WTF is breadcrumbing in the workplace?
Yet another popular dating term is making the rounds and showing up in workplaces — breadcrumbing.
It’s when someone offers intermittent reinforcement to keep someone on the hook. At work, it may look like managers or HR telling staff about future opportunities, like raises, promotions, and travel, that never come to fruition. While this tactic to keep staff engaged isn’t new, it can ultimately break employees’ trust in their employer. And today’s younger workers are more discerning of it and have no problem job hopping when their patience dwindles.
A key problem is a lack of proper manager training and enablement when it comes to coaching and developing employees to get to next-level opportunities, said John Schneider, CMO of performance management platform Betterworks.
“Breadcrumbing — just doing enough to keep somebody in their seat — is really a significant contrast with what the potential is, when you can actually provide growth and development pathways for employees where they don’t just feel like it’s just good enough to be there, but they can actually thrive and see themselves in their next iteration,” Schneider said.
“When a manager does not give an employee a concrete path of where they could move forward and commits to helping them get there, that employee is potentially irrevocably damaged in terms of their feeling about the employer itself,” Schneider added.
In many cases, it’s due to a lack of formalized standards around tracking career progression. “They are not given a sort of mechanism or process in which they can coach and develop their employees proactively, so they sort of do these things on an ad hoc basis,” he said.
Some companies have turned to methods like corporate universities to keep staff engaged and actually ensure they are tangibly advancing in their roles. Those programs foster internal talent mobility by offering tailored learning and development opportunities for staff based on their individual interests and goals. Proponents say they lower turnover rates, heighten engagement and boost innovation by giving staff a clear path to their professional goals.
Another part of the breadcrumbing problem is that managers often lack contextual training around career paths at their own organizations to help inform those they supervise, said Brian Smith, an organizational psychologist. “A lot of those managers may be hired from the outside, so they didn’t actually take the career path within an organization,” he said.
General communication issues are another challenge that could be addressed with better training. “They oftentimes will communicate opportunities in a way that makes them look more accessible when they actually aren’t,” said Smith. “When they cross the line is when they make those opportunities feel like reality, and they don’t communicate them in a way that they’re just opportunities,” he said.
At the same time, HR professionals and managers may simply have their hands tied, strapped by budgets and other factors and unable to make good on their word.
But for those who intentionally breadcrumb staff, “that’s just giving them real, tangible, false hope, and I think that should never be condoned,” Smith said. “A manager who actually does that should probably be one that’s reprimanded,” he added.