Arnie Weissmann
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 analyzed 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 traveler satisfaction. That would be a threat to advisors.
For the moment, travel is booming, and travelers 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.