Your Best People Would Take Less Money to Keep Their Schedule
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Flexibility has finished its move from perk to expectation, and the data backs it up in dollar terms. Owl Labs released its 10th annual State of Hybrid Work report for the U.S. this week, and the headline finding is that workers will trade real income for control over where and when they work.
Pay is still the top reason people change jobs, cited by 51% of job seekers. But flexibility is the top deal-breaker on the other side of that equation. 39% would turn down an offer that requires full-time office work, and 33% would pass on a job with no flexible hours at all. The number that should stop any employer scrolling: 47% would take a 10% pay cut or more just to keep flexible hours.
The threat isn’t hypothetical for a lot of companies. If an employer took away hybrid or remote work tomorrow, 6% of workers say they’d quit outright and another 41% would start looking for something more flexible. Only 11% say they wouldn’t mind either way. Yet only 26% of companies changed their remote or hybrid policy in the past year, which means most employers are sitting on a mismatch between what their policy allows and what their workforce is willing to tolerate.
A few other numbers from the report round out the picture. 28% of workers have at least one side hustle, and 60% of those started it in the past year, mostly, 40% say, because they need the income to cover expenses. On AI, 82% of workers use or experiment with it at work, but 1 in 3 of those users rely on tools their employer never approved, and 46% worry AI will make their role obsolete, a fear that climbs to 56% among Gen Z. Stress is up for 36% of workers since last year, and burnout, at 28%, is the top reason people disengage from their jobs. 38% say they’re job hugging, staying in a role they’re unhappy with, and 31% admit to quiet quitting. Coffee badging, showing up just long enough to be seen before leaving, is now a habit for 40% of hybrid workers, and 83% of the people doing it are managers. On the harder edge of this data, 39% of workers say their employer has discussed possible layoffs, and 33% say layoffs happened. The cost of showing up also dropped slightly: hybrid workers spend $53 on an office day, down from $55 in 2025, against $20 a day for remote workers.
The stat I’d watch is the pairing of two numbers that seem to contradict each other but don’t. 41% of hybrid and remote workers say they’d start looking if flexibility disappeared. 38% say they’re job hugging right now, staying in a role despite being unhappy. Both are true at once, and together they describe exactly the market we’re in. People want flexibility badly enough to give up pay for it, but with hiring this slow, most of them aren’t going anywhere yet. Saying you’d start looking and resigning are two separate decisions.
Employers shouldn’t mistake that gap for safety. The people job hugging through a slow market are often the first to leave the moment hiring picks up. The flexibility policy you set now shapes who stays once your people have options again. Flexible hours may also be the cheapest retention tool available: nearly half the workforce puts a price on it at 10% of their paycheck, and few benefits buy that much loyalty for that little cost. The AI figure deserves its own attention too. If 1 in 3 AI users are on tools their employer never approved, your company’s data is already flowing wherever those employees decided to put it, whether you’ve written a policy or not. If your retention strategy needs a rework to match what this data shows, talk to us about hiring and we’ll help you build one that holds.
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AI Made Judgment the Most Valuable Skill & Nobody Told the Workforce
A new IBM study shows just how far apart HR leaders and employees are on what AI demands of people. IBM’s Institute for Business Value surveyed 1,500 HR chiefs and 8,800 employees worldwide, and the gap in how they see AI’s biggest challenge is wide enough to be its own headline. 71% of CHROs say the most essential workforce skill now is the ability to supervise, check, and override what AI produces. Only 29% of employees rank judgment as important at all.
Employees, for their part, are anxious about their own skills eroding. 60% worry AI is wearing down their capabilities, and critical thinking is the skill they name most often as the one slipping. Among those who worry, 3 in 4 say the erosion has already started, not something they expect down the road.
The accountability data explains a lot of that anxiety. 43% of employees say they get the blame when AI gets something wrong, and 41% of CHROs themselves think employees may not feel safe challenging or overriding AI in the first place. 80% of CHROs acknowledge that AI creates what they call invisible work (the validating and fixing that happens behind the scenes), and 42% of employees confirm that work adds to their load or goes unrecognized entirely. Making this harder to fix, 46% of organizations don’t even involve the CHRO when they set AI strategy, and only 28% of CHROs have a joint roadmap with IT.
There’s a clear fix inside the same data. Where HR shares responsibility for which decisions stay with humans, 76% of employees feel safe questioning AI. Where HR only advises without real ownership, that number drops to 43%. Organizations that define each workflow as human-led, AI-assisted, or AI-executed report an 18% reduction in risk and a 20% improvement in quality, concrete numbers most companies would chase through any other initiative. IBM’s own CHRO, Nickle LaMoreaux, framed the shift this way: “AI is changing not only how work gets done, but where people can contribute the greatest value.” Dr. Amit Das, CHRO of Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd., put the risk more bluntly: “Fluency without judgment simply helps an organization make mistakes faster.” Kristin Oliver, CHRO at Hyatt, said her company measures AI by “whether AI helped improve decision quality, speed, employee experience, and satisfaction,” not by how much work gets completed. And Ali Peek Bebo, CHRO at Pearson, described her own partnership with IT this way: “We think of the CHRO and CTO as the power couple bringing talent and technology strategy together.”
The number that bothers me most here is the 43% who say they take the blame when AI gets something wrong. Line it up with the rest of the findings and the pattern is hard to miss: companies are asking people to catch AI’s mistakes, not crediting them when they do, and holding them responsible when they miss one. For hiring managers, judgment is now the skill everyone wants and almost nobody interviews for directly. Ask a candidate about a time they caught a bad number, a wrong answer, or a flawed recommendation, and what they did next. Anyone job hunting in this market should have that story ready before they walk into the room. If you’re rebuilding your interview process around what this data shows matters, see how our staffing services can help you screen for it.
Hiring Just Posted Its Third Straight Weekly Gain
ADP’s weekly jobs tracker gave the labor market a small but real reason for optimism this week. The NER Pulse, ADP’s preliminary estimate, shows U.S. private employers adding an average of 20,000 jobs per week over the 4 weeks ending September 5, up for the third straight week.
The climb has been steady: 10,000 jobs a week in mid-August, then 12,250, then 16,750, and now 20,000. This marks a real recovery from the summer low of 8,250 for the week ending July 25, and it puts the pace close to where it stood in late June, when the 4-week average was 21,000. ADP is clear that these figures are preliminary and subject to revision as more data comes in, and the next update arrives October 6.
The number itself is modest, and I wouldn’t call this a turnaround yet. This is preliminary private-payroll data; it gets revised, and BLS still has the final word once the official numbers catch up. But if you’re a hiring manager who put searches on hold in July, this is the first real signal that the market for talent is getting busier again, and competition for good candidates tends to pick up right along with it. For job seekers, the takeaway is simpler: this is a reason to keep applying instead of waiting for a clearer signal that may not arrive before the good roles are gone. See what’s open right now while the pace is still building.
