The theme that keeps coming up this week is employees who don't turn up on their first day of work. Without having a foot in a meatspace small business, it didn't occur to me that it's that much of a pandemic.

Variations of this may be quitting after three days demanding partial pay; calling in sick half the time; taking unreasonable leaves when they business needs them.

Being irresponsibly flaky is typically found among low level work positions. It's not unheard of among knowledge workers but it's not a norm. Chances are the person will be a young adult, evenly spreaded among gender and race.

Employers complain it's hugely disruptive to their business. Some even have solutions for it. But real solutions require tackling the root cause, so this is an attempt to understand the employees's psyche.

Let's start by looking at their social profile. They have little to nothing at stake. There's no reputation to speak of, no real asset to lose. These are the qualities that make univesity students appealing as revolutionaries. That they have nothing to lose also means there's no systematic incentive to maintain their end of a social contract, to keep up some sense of honor.

They have no professional identity. Upon graduation (at any level), they might have built some amount of identity as a gamer, a troll online, a social butterfly, etc. But when they start to have a need for cash, none of those identities serve them so they need to start building a new one from zero.

Without a working relationship with any employers, every move is transactional. Quiting unannounced is fair game because they don't owe employers anything. Ethic is for the rich.

The notion of having to make a living is a necessary evil. Communism probably sounds appealing to them with total disregard to the caveats. They have yet to make a connection between "making a living" and "providing value".

From here I get more speculative. I could be mostly wrong but it would be useful to assume I'm right.

Excellence is a distant concept to them. Not that they don't know excellence when they see it. Maybe they are even more acutely aware of the price of gaining some. What they are missing is the why. Explaining "why be world-class about what you do" to them might be a two hour conversation, to which they have a psychological resistance but they lack the skill to express.

They are not necessarily unambitious if given a fair shot. They are anti-ambitious; where ambition is seen as a source of suffering. No one ever told them "you can do anything you set your mind to." Therefore their field of possibilities is limited to what they see among peers. You would think internet access would broaden this scope but they don't have the time to find out, there are dance-TikToks to finish watching.

These are not criticisms. It's me LARP'ing as a businessman making a straight observation of the state of affair that's largely unchangeable. When a social trend is this apparent, genuine change is at least two generations away.

The fact that low level employees get to pull moves like that tells me that the economy is generally good, despite what economists say. In an employees's market, it's the businesses that will have to suck it up.

I wonder when did this phenomenon start. Conversations among entrepreneurs here sounded to me like a newly emergent behavarior. But if it's already a known problem in the employment market 50 years ago, then it's a terrible failure of ignorance among business people. It's only a surprise if you did not anticipate it.

I don't like the word training and what it conjures in my mind. But in scenarios like these, employee-training becomes an inevitable core of the business. Large sales orgs understand and accept this, therefore build their operations around that. Micro businesses though would probably claim they don't have the resource. So they end up dealing with flaky employees on a consistent basis.

It's not interesting for me to propose unimaginative solutions here. What I can deduce is that flakiness is a factor of skin in the game. In this case perhaps universities/colleges provide hidden value where being flaky reflects badly on them, so graduates have an incentive to behave to protect their alma mater.

The principle being that a good hire should either come with hunger for achievement or with something to lose.