Data from studies around the world offer a sobering conclusion: customers and employees are less happy now than they were 10 years ago. While much of the current narrative focuses on the pandemic’s impacts on mental health, various happiness indexes already started declining even before COVID began.

42% of Gen-Zers are battling depression. The reasons for this are numerous and complex, but for the younger generation, overuse of cell phones and the constant pressures of modern life have created a whole cohort of cranky consumers and workers. More broadly, employee engagement is in a slump. Understanding these patterns can be a path to competitive advantage.

On this page, we offer resources so employers can check the boxes on career progression, flexibility, and compensation. See:

Today, we focus on comp.

Gallup and others have reported that employee satisfaction has fallen about 10 points more for hourly workers compared to exempt workers, signaling that inflation has had a much deeper impact on frontline employees. However, it’s not just the financial strain that’s at play—many workers judge their self-worth based on their compensation.

Employees are staying for culture and switching for compensation.

Through August, job stayers received 5% wage increases, while job switchers remained steady at 8%. Last month marked a time when wages were higher than core inflation, allowing frontline workers some breathing room.

Median year-over-year change in annual pay

Source: ADP Pay Insights

While wage increases were slightly lower for companies with less than 10 employees, wage inflation has been applied evenly to employers of all sizes.

Median year-over-year change in annual pay by firm size

Source: ADP Pay Insights

However, younger workers (especially young women) are commanding increases over 9%. Of course, these workers are changing jobs more frequently. It has never been more important to complete regular compensation benchmarking (typically through a comp consultant who can offer detail by job band, geography, etc.).

August pay insights by age and gender

Source: ADP Pay Insights

ChatGPT offers some interesting real-time analysis on the fluidity of markets.

For example, this simple prompt allowed us to benchmark wages for healthcare workers in three markets, and tie back to CPI. Employers could use such a methodology to develop a wage index, which could be used as a KPI:

Healthcare worker wages

Another stressor for frontline workers is housing costs. Even with higher interest rates, the gap between owning and renting has never been higher. The average apartment rent exceeds the monthly mortgage payment by $800 per month (which of course does not factor in other expenses such as property taxes).

Another useful application of ChatGPT is to build your business continuity plan. As with any output of large language models, they are as useful as the prompt you provide. An applicable prompt might be: “write me a business continuity plan for” (fill in the blanks):

Please create a business continuity plan in 1,000 words:

• Type: Private company with 300 employees
• Geography: Florida
• Risks: Hurricanes
• Software: Netsuite and Procore
• Offices: One in Miami, one in Naples and one in Jacksonville
• Communication System: Cell phones for employees with no phone tree
• Standard Elements: Communication plan and safety protocol in case of disaster, cyber defense (SOPs)
• Considerations: Safety of employees during natural disasters, SOPs, redundancies for computer systems
• Company-specific requirements: We install roofs for commercial accounts

Our expectation of large language models should be not to provide a final product, but a useful outline to populate.

Once ChatGPT creates a first pass, you can provide your second-level prompt to request more specifics and add details applicable to your business.

Young people have been reporting a sharp rise in anxiety and depression. This maps neatly onto the global rise of the smartphone. Some researchers are convinced that one is causing the other. But how strong is the evidence?

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