.
“The new generations know that’s not going to happen to them. They know they have to live with uncertainty and make decisions based on what they need each moment,” Aguilar said.
New generation, new carrot
Not surprisingly, Gen Z respondents to the Randstad survey were more likely than millennials or Gen Xers to agree with the statement, “I don’t want career progression.”
The new generation of workers is used to uncertainty, Aguilar said.
“They have lived through a global pandemic, the 2008 crash (The Great Recession), and more, so they don’t expect certainty at work. Generally speaking — because there are still some people who want to work nine-to-five — the new generation is focused on doing what they need to do right now,” she said.
Millennials and Gen Zers are also more skeptical. Many have been promised promotions “next year,” only to learn they won’t get them because of a “bad quarter,” Aguilar said. She added that companies used to plan three years ahead, then one year and now a quarter.
Given that promotions are no longer the appealing carrot at the end of the stick, the question becomes how organizations can retain these employees.
“Companies must create corporate cultures in which loyalty isn’t necessarily toward the organization the employees are working for but toward the work they’re doing, the projects they’re working on, the people they’re reporting to right now,” Aguilar said.
“What we know for sure is that one size doesn’t fit all anymore, like it did for previous generations in the world we once knew. Now we must think differently,” Aguilar concluded.
