Fewer than 1 in 4 workers feel their job is safe. Here’s why worker ‘FOBO’—fear of becoming obsolete—is hurting companies

When Oracle cut scores of jobs last month, Melody Wilding, an executive coach and author, knew she was going to hear about it from her clients. For months now, the corporate professionals Wilding advises have been airing fears about losing their jobs, and their worries seem to spike “when big companies make layoff announcements,” she says. In the era of ‘forever’ layoffs and looming dread caused by AI’s advances in automating work, her clients are plagued by “the sensation that you never can get too settled. [N]ot only could your entire reporting structure change tomorrow, the department or the product you were working with may be gone.”

Many of the executives that New York-based Wilding coaches are in the tech field, but job insecurity has become a universal truth: The fear her clients are voicing is consistent among workers regardless of geography, job level, work type, and sector. 

A recent report from the HR software company ADP based on a survey of 39,000 workers in 36 countries last year found that fewer than one in four respondents felt confident that their job is safe from elimination. In no country did the share of job-secure workers breach 38%, and even though job security rose slightly with seniority, still only 35% of C-suite executives felt their job was safe. Knowledge workers who use expertise “to create something new” (30%) felt safer in their jobs than skilled workers—those who use expertise to “solve similar problems each day— (18%) or workers in repetitive jobs (16%). Knowledge workers in finance and insurance had the highest confidence at 39%. 

As anyone who has had the experience can attest, this kind of anxiety is hard to live with. In fact, worrying about losing a job can take a similar toll on wellbeing as the worst-case scenario of actually losing a job. Indeed, researchers have described the two experiences as “surprisingly identical twins.”

That sense of unease is easily framed as an individual problem, one you discuss with a career coach or even therapist. But its depressive effect can harm mental health, physical health, and personal relationships. And workers’ job insecurity is also an enormous drag on the companies they work for. It sours workplace relationships, stifles creativity, eats away at productivity, and can even make workers more prone to jobsite accidents. 

Hans De Witte, an emeritus professor of work psychology at KU Leuven, says there’s a “dangerous” belief among business leaders: that fearful employees “might really want to work harder in order to keep their jobs.” Fortune reports that one reason CEOs are tying layoffs........

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