How to survive a workplace that is running out of patience

Just 30 minutes after sending an e-mail that you haven’t responded to, a colleague resorts to calling your phone. A boss demands an in-person meeting at one hour’s notice on the day you are supposed to be working from home. A junior colleague is constantly seeking feedback on their short-term performance. These are symptoms of a labour market that just cannot wait.

The workplace has become impatient. Employers are less willing to indulge those who need time to learn. Working professionals demand continuous feedback on their performance. They sense that the skills that made them valuable yesterday may not do so tomorrow and feel that they must work doubly hard to keep up with change. Technology has accelerated the cycle: companies want people who can respond to situations immediately, while employees know they may need to keep moving to remain employable.

These developments raise a more important question: What happens when a workplace loses the capacity for reflection, long-term planning and the development of its people?

In terms of hiring, there is a mismatch between demand and supply. Employers increasingly expect graduates to arrive already able to do what used to be taught on the job. Hence the now-familiar paradox of the “entry-level candidate with three to five years’ experience”, which has spawned countless memes and social media complaints.

Meanwhile, employees are getting swamped. The 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report by Microsoft shows that the average worker receives more than 100 e-mails and up to 275 total “pings” per day, with interruptions occurring every two minutes. Additionally, more than half of all meetings are called on the spot, without proper planning. And this barrage does not stop even when office hours are over: The data shows that the average employee exchanges more than 50 messages outside of business hours, and 70% of Singaporeans report responding to messages outside office hours.

But why has the workplace become so impatient?

Employers want ready-made staff

Training a newcomer has always required patience: weeks of onboarding, mistakes absorbed, questions answered and judgment gradually built. In a dynamic market, with so much uncertainty about revenue, technology and whether a new hire will stay for more than a few years, that investment looks increasingly risky to firms. It is easier to hire someone who can contribute from day one, or to rely on interns and contractors who carry lower fixed costs and can be released with less friction.

But there is a trade-off. Without proper training and the time to familiarise themselves with context and stakeholders, new employees will hardly be able to develop the knowledge and skills that their organisation specifically needs and the judgment that would make them valuable to it.

In an impatient workplace, mid-managers are incentivised on quick deliverables. Like hyper-reactive firefighters, they are constantly trying to achieve short-term KPIs (key performance indicators) and fix mistakes, but lack the time to train their junior staff. This leads to talent stagnation and their own burnout.

While managers are burdened with delivering immediate results, subordinates look to them for stability in the volatile workplace: Randstad’s 2026 research found that nearly seven in 10 workers in Singapore look to their manager as a source of stability. But if every manager is rewarded only for this quarter’s numbers, there is little incentive to spend time teaching someone who may not become fully productive for another year. That trade-off needs to be recognised rather than wished away.

A possible solution is for organisations to design a dual career ladder, which creates two pathways for workers to grow: one focused on technical and functional expertise, and one focused on people management. This would allow certain managers to be more task-focused and others to be more people-focused. In this way, employees would have dedicated figures focused on supporting their growth.

An impatient market creates restless workers

Employers increasingly need their workers to be able to absorb change quickly. The skills that made someone valuable a year ago may no longer be enough today. Content creators, editors and translators, for example, have found themselves helping to train the artificial intelligence systems that could eventually automate parts of their work. Workers therefore have their own reasons to keep moving – chasing a promotion, acquiring new skills or simply protecting themselves against the next restructuring.

One consequence of this restlessness is a rise in performative work at the expense of productive work. Instead of actually getting work done, employees focus on impression management – or so-called productivity theatre. Indeed, Singaporean desk workers report spending more than a third of their work time “appearing busy” while not doing any substantial work.

The result is a labour market characterised by churn. Employers are reluctant to invest heavily in people who may leave. Employees are reluctant to invest their futures in employers who may restructure or automate their roles and increasingly emphasise appearing busy rather than getting stuff done. Each side’s impatience reinforces the other’s.

What gets lost when everyone is in a hurry?

The obvious cost of churn is financial. Replacing an employee can cost between half and twice that person’s annual salary, according to Gallup, with the higher end applying to senior and specialised roles.

But when an experienced employee walks out the door, organisations do not just lose headcount. They lose tacit yet vital institutional knowledge: which supplier can be trusted in a crisis; which client needs reassurance before a difficult conversation; why a process exists in the first place; which seemingly minor detail can derail an important project. The key word here is tacit. What is lost is not just information that can be easily recovered through a Google search or a chat with Claude. It is firm-specific and role-specific information that takes time to build. It is knowing which question to ask, and whom to ask. It is not just knowledge; it is judgment. And this judgment is increasingly rare, given the churn rate in the current workplace.

This is the paradox of the impatient workplace. The qualities employers most value – adaptability, judgement, familiarity with the context, resilience and the ability to handle ambiguity – are often the very qualities that take time to develop. They come only from spending a significant amount of time in the same organisational environment, making mistakes and learning from them, and building longstanding relationships with colleagues and stakeholders. Yet, organisations tend to favour workers who can make snap judgments – ironically, the sort that could easily be made by any other professional or by AI.

This feeds into the rhetoric that workers are becoming disposable in the age of AI, when they are, in fact, an ever more precious resource. Organisations such as Klarna and Ford learnt this the hard way, as they were forced to rehire qualified workers who had been let go to save costs because they “misjudged what AI could do alone”, in the words of Ford’s vice-president of vehicle hardware engineering. Indeed, a recent Careerminds report showed that two thirds of the companies which carried out significant AI-led layoffs quickly rehired more than a quarter of the fired workers, with half of those companies hiring back more than half of those workers.

The danger is not that everyone will become less employable. It is that organisations may become better at hiring people who are immediately useful (but can be disposed of as quickly) while becoming worse at developing the people who would eventually have become indispensable. So, relationships become more transactional and institutional memory becomes thinner.

Employers must invest in tacit knowledge

The answer is not to stop hiring for adaptability. Nor should employers be expected to train every employee indefinitely. But companies need to recognise that some of the capabilities they want cannot simply be bought off the shelf.

One practical response is to make knowledge less dependent on individual employees. Structured documentation, cross-training, mentorship pairings and communities of practice can help ensure that institutional memory survives staff turnover and make it easier for newcomers to learn the ropes. GitLab, the all-remote software company, offers a useful example. Its extensive public handbook documents processes and decisions so that knowledge does not disappear when employees leave.

But while documentation like GitLab’s captures information on standard operating procedures and regulatory compliance, no handbook can teach employees how to exercise judgment. This is where tacit knowledge comes in. Knowing when the written-down standard rules and norms may not apply. Being able to read the non-verbal cues by colleagues whom you’ve known for years. Knowing how to handle a key customer or decision-maker. Sensing when a team needs a motivational boost. All of this cannot be taught in a manual or learnt during a two-week onboarding period, but comes only with experience and practice.

Employees must own their growth

Workers, especially mid-career ones, also have to recognise that the old bargain – learn a skill, stay with an employer and steadily progress – is becoming less reliable.

Rather than waiting for an employer to map out the next decade, resilient professionals need to treat their own development as an ongoing project: maintaining a current portfolio of skills, building networks that travel with them and having honest conversations with employers about where they can grow.

But adaptability should not mean constantly chasing whatever skill happens to be fashionable. Investment into the skills honed throughout one’s career is key, especially soft skills such as communication, problem-solving, the ability to learn and the ability to work with people. Yet, building organisation-specific and job-specific skills that make one irreplaceable is no less important, as shown by the recent rehiring trends. The skills that make one irreplaceable would follow the familiar VRIN (valuable, rare, inimitable, non-substitutable) framework introduced by Jay Barney in 1991.

The organisations and professionals that will thrive are not necessarily those that move fastest. They will be those that know which things can be accelerated – and which things, such as judgment, trust and expertise, cannot be rushed.

Federico Magni and Grace J. H. Lim are assistant professors from the Division of Leadership, Management and Organisation, Nanyang Business School at NTU Singapore.

Source: The Straits Times