Your Retention Numbers Look Great. Your Team Might Just Be Job Hugging.
Low turnover isn't automatically good news. Marcus Webb on "job hugging" — why so many employees are staying put out of fear, not commitment.
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Marcus Webb
7/29/20263 min read
A director told me this week that her team's retention numbers were "the best they've been in years" and she wasn't sure what to make of the fact that morale still felt flat. Nobody was quitting. Nobody was celebrating either. I've heard some version of this from three different managers in the last month, and I think they're all describing the same thing without a name for it yet.
The name is "job hugging," and it's not the compliment it sounds like.
What's Actually Happening
Job hugging describes employees who stay in roles they're unhappy in — not out of loyalty, but because leaving feels riskier than staying. Recent survey data puts real numbers on this: as of early 2026, 57% of workers identify as job huggers, up sharply from 45% just six months earlier. Separately, close to half of workers say they're staying in their current jobs specifically out of fear and economic uncertainty, not because the job is working for them. Gallup's most recent global workforce data has engagement sitting around 21%, one of the lowest points on record.
Put those together and you get a workforce where "they're not leaving" and "they're doing fine" have quietly stopped meaning the same thing. A lot of leadership teams haven't caught up to that yet, because low turnover has always been the metric that made people relax.
Why This Matters More Than a Bad Quarter of Morale
Here's what I want HR leaders to sit with: an employee who is job hugging is often doing the minimum required to stay safely employed, not the work they're actually capable of. That's not a character flaw. It's a rational response to a labor market that currently punishes risk. But it means your retention metric — the one you report up to the board as a win — can be masking a productivity and engagement problem that's actively getting worse underneath it.
I've also seen the reverse mistake: managers who read low turnover as proof the team is fine, and use that as a reason not to invest in the harder conversations about workload, growth, or what's actually broken. If people aren't leaving, the thinking goes, why fix it? Because they can't afford to leave right now. That's a very different question than whether they want to stay.
What This Isn't a License to Do
I want to be direct about something, because I've seen this get twisted: "employees are staying out of fear" is not information HR should use to deprioritize retention work. It's information that should make the work more urgent, not less. An employee who's job hugging today is often one market shift away from becoming the resignation you didn't see coming, and in the meantime, disengagement has real costs — in quality, in customer experience, in the culture the rest of the team absorbs from someone who's checked out but still in the building.
What Actually Helps
A few things I've seen make a real difference with teams that are quietly job hugging rather than genuinely engaged:
Ask about the job, not just the future. Career conversations that only focus on "where do you see yourself in five years" miss people who can't think past the current market. Ask what's hard about the role right now. That question gets more honest answers.
Separate "staying" from "satisfied" in your own data. If your engagement survey doesn't distinguish between people who'd leave tomorrow if they could and people who genuinely want to be there, you're not measuring what you think you're measuring. Exit interviews tell you about the people who left. You also need a way to hear from the people who wanted to but didn't.
Give people something to work toward inside the role, not just outside it. If external mobility feels too risky right now, internal movement — a stretch project, a lateral move, a real shot at a different team — is often the thing that keeps someone genuinely engaged instead of just present.
The director I mentioned at the start wasn't wrong that her retention numbers looked good. She was wrong to stop there. Low turnover in this market isn't proof your culture is working. Sometimes it's just proof the exits look scarier than the status quo — and that's a very different problem to solve.
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