Employees are quitting worldwide. A lot of them. But when The Great Resignation makes its way to Australian shores, will it really be all that bad?
Employees are quitting worldwide. A lot of them. But when The Great Resignation makes its way to Australian shores, will it really be all that bad? Or are we looking at it the wrong way?
In the US in August 2021, 2.9 per cent of the national workforce left their jobs. That’s 4.3 million people. In the same month in the UK, the number of open jobs surpassed one million. That’s a new record.
In our previous blog, The Great Resignation: What is it and how will it affect business, we looked into reasons why employees were leaving their jobs. In large part, it was a result of pandemic fatigue and new priorities because of longer periods at home. It’s a niggling spurred on by more family time, new passions, greater workplace flexibility, and having life and death brought closer to home.
The numbers are confronting, but does it tell the whole story?
Let’s look at who coined the trend, The Great Resignation.
Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University, first used the term back in May 2021. He spoke a lot about the intention to resign over people following through. He even suggested that most employees would stay with a company if they allowed them to WFH or work fewer hours each week.
It certainly seems that The Great Resignation isn’t something to fear. However, it is certainly a time for employers to check in with their employees and be open to negotiating a new arrangement. One with benefits that reflects society’s desire for better work-life balance.
There’s also an association that all workers who are quitting are doing so from a place of power. However, that’s not necessarily true. People might have quit as they had to home-school their children or they didn’t have career opportunities. They even could have quit because they did not feel comfortable enforcing vaccine mandates, say if they worked in hospitality.
The numbers do show there is a trend for workers to leave their employers if they are unhappy. It also suggests that even if workers don’t quit, they might have been seriously considering it for some time which means there is low employee satisfaction. But this all points to an opportunity for employers.
It is an opportunity to:
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