Post COVID: Great Resignation and Causes
Changed Priorities
Why did the Great Resignation happen? Because we’re human. As we know, our experiences create our perceptions. These then determine our behaviour in response to different situations. All of us had come through two years of being locked in and locked down. We all saw serious illness on a scale that none of us had ever experienced. Some of us suffered personal tragedy. It was brought home to each of us how precious and short life could be. As a result, many of us reprioritised what was important in our lives. For most, this meant that the importance of work compared to the importance of family, free time, quality of life and wellbeing significantly dropped. It was probably the greatest reality check many of us have ever experienced.
It was those changed perceptions that raised the benchmarks by which we measured what we wanted and expected from work. People are no longer prepared to tolerate poor leadership, excessive work hours, not being treated with respect, having our personal lives undervalued, not being able to grow and develop as a person or see a positive future ahead.
Pre-COVID, people tolerated these. Post-COVID, the world is different.
That feeling was so powerful that, as the world of work slowly re-opened, record numbers of employees (36%) left their current job without having a new role to go to, a resignation rate never seen before.
The Great “I’m Not Going Back”
The Great Resignation records people who returned to work when able and who then quit their jobs. But there were also a large number of people whose pre-pandemic work experience left them deciding not to return to work at all! Many unemployed and furloughed workers had time to think about what mattered most to them in their work life and what they truly wanted. For many, their pre-COVID jobs didn’t make the grade.
Employee Engagement Drops
This is also confirmed by employee engagement scores; the percentage of people in an organisation who consistently give their best. For 10 years, this percentage has been rising across the board. During COVID, it fell, perhaps unsurprisingly. But the trend has continued post-pandemic. The most plausible reason is not that leaders have gotten worse since the return to work but rather that people now have higher expectations of them. The evidence supports this; according to Gallup in the UK, employee engagement is now down at around 9%.
Take a moment to reflect on that. This means that only 9% of people on average in UK organisations are giving their best. That’s worrying enough, but what about the other 91%?
Taking aggregate Gallup data from across Europe, potentially of these 70% are only “sometimes engaged” – which is not good – and about 20% are “disengaged” – which is a serious problem.
What does disengaged mean? It means this: disengaged people aren’t just apathetic to the organisation’s objectives, they are negatively impacting it. To counter the impact of one disengaged person on a team you need to have 4 people or more to prevent this. The estimated impact of the disengaged is a potential loss of between £50-70bn a year. Not only do they negatively impact others at work but they have the same impact at home with gallup funding 51% behaved badly towards friends of family as a result. Bringing Work Problems Home (gallup.com).
How good can things be if you get leadership right? WD40, the household chemicals manufacturer, led by long time CEO Garry Ridge has an engagement rate of 93%.
The Perfect Storm
When you combine the change in personal perceptions and priorities that COVID has caused, the significant number of jobs suddenly coming on to the market as businesses reopened, the ease of access to a new job literally anywhere in the world via the Internet and the high proportion of people who are prepared to leave jobs without another to go to it, you have the perfect storm; the Great Resignation.
Do Employers Understand Why People Left?
Why did people leave their jobs? Here are the reasons people gave:
- Uncaring leaders: 35%,
- Unsustainable workloads: 35%,
- Lack of advancement potential: 35%,
- Lack of meaningful work: 30%
Employers, however, believe the top reasons are different. They say that people left because they wanted better pay, were poached, or had health concerns. Note that none of these reasons attribute any blame to the employer. This demonstrates poor management of recording the cause of employee exits. They do not accurately reflect the reasons for departure.
All of this serves to demonstrate why organisations which do not try to understand the drivers behind The Great Resignation are at significant risk.