2020 and 2021 have brought to our workforce a myriad of millions of resignations. How will this affect your company? We will look at 3 ways to make this new phenomenon work for your business!
What is “The Great Resignation”?
This term was coined during 2020-2021 as a record number of people are quitting their jobs! Why? As companies changed policies for work from home due to the pandemic, vaccine mandates, layoffs, and opportune career changes as the rehiring began again, workers gained momentum in looking out for themselves. The reasons vary, but any worker who disagrees with the new policy changes is game for employment changes. After spring 2020 layoffs and business closures, unemployment grew but federal and state programs paid many unemployed handsomely thus keeping them unemployed.
Today, people are quitting, changing jobs, and increasing their salaries, titles, and benefits including perks we had not seen in many years. As the pandemic programs wind down, many people are signing onto new companies depending on the company policies. These policies include:
- Work from Home or Anywhere vs. return to the office
- Vaccine mandates, with companies terminating people for not being vaccinated
Many people moved out of cities, to less expensive areas, and away from company offices. When return-to-office orders were given, people quit or started to look for new jobs and career changes. Will they move back to the cities? Time will tell.
3 Tips to Benefit Your Business from the Great Resignation Period
- This may be the best time ever to add available talent to bolster your team. Even if you are not looking to hire, recruit anyway to add top-notch talent to create your A-Team. CEOs I talk to all tell me that their success is fueled by their trusted leadership team.
- There has never been a better time to change your policies and improve your new, post-pandemic culture. It is true at this time that the pandemic is not over, however, with vaccinations, precautions, and life is mostly on the way to a new normal, this is a perfect time to change company policies. You can ask employees for recommendations. You can review the compensation structures and plans in your company. You can check out your overall plans for diversity and inclusion. You can discuss other ways to modify your culture and purpose which may suit Millennial or GenZ employee additions.
- Take a closer look at meetings. During the past 18 months, remote employees have developed “Video meeting fatigue”, and although some companies figured it out, most did not. Analyze necessary meetings and attendees to those meetings. Can the topics become an email or Slack/Teams/messaging discussions? These operational type of meetings when employees jump from Zoom call to Zoom call to Teams to Google Meet with no time for breaks gets old. The yo-yo effect of schools on-campus vs remote. While some employees may like being remote, others want to be back in the office, but whatever your choice, assess meetings and time wasters. This is a great benefit to your productivity if you can get it right!
In Summary
The Great Resignation is real. Millions and millions of workers are exhibiting some form of burnout or anxiousness to change jobs. There are many reports and resources out there from the US Labor Department (Bureau of Labor Statistics), Microsoft Work Trend Index, Gartner, YPulse, Gallop, and a myriad of other studies that share statistics supporting this phenomenon.
It may be best to take a hard look at how you can turn this around and make it a positive for your employees and your company. Be creative. Think outside the box. Be bold.
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