No One Wants to Work Anymore Is a Lie, Here’s What Leaders Are Missing

If you've felt the pressure of hiring, retention, engagement, or getting your team to bring their best, you're not alone. But what if the real opportunity isn't in fixing people? It's in fixing work. Right now, leaders everywhere are facing turnover, burnout, and the constant churn of good people leaving. Meanwhile, the myth persists that no one wants to work anymore when the truth is far more powerful and, quite frankly, far more useful. Today's guest cuts through all the noise. Joe Mull is a Hall of Fame speaker, employee commitment expert, and author of the award winning book Employality. He spent nearly two decades helping leaders create workplaces where commitment grows, performance rises, and people stay workplaces employees actually recommend to their friends. His work has been featured in the Walls Street Journal, Forbes, hbr, and beyond. In this conversation, Joe is going to show us what truly makes someone say, this is a great place to work and you should work here, too. We're digging into the real drivers of retention, the truth about modern employee expectations, and how leaders can become architects of thriving cultures. So if you lead people, even one person, this episode will reshape how you think about the experience your team has every day and what the experience unlocks for your customers. This is Chats with Jason, and I'm your host, Jason S. Bradshaw. Joe, I'm thrilled to have you on the show.

Jason, what a warm introduction. I am delighted to be with you. Thank you so much for having me.

Fantastic. So let's start right where so many leaders are struggling. Why are people really leaving? And what does it take to build a place they want to stay?

There are a lot of reasons. If you think about asking people, why do people change jobs? I actually do this a lot in workshops or in keynotes. I'll ask the room. Think of somebody that you know who has changed jobs in recent years, and you tell me, why are people leaving? And as you can imagine, Jason, we get lots of different answers. We get people who say, well, I left for more money or I left for more flexibility, or I left because I had a bad boss or I wanted a less toxic workplace or I wanted more fulfilling work. We can pull out 20 or 30 different answers from the different circumstances that people find themselves in. But I would argue that all the answers we hear roll up to a larger idea. And that idea is the same across the board. People are making decisions about employment that are based entirely on quality of life. All of those different answers are about quality of life. I want to earn more so I can have a better quality of life. Some people are looking for an upgrade in commute or an upgrade in the kind of work that they're doing. But across the board, all of those answers are about people looking for an upgrade to their quality of life. And if we are working in a place where it feels like I'm experiencing a negative impact on the quality of life that I experience, the way that my job fits into my life, the amount of money that I earn, the time I have to spend, the, the toll that it takes on me or my family outside of work, I'm going to revisit whether or not this place is the right place for me and consider making a move.

I love that framing about upgrading the quality of life. I've always looked at it as people are leaving because the promise of the job, the promise of the workplace wasn't delivered on. But I love that reframing that it's actually about upgrading the quality of life. However, that looks for everyone, right? That's going to be different. As you've explained, you've been known to say that people do a great job when they believe they have a great job.

Yeah.

What do leaders often miss about that?

Yeah, people generally do a great job when they believe they have a great job. But we don't help leaders understand or engineer the conditions that lead people to think that way. If you ask a leader, whether you're talking about a frontline leader or a mid level person, or all the way up to the, to the C suite, what are the handful of things you have to pay attention to that you have to get right in order for people to want to be a part of what you're doing, you're going to get dozens of different answers. This is, this is sort of a failure, a societal failure for what we have not given leaders in terms of the knowledge and the insight that they need to have. But at the end of the day, if I look around in my workplace and say this is a great job, I am much less likely to leave and I am far more likely to part with effort on behalf of the company. I am much more likely to part with effort on behalf of the people that I serve, whether that's customers or other people on my team. And so when we set out to write the book Employalty, we analyzed more than 200 studies and articles on why people quit a job, why they take a new job, why they stay long term with an employer. And we married that together with a bunch of social science research around the psychology of motivation at work and with a bunch of data in labor markets across the globe about why people were moving around or not. And what we found is that a great job really comes down to winning in three areas of the employee experience. We call those ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss. So that's my one sentence answer to the question, what makes a great job? It's when people are in their ideal job doing meaningful work for a great boss. And we can get into, you know, each of those is a factor that has some dimension to it. Right. So we can break those down a little bit more if you'd like to, Jason. But you know, if your listeners only remember one sentence from my time with you, that's the one sentence I would want them to remember. Commitment appears when employees are in their ideal job doing meaningful work for a great boss.

So what does a great boss look like?

Usually they're about 6:1, they've got brown hair. No, I'm just kidding. Anyone who has led people in the workplace for a long time or even just a short amount of time knows that there are a lot of things you've got to get right for someone to point to you and say, boy, I've got a great boss. We think the three most important are the dimensions of trust, coaching and advocacy. So trust. Trust is a two way street. Does my boss trust me? Do they treat me as capable? Do they treat me as having integrity? Or do they micromanage me? Trust comes the other way too. Do I trust my boss because she is present, because she is capable, because she's operating with the right orientation of interests? That is a kind of center ingredient to the employee experience. Am I trusted? And do I trust the person in charge with overseeing my work? That coaching piece is a very specific kind of interaction that takes place between the person that's responsible for overseeing my work and me. And when we think of coaching, sometimes we think of that as giving people advice or helping them understand better what to do differently. For me and for the research around this, coaching is quite simply helping people sort through what they know, think and feel to determine their next step. So when an employee comes to me as the boss with a question, instead of just giving them the answer, taking that moment to say, well, what options do you see? What do you think is the next best step? If I weren't here, what would you do? What does your gut tell you? And I'm treating them in that moment as capable, I'm not playing gotcha. Right. Those coaching conversations are a kind of secret sauce in employee commitment. And then that third part of this great boss factor, Jason Is that advocacy factor. Right. And an advocate is somebody who acts in the best interests of somebody else. And so does my boss care about me as a human being first? Do they care about my life outside of work? Do they know a little bit about me, about my family, about my hobbies and interests, about what makes me human? And do they care about making sure that my job doesn't do harm to any of that? That's what an advocate does. So a great boss is someone who is a coach, who is an advocate, and who trusts.

Yeah, I can really relate to those. I actually once resigned from a position that on the outside, you'd think was probably a job I absolutely wanted. But I remember saying to my leader at the time, the CEO of the business, that I'm resigning, and he said, oh, you know, can we talk about it? And I said, well, I don't trust you, so nothing we talk about is going to change the outcome. And. And I had some of the founders even reach out and say, oh, you know, surely there's a way we can work this out. Well, no, no, because that trust is so important. I. I definitely, I share that because I definitely know how that impacted how I showed up in the workspace. It wasn't that I didn't want to do a great work. It was. That wasn't trusted to do great work is how I felt.

And you can probably agree, too, that these factors take. They can take some time to build, to earn between a leader and the person reporting to them, but they can be damaged in moments. They can be very fleeting. Right. One wrong move, the moment that leader takes credit for somebody else's work because it showed up, well, then that trust is damaged. There's lots of different ways that can happen.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think we could spend a lot of time on this, but we will move on. You know, we've all heard the story. I'm sure. It's so hard to recruit people. No one wants to work anymore. You know what can I do? Your research into this space probably probably proves a different story. Do people want to work anymore?

Yeah, we've heard that, right? If anyone listening to this is guilty of having said the phrase no one wants to work anymore, please raise your hand. I have a feeling there are a number of hands that have gone up. And I told you a moment ago that we analyzed more than 200 studies and articles when we wrote Employalty. And so, Jason, I'm going to share with you my single favorite data point that we found when doing the research for this Book, it's this. Did you know that that phrase, no one wants to work, has shown up in North American newspapers every single year going back 120 years. There's actually a researcher who is based in Canada who found this, and we included it in the research in the book. This is the single most persistent generational trope in human history. Every generation in the workplace believes that the people coming in behind them are coming in with. With less commitment, with more entitlement, with lesser of a work ethic. And it's just fundamentally not true. You know, I hate to break it to everybody listening, but all the complaints that you have about the people coming in behind you are the same things that people said about you when you got here. We believe, I call this in the book, the myth of Lazy. We believe that young people coming into the workplace have defects, have character defects. And this is actually a societal pattern that has a really cool name in sociology. It's been known as the illusion of moral decline. Isn't that the greatest name you've ever heard for a sociological pattern? But the truth is that the young people coming into the workplace behind us, they don't have character defects. They're just young. And what do young people in the workplace need more than anything? They need patience and mentoring. And what do a lot of leaders not have any time for anymore in the workplace? It's patience and mentoring. And when you think about how work has evolved in a lot of places over the years, we're getting asked to do more and more and more. We're getting less time away from work. We see pay scales that haven't moved in years. And so what ends up happening is people look around and they're saying, I am living to work, not working to live, and I just don't want it to be this way anymore. And so they make a change. They go looking for that upgrade that we talked about to their quality of life. And so my argument is not that people don't want to work anymore. My argument is that people don't want to suffer anymore. And if I'm stepping into a workplace that negatively impacts my quality of life, if I'm a young person entering the workforce and I'm not getting the patience and mentoring I need to be successful, I'm out of here. I'm going to go make a change.

Interesting study. Reminds me of the. The adage that, you know, everyone's on their mobile phones and not paying attention to each other. And then you go to the photo of everyone sitting on the train reading their Newspapers, not talking to each other. You know, I think the one difference, and I'd love your take on this, Joe, is that today, in 2026, when this episode comes out, 2025, as we're recording it, the next generation of workforce is more empowered and less willing to be treated badly. I think back to conversations that I had with my late grandmother and others in her era and it was you get a job and you keep that job for life. You show up, you keep the boss happy, you do what it takes. Where it's not that today's generation doesn't want to turn up and keep the boss happy, do a great job. They want respect in that process. They want it to be a genuine two way exchange and not just a one way conversation. Do you think that's maybe a generational shift that we're seeing now?

I don't. I only. I not only think that that's true, I know that it's true. Based on patterns and research that we've seen among people who study these generational differences in the workplace, we know that the prior that a younger generation has are usually rooted in a correction that they see needs to be made to how prior generations operated. And when you look at workplaces across the globe right now, we know that burnout is at an all time high in so many places here in the United States. Burnout has been in all in, at an all time high in the US Workplace. It was there right before the pandemic. Then the pandemic hit and just took an already exhausted workforce and broke it. And we know that's true in other countries as well. We know that's true across industries. And as young people have come up through educational systems and watched their parents and had conversations, think about the advice that we've given to the young people in our own lives. For folks who are listening to this, if you have kids or nieces and nephews and you've given them advice as they've, as they've gone out to get their first job, what have we told them? Boy, you better ask for more pay when you're coming in the door because you're not going to get it after you get there. Boy, you better choose work that is meaningful to you because you're going to work a lot for the rest of your life. Don't be miserable. Boy, if you end up with a bad boss, don't stay. A bad boss can wreck your life. You know, bad bosses are a dime a dozen. Go work someplace that you're respected. Well, guess what? They Listened. And so they're demanding things in the workplace now that the rest of us. Maybe it took a few years for us to look around and say, no, no, no, I'm not willing to stay in these kinds of circumstances.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense to me. Now, you've talked about in your work that shifting from fixing people to fixing work. What does that shift actually look like for a leader?

Yeah. Well, it does start with us not letting ourselves off the hook with phrases like no one wants to work anymore. Right. If we know that people are making choices about employment that are based on quality of life, if we know that burnout and overwork and being underpaid are the primary drivers of people either checking out at work or moving on to some other place, then we have to take ownership for the conditions that we're creating that lead to that. When we say no one wants to work anymore, we are blaming people and we're saying that it's a character defect. When the truth is we need to turn the mirror inward and we need to understand what about how we work and when we work and where we work and what we expect from work needs to change in order for people to decide that this place would be the very best place for me to be a blank. Right. If you're a restaurant and you're struggling to retain servers, what would make this place the very best place for me to be a server? If you're a hospital and you're struggling to retain nurses, what would make this place the very best place to be a nurse? When we turn that mirror inward, we start fixing work. We're not blaming people for a character defect. That isn't really the driver of this. Another way to think about this, Jason, is when I hear leaders say there's a staffing shortage, I will challenge them to say, is it really a staffing shortage or is it a great job shortage? Because if you're creating a workplace that economically compensates people at the level that they need to be compensated at so that they're not experiencing suffering outside of work, that gives them some input into when, where, and how they work, that treats them with respect, that makes the work fulfilling, that's a pretty great job. You're not going to have a hard time filling those positions. Now, yes, there are. There are remote places, there are rural places. There are roles that have certain levels of education attached to them that make them maybe a little harder to fill. So I'm not dismissing that. But if you're in an industry where you treat people well and you create an environment where the work is meaningful. It doesn't have to be so hard.

Yeah, I also love that I didn't hear once during that conversation that the mention of free lunches, unlimited time off, you know, all the, all the things that some, that people turn to and says, well, we can't afford to do what Google does. Well, there's a lot of people that don't want to work at Google.

That's right.

And just because one company does it and does it successfully doesn't mean it will work everywhere. I'm wondering, why do you find it, what do you see in your work that explains why leaders find it so difficult to understand this notion that creating great jobs, providing a, a livable wage, seems so foreign for, for many to even start to have that internal dialogue? What are you seeing in that regard?

I think there's a couple things to that. I, I think there are some people in the workplace who do have a work is supposed to suck mentality, right. And they embrace the mentality that, well, everybody's got to pay their dues, right? You've got to come in and you don't earn anything for a while and you've got to hustle and work 60, 80 hours a week and you've got to pay your dues and then you earn the right to ask for better treatment. And I understand why some people think that way, but how well did that work for you and your effort and your motivation and your commitment when you were a young person? It probably didn't do as much as you think that it did. I think the other influence on that, Jason, has to do with power. I think there are a lot of leaders listening to this right now who will hear what I've said and say, well, that sounds great, Joe, but I don't have the power to increase wages like you're talking about. I don't have the power to create more flexible workplace policies. And that might be true, but where are your spheres of influence around these ideas of ideal job and meaningful work and great boss? What can you control? And for the things that you can't control, where can you become an advocate for your people? Where can you help those who do have power understand that we will continue losing people to the, to our competitors across the street because they have more flexible work policies and they pay two and a half dollars an hour more than we do. And you know, those kinds of conversations can go a long way to getting leaders and organizations to start to think about where and how they need to innovate.

Yeah. And going back to what we touched on earlier, that's part of the leader's job to advocate.

Right.

We're not saying that every leader has the power to change everything, but every leader does have the ability to advocate for what's right. And I certainly believe that your people, the people that work for you, can truly tell when a leader is advocating for them.

Absolutely.

You know, unless you're the owner of the business, most people will give you more credit for advocating than even if you don't get the end result that you're looking for. I'm wondering what, other than advocacy, what one behavior leaders can adopt today that will help activate commitment with their teams?

What one behavior today will activate commitment on their teams? I want to see leaders open up a dialogue with their direct reports about their jobs. What energizes you about your job? I guess I would. I would label the behavior as a stay interview, if you're familiar with the concept. We've heard about exit interviews for years. Right. Which is where somebody decides they're leaving an organization. So before they head out, let's. Let's do an interview and. They're absurd. They're a colossal waste of time and resources. Like, okay, you've. You've decided to move on. You have no investment here. What's. However, now's a great time to ask you what you think we should do differently. Why don't we ask the people who stay, why do you stay? What do you like about your work? What energizes you about your work? But then let's also ask them questions that might push them away. Right. If you left here, what would be the reason why? If you could change one thing about your job, if you could wave a magic wand, what would you change? Right. If you could rework or rewire some aspect of what you do, what are the biggest challenges you face every day that you wish you could cut down on a little bit? What one thing, if we changed it about how we work here would make your life easier, right? If we do those kinds of interviews, have that kind of dialogue, is there something that you'd be interested in learning more about? Is there something that you'd like to spend more time on in your work in the year ahead? You know, we're having this conversation, Jason, as we wrap up one year and step into another. And this is as great a time on the calendar as any to have these kinds of conversations with people and having those conversations. First of all, it signals to those folks that you care about these things and that you're not just treating them as a commodity to be leveraged, but it also sets up the opportunity for the leader to take action and to tweak around the edges wherever they can, how people work and what they do to better understand what that person needs to be at their best every day. And to me, that's the fundamental definition of leadership. A leader's job is to create the conditions at work for people to thrive, to come to work every day and say, I need to figure out what these folks need to be at their best every day and then fight like crazy to provide it. And I think stay interviews are a great way to make that happen.

Yeah, what a great concept to actually asking people that are with you about why they're still there and what's what, what it would take to even enhance the environment. You know, I was as you were talking about those exit interviews, the one thing that reminded me of was so many organizations do exit interviews and they do nothing with the information. So the information's probably going to be tainted in some instances. The information is not necessarily going to be coming from a place of trying the organization to be better. But when you go through that effort and you do nothing with it, you don't even have a conversation around what might be valid in it or try to validate the feedback through maybe the stay interviews. Definitely. Those stay interviews, I think, are a great thing that listeners should take away with them. And for me, it's different to the conversation many leaders have. Most organization leaders will have a performance review with their team members at least once a year. That's not a stay interview. That's a KPI discussion. You're talking about something really different. I think it's quite powerful. I'd encourage everyone listening, if you take nothing away from today's episode, to embrace this concept of a stay interview and really lean into what's keeping your employees today. But what they're looking for that, if delivered, will cement their commitment to your organization, I would say.

Can I jump on that for a second, Jason?

Go ahead, Joe.

I think one of the things that I think will be really helpful to leaders maybe who are encountering this stay interview conversation for the first time is to understand that every employee in every job in every company on planet Earth is walking around with a kind of internal psychological scorecard. And if you can create the conditions on that scorecard that lead people to think, I've got a great job, that lead people to want to be a part of what you're doing and every metric you care about in your organization is going to go up and retention is going to improve. Turnover is going to decline. Customer experience is going to improve. Productivity, reputation, revenue, all of it. We think that internal psychological scorecard is made up of those three dimensions of ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss. And so the stay interview is how you find out which pieces of that internal psychological scorecard are most important to them. Because we illustrate this as a Venn diagram in the book that ideal job, meaningful work, great boss. But the truth is that at different stages of our lives, those things carry different levels of importance. And so everybody's internal psychological scorecard has sort of got different ratios to it. Right. When I was young and first starting out and entering the workforce, I had a car that was held together with duct tape and prayer. And so it was really important to me to try to grow my compensation so that I could level up and pay for a nicer vehicle. Fast forward 25 years and now I've got kids and I need a boss who has a flexible work schedule mentality so that I can get my kids off the bus two days a week because of my wife's work schedule. So that doesn't mean those other things aren't important to me, but maybe at this moment in my career, they're not as important to me because of my life circumstances. And the exit interview is the vehicle we. Excuse me. The stay interview is the vehicle that we can use to understand at a deeper level what is most important to each person that will ultimately lead them to feel like I've got a great job.

Yeah, yeah, Absolutely fantastic. Just two questions and then I'm going to let you go today, Joe. We've talked a lot about how leaders can make some small tweaks in the way that they operate to really help elevate the commitment of their team members to even attract and have conversations that deliver that retention that we've been looking at. But one thing we haven't talked about is giving feedback. I hear quite a lot from leaders. Oh, it's so hard to find people. I don't want to give bad feedback because it might mean that the person leaves. So how can a great leader give feedback that doesn't hurt, but enhances the relationship?

Yeah, there's actually some emerging research on this in recent years that I think is really exciting. I sort of nerd out on this stuff a little bit. One of the things that we found in recent years is that people are far more responsive to feedback when it speaks to our potential. If we just criticize a mistake that people have made or an error in the ways in which they show up. That's. That's typically how we internalize it. But if we give people feedback and then we tell them that we are giving them that feedback because of what we know they are capable of, it is much more likely to be heard. And so here's what that sounds like. You know, if I sat down across from you, Jason, and I said, hey, you know, I've noticed that when you interact with. Let's pretend we were working in a doctor's office office, and I felt like I needed you to be a little bit more obviously warm and friendly to people when they came into the clinic. For the record, I would not use the words warm and friendly because those are subjective adjectives which are descriptors that people would experience as character attacks. If I say, I need you to be warmer and friendlier and nicer, what you would hear is, I'm not warm, not friendly, not nice. And you would go, what are you talking about, man? So I would first describe the behavior that I want the person to use. I wouldn't say, I need you to be nicer at the front desk. What I would say is, when somebody approaches the front desk, I want you to turn your body away from your computer, make direct eye contact with that person, put a big obvious smile on your face, say, good morning. And I would start to describe the behaviors I would want them to use. And then after I finished going through the behaviors, I would say, jason, I am giving you this feedback because I have really high standards and I know you can meet them. I've just spoken to your potential, and we have some research that tells us this does something different in the brain to how people hear that feedback and makes it more likely that they're going to part with effort to try to meet what you're asking.

It makes a lot of sense, and I think it comes down to that framing. You're not attacking them, you're helping them step into their potential. What a great, great lesson for us all. Now, it wouldn't be a conversation in late 2025 without the mention of the two wonderful letters, a and I. I'm wondering how in the age of AI hybrid work and, and really evolving expectations from team members, what. What is it that we haven't spoken about that it takes to be a great boss today?

I think it's understanding that at least around the AI conversation that two things are happening at once. You probably have some people on your team who are afraid because AI is disruptive and it's a tool maybe that I'm not comfortable with and I don't know how to use it yet or it's coming for my job. And so as any new technology enters the workplace, we need to create an environment where people don't feel threatened to start to experiment with it and they don't feel threatened that if they don't pick it up quickly they're going to be penalized for it. And so I think that there's some responsibility for leaders around that to make it safe for people to learn how to use these tools in the new ways that we are integrating them in the workplace. I also think the best leaders who are creating environments that people are going to want to be a part of have to look at ways to use those AI tools to improve employees quality of life. Maybe I don't have to work 50 hours a week anymore if I'm using some of these tools and they're able to increase my productivity. Right. That's a beautiful way to use some of these tools in the workplace. What I hope leaders are recognizing though is that if we only use AI tools to remove the entry level layer of work, then where will the next level of workers come from? I think we have to think about how we pair people with tools that allow us all to be better at work and do better work, not to necessarily replace people with those tools. We could get into a lot more around this, I'm sure Jason, but I think right now those are kind of the big themes that than I'm talking about and thinking about around how AI fits into a more humane workplace.

Yeah, I love it. And great reminder that AI doesn't have to, doesn't have to be that disruptor that replaces people or that's the intent of it. It can actually create a more effective workplace that allows our people to focus on higher value tasks and really drives a better experience for them all around. Joe, thanks for being on the show today.

My absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Now Joe, if people want to follow your work, what's the best way for them to do so well?

Thank you for asking. My website is joe mull.com it's my name. The book Employalty is available wherever you want, wherever you get books, wherever you like to read your books or you can visit bosshero school.com which is the, the leadership development program that we take into organizations and it's also an event that we hold a couple of times a year.

Fantastic. We'll be sure to have those links and more in the comments section. Joe, you've given leaders something incredibly rare today, and I thank you for that. You've given us clarity, not guesswork and not platitudes. A clear, practical path to becoming a workplace where people stay, thrive and proudly say, you should work here too. Because when employees feel supported, purposeful and connected, customers feel it instantly. Employee experience becomes customer experience Listeners, if you want more of Joe's work, make sure you do pick up a copy of Employality. It's a fantastic book. I cannot recommend it high enough. And of course, as Joe mentioned, explore Boss Hero school and listen to the Boss Better now podcast consistently ranked among one of the top management shows in the world. So if today's episode's helped you rethink what's possible for your team, share it with another leader. Let's accelerate a world where we work where work works for everyone. Joe, thank you for being here and for everyone listening. Lead boldly, create intentionally and as always, put people and experience at the center of everything you do. Because when we transform the experience, you transform the business and the world around you.