It’s easy to feel like just a small cog in a very complex machine when you’re a low-level worker. Employers try to counter this feeling of having a limited career horizon by promising raises and promotions — a hint that you won’t remain a small cog for long, and there’s a bigger and brighter future for you if you just stick with it and grow with the company. But a new survey shows that many of these promises ring hollow, and the majority of American workers have experienced what’s called “ghost growth,” where their employer has promised advancement of one type or another, and then simply failed to follow through. There are lessons to be learned from this for your company, primarily how to avoid damaging employee morale.
The data, from San Francisco-based resume platform MyPerfectResume, found that fully 65 percent of U.S. workers surveyed said they’d suffered ghost growth at one time or another. Essentially this means that two in every three workers have been promised advancement, and may have been handed expanded duties or authority, but without any meaningful changes to their jobs, such as significant pay raises, HRDive reports.
Digging into the details, the study confirms that 78 percent of the 1,000 workers questioned said they’d been assigned new duties without getting a raise or promotion. Over half said they’d been promised promotions that never materialized, and over a third complained that they’d been given an increased workload as part of this process but had not been given a raise. Only 15 percent of people said they’d received a raise in the past year that matched their ever-growing duty list. And 35 percent — more than one in three people — said they’d never been properly compensated for additional workloads.
This phenomenon seems incredibly prevalent, which may explain why two in three of the survey respondents blamed their employer for taking part in “growth theater.” You can think of this as being like greenwashing (promising some eco-friendly credentials that are associated with a particular item or business process, in order to boost sales and the company’s image, even though there’s no meaningful benefit), but for career growth. Basically an employer goes through all the big-gesture motions of promising to help their staff’s career paths without actually intending to go through with much of it. This could look like offering training to a staff member who’s been given new, expanded responsibilities ,but then failing to promote them to a new job title or boost their salary.
The damage this bait-and-switch can cause is significant. Survey respondents noted how emotionally damaging ghost growth can be, with 53 percent saying it “looks like” their career is progressing, even as it actually doesn’t feel like it. And 49 percent of people say they’ve reached a plateau in their career and, as the report notes, “their company is trying to mask it with superficial opportunities.”
Promising someone recognition of some sort and then not following through can harm trust and, ultimately, even drive staff to look for work elsewhere if they feel they’re being exploited by their employer, or if their extra duties are burning them out. Nearly 7 in 10 people in the survey said they’d considered quitting due to ghost growth issues, and nearly 3 in 10 people had actually done so.
Losing these frustrated, disaffected employees can hurt a business beyond the departure of trained personnel and their expertise. It has an actual cost, from repeating the recruitment process, which increases the price tag through the extra time and effort required. This might be one reason why ghost growth happens, of course: conscious of their bottom line, and faced with a an important employee’s departure, some managers may be tempted to share out that person’s duties to their remaining colleagues, but not reward them accordingly.