Job Hugging Is Not Retention. It Is Fear in Disguise

When staying becomes the real risk

If your turnover is low in 2026, do not assume you have a retention strategy. In the current labour market, low turnover can just as easily mean low mobility: people staying put because moving feels unsafe.

That pattern has a name in practice: job hugging. This is when employees remaining in roles they have outgrown (or don’t enjoy) because the external market looks volatile, competitive, and uncertain. The organisational risk is not resignation. It is stagnation.

Why this is happening: the market is signalling “don’t move”

The UK labour market has cooled in ways employees can feel, even if headline numbers look “stable”.

• Vacancies are down year-on-year. ONS estimates vacancies fell 8.6% in Oct–Dec 2025 versus a year earlier, and the labour market is less tight with 2.5 unemployed people per vacancy (up from 1.9 a year earlier).
  
• Employer hiring intent is unusually low. CIPD’s Labour Market Outlook reports a net employment balance of +9, described as an “unprecedented low outside of the pandemic,” with public sector intentions negative at −8.
  
• AI is adding perceived risk. CIPD also reports 17% of employers expect AI tools to reduce headcount in the next 12 months.

In that context, staying put becomes a rational personal risk decision, even for employees who are disengaged or stalled. According to McKinsey’s 2025 HR Monitor, job security is the top reason employees say they stay.

The problem: low turnover can hide a “frozen culture”

When job hugging rises, symptoms include:

• fewer internal moves and lateral shifts
  
• reduced voice (“don’t rock the boat”)
  
• fewer experiments, fewer challenges, fewer ideas
  
• more compliance, less commitment

It’s not just how people feel, it changes how the business performs. Treat it as an operational risk: it hits delivery, quality, and innovation and is extremely costly:

• In the State of the Global Workplace reporting, Gallup states global engagement fell to 21% in 2024 and links the decline to $438bn in lost productivity globally.
  
• In its 2023 reporting, Gallup put the cost of not-engaged/actively disengaged employees at $8.8tn, ~9% of global GDP.
  
• Gallup’s reporting on the UK shows ~10% of UK workers feel engaged in 2025

Job hugging is disengagement without the resignation. People remain on the payroll, but their commitment drops.

Why eNPS misses the real risk

eNPS can sit flat while energy drains away. It captures intent to recommend. It does not capture why people stay.

In a tight labour market, many employees answer neutral or mildly positive because:

• Your organisation feels safer than the external market
• They feel relief and gratitude for having a job
• Recommending an employer is not the same as feeling motivated by the work

That is job hugging. eNPS will not surface it.

What matters more than “would you recommend us” is:

• Are people emotionally invested?
• Are they growing?
• Are they committed to staying for the right reasons?

This is where an emotions led approach outperforms eNPS.

The Inpulse Emotions approach measures the mechanism, not the headline:

• Emotional states like motivation, frustration, confidence and fatigue
• Whether energy is building or leaking
• Where commitment is real versus conditional

Learn more about why emotions matter in employee engagement here.

A practical upgrade looks like this:

1. Career momentum.

Movement, stretch, skill growth, internal opportunity

2. Manager signal.

Quality of 1 to 1s, frequency of growth conversations, emotional support

3. Engagement and wellbeing indicators.

Measured little and often so leaders can act, not once a year eNPS tells you if people might speak well of you.

Emotions tell you if they are actually with you. That is the difference between retention by fear and commitment by choice.

The manager variable is not optional, it is the main lever

If job hugging is fear-driven, the antidote is not a new perk. It is manager capability: the day-to-day conditions that determine whether people feel safe to speak up and whether they can see a future internally.

Gallup is explicit about the manager effect:

• 70% of the variance in team engagement is related to management.
  
• In Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace page, only 27% of managers are engaged, down from 30% the year prior, and Gallup links manager engagement to team engagement and productivity.

In a cooling market, disengaged managers create a predictable outcome: people stop moving, stop speaking, and start protecting themselves.

We had an exclusive conversation with employee wellbeing expert, Dilan Gomih, about protecting line managers. The webinar explored how wellbeing can be used as a performance strategy, and what HR leaders can do right now to support their managers. Download it here.

What breaks job hugging: psychological safety + internal mobility

1) Psychological safety (so people can say what’s true)

Job hugging persists because honesty feels risky. Employees do not say “I’m stuck” when they fear that visibility could backfire.

Harvard Business Review’s work on psychological safety consistently frames it as enabling candour, learning, and speaking up, the behaviours that disappear first in a fear-driven culture.

For HR leaders, the operational standard is simple:

• managers must be able to run growth conversations without defensiveness
  
• leaders must communicate clearly during uncertainty
  
• teams must have a safe route to raise friction early

2) Internal mobility (make it safe to leave the role, not the company)

If people are scared to leave the organisation, the strategic move is to make it easy to move inside it:

• visible lateral moves (not only promotions)
  
• short-term projects and secondments
  
• skill-based matching to work (not just vacancy-based moves)

This is not theory. Research on internal talent markets shows there are measurable trade-offs between productivity match and employee preference, and that preference-based matching can materially improve satisfaction/retention outcomes.

Harvard Business Review has also been pushing “systems” thinking in retention: organisations with coherent talent systems materially outperform others on retention outcomes (for example, being 2.2x more likely to retain past year one in one published index comparison). You can read more about how to utilise career progression as a lever for engagement in our guide Where to Focus in 2026. Download it here

What to do next: a straightforward checklist

1. Stop celebrating low turnover by default. Pair it with internal mobility rates and engagement data.
   
2. Measure sentiment frequently enough to act. Annual surveys are too slow in a fear-driven market.
   
3. Segment your workforce. Identify teams with “staying” behaviour plus low energy/low voice signals.
   
4. Equip line managers. Make growth conversations, listening skills, and psychological safety non-negotiable management standards.
   
5. Build internal pathways. Projects, rotations, secondments, skill moves, and make them visible

The Bottom Line

Low turnover in 2026 can mean two very different things: a workforce that’s committed and progressing, or one that’s staying still because it feels unsafe to move. 

Stop guessing what your retention rate really means. Inpulse’s Emotional Analytics helps you surface the underlying sentiment behind “staying,” pinpoint where anxiety is building, and where teams still have energy and momentum. Book a demo.