There is a great resignation happening around the world, according to an American academic.
Professor Anthony Klotz has given it a name, the Great Resignation and says it is being driven by four main factors.
Professor Anthony Klotz Photo: supplied
Firstly, there were pent up plans to resign put on hold by the pandemic; reports of employee burnout were emerging across various sectors, something he describes as lockdown epiphanies where people re-evaluate their lives was occurring and lastly a reluctance to return to the office after many had been working from home for months.
The resignations appear to be happening across all demographics, he says.
“The organisations I'm talking to are seeing it across the board, both in terms of generations of workers, as well as in terms of frontline workers versus senior management,” Klotz a professor at Texas A&M University told Jesse Mulligan.
For many, the lockdown and extended periods of working from home disrupted long-established routines, he says.
“A lot of individuals have worked at the same organisation for a long time, or who have been in the workforce for a long time, so Generation X and boomers and beyond, working from home gave them a break that in some ways they may not have had for 20 or 30 years.
“And I think coming out of the pandemic, a lot of individuals later in their careers are saying, get me to early retirement, or can I reduce the hours that I'm working? Because this was kind of a refreshing change in my work life.”
Resignations also tend to be contagious, he says.
“There is a term that we study called turnover contagion. And one of the things that causes you to start thinking about turnover, or employees to start thinking about turnover is something that happens in their personal or work life that causes them to reevaluate their situation.
“And the pandemic in general was one of these things, but you can imagine, it's pretty distressing to have a friend at work leave and work becomes less enjoyable for you.”
There also seems to be a power re-balancing between employee and employer, he says.
“You can just see, at least here in the United States, that companies are responding to this power imbalance by providing employees with better pay, better benefits, more time off, retention bonuses and so forth.”
Forced working from home also allowed us to re-imagine work, he says.
“This is the biggest shift or shock to happen to the world of work, maybe ever, but definitely in a long, long time. And it's not difficult to think ahead and say, you know, two years ago, if you were looking for a job, the number of jobs that would allow you to work in a hybrid few days a week in the office, or completely remote was a really small percentage of overall jobs.
“And I think every recruiter will now get questions from job seekers asking about these work arrangements. And so this fundamental shift has definitely happened.”
There are a number of reasons people might prefer working some or all of their time at home, he says.
“Lots of our friends and people that we like exist in the office, but there's also a lot of really unpleasant interpersonal interactions that happen in the office.
“So again, working from home, being able to choose a little bit more who you interact with, can be more pleasant for some individuals.”
Something else is going on too, he says.
“A lot of employees are starting to report that working from home, they feel like they could be more of themselves, and they can bring their whole selves to their home office.
“Whereas when you come into the workplace, you have to act, you have to wear a certain clothes a certain way, you may have to wear makeup or your hair a certain way. And you might have to a lot of the time fake who you are for different reasons.”
He advises companies to stay close to people who resign, as they may return.
“And so just giving employees the room to explore, usually it's not a pleasant thing to let an employee go and it can sometimes be frowned upon, but shifting that attitude and treating them like an alumni of the organisation is probably a better approach.”
