Many of the executives that New York–based Wilding coaches are in the tech field, but job insecurity has become a universal truth: The fears her clients are voicing are consistent among workers regardless of geography, job level, work type, and sector.
As anyone who has had the experience can attest, this kind of anxiety is hard to live with. In fact, worrying about losing a job can take a similar toll on well-being as the worst-case scenario of actually losing a job. Indeed, researchers have described the two experiences as “surprisingly identical twins.”
That sense of unease is easily framed as an individual problem, one you discuss with a career coach or even a therapist. But its depressive effect can harm mental health, physical health, and personal relationships. And workers’ job insecurity is also an enormous drag on the companies they work for. It sours workplace relationships, stifles creativity, eats away at productivity, and can even make workers more prone to jobsite accidents.
Indeed, researchers have studied job insecurity for decades and reached the overwhelming consensus that the sentiment is a net negative for organizations. And now AI is putting a new twist on the old fear; workers are not just worried about losing their current job, they’re worried about their entire arsenal of skills—or still worse, their entire occupation—becoming obsolete.
And unlike past eras of elevated job insecurity, like the COVID-19 pandemic, the AI revolution has no end in sight. If AI didn’t take your job this year, it might still displace you next year, meaning the detrimental effects of AI job insecurity could become a mainstay of the modern workplace that CEOs and managers have to contend with indefinitely.
Still, the labor market is off-kilter. A low-hire, low-fire “job-hugging” environment has sapped workers’ sense of mobility, adding to their uneasiness, says Ravin Jesuthasan, global leader of transformation services at Mercer, a consulting firm. And reports that AI is shrinking entry-level or middle-management opportunities are upending the traditional career trajectories that workers have come to trust.
And workers using AI day-to-day are grasping how much of their jobs the technology can do. “’re seeing the tools evolve before their very eyes,” Jesuthasan says.
There’s a disconnect between the framing of the AI revolution as a time for ingenuity, and the ways that job insecurity can make it scary to go out on a limb.
But the job insecurity that’s wracking the wider workplace can effectively kill that sense of discovery. “When we face threats—and job loss is a major threat—we tend to focus very narrowly on things that are known,” says Mindy Shoss, a psychology professor at the University of Central Florida who focuses on the future of work. “It really constrains thinking, and we try to latch on to solutions or any information we can find … That’s sort of the opposite of what we need for creativity.”
Shoss’s research backs up this commonsense view. She has found that people who fear for their job “want to play it safe.” She also points to a well-known theory in psychology called “broaden and build” or the idea “that when we have positive emotions, we can broaden our mental horizons and come up with different ideas and solutions. Vigilance and alarm and fear make it hard to think broadly; it’s hard to think of new things, and it’s hard to take risks.”
But job insecurity can undermine human workers’ ability to get stuff done.
Fear of losing a job breaks the psychological contract and disrupts the rewards system between employee and boss, says De Witte. If employees no longer expect to keep their job or advance, even if they perform well, they tend to withdraw, he says: “If I suddenly feel that my job became insecure for a variety of reasons … you’re taking away something you promised to me.”
Fearing for one’s job is also a major distraction. “People reduce their involvement in the company because they have to deal with something inside themselves,” De Witte says. It can also cause workers to focus on what De Witte calls “impression management” and what Shoss calls “performative behaviors”: over-talking in meetings, over-messaging on Slack, overcommunicating KPI progress, or even coming to the office while sick. “People are working really hard to look busy,” Shoss says.
CEOs can fan the flames of AI-driven job insecurity among workers, and they also have the power to calm fears—even if they, like workers, don’t exactly know how this all ends.
It comes down to communication, says Shoss. “People just want to know, what’s the process by which you’re going to think about this or explore it? Are you gonna have input from people? If there’s going to be a change, how are you going to lay this out?” she says. “That can create a sense of certainty, even though everything’s uncertain.”
