It’s not uncommon for employees to leave their current place of work for new opportunities, but how common is it to occur in large numbers, like a mass exodus?
It has been approximately seventeen months since the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 coronavirus a pandemic and with the arrival of various variants emerging from places like Brazil and India, it shows no signs of slowing down or going way anytime soon. Accompanying the arrival of COVID-19 comes a by-product of reshaping and redefining the quality of life and how it is measured.
Kate Morgan, in her 2021 ‘Worklife’ blog for BBC.com, writes, “a Microsoft survey of more than 30,000 global workers showed that 41% of workers were considering quitting or changing professions this year, and a study from HR software company Personio of workers in the UK and Ireland showed 38% of those surveyed planned to quit in the next six months to a year”.
Economists and culture scholars alike are coining this new craze, ‘The Great Resignation’. Morgan continued by stating, “the pandemic precipitated a shift in priorities, encouraging them to pursue a ‘dream job’, or transition to being a stay-at-home parent. But for many, many others, the decision to leave came as a result of the way their employer treated them during the pandemic.”
There is no doubt that the environment brought on by the uncertainty of the pandemic brought about onsets of anxiety, depression, worry, and fear. This onset perhaps exacerbated the shift in priorities of work life/personal life balance. Perhaps individuals were influenced by the age old saying “life is too short”, and in a time where a virus as strong as COVID-19 is claiming the lives of individuals by the millions, this saying couldn’t ring truer.
The Great Recession is not only impacting employees but employers as well.
Lorna Borenstein, member of the Forbes Human Resource Council, writes in her 2021 article for Forbes.com, “Three Indisputable Truths About The Great Resignation”, that, “what’s happening is a big wake-up call to employers, regardless of whether they thrived or languished during the pandemic. It’s part of a larger trend that’s taking shape in real time and speaks to the very heart of the employer-employee compact. There are a record 9.2 million job openings, but employers can’t fill them…”
This kind of phenomenon begs the question of what strategies employees and economic & workforce developers alike are coming up with to solve the biggest work gap in the past century. While economic development focuses its priorities on attracting new employers based on industry demand as well as retaining and expanding current employers, workforce development focuses its efforts on growing the talent needed to fill the positions brought on by these employers. These efforts specifically focus on the training for the skills these positions require.
In an era where automation and technological advances are transforming the nature of work by the day, and in a time where nearly the entire world was forced to reconfigure and work remote, individuals not only gained a new set of skills to further adapt to this dynamic environment but also earned a new appreciation for a more effective and simpler way to navigate the rat race that is work/life balance.
Despite being nearly two years into the pandemic, it will be quite a while before it is really known of the repercussions that the Great Recession will have on the nature of work and life, but in the meantime, it is very clear that many individuals want change and will not stop until it is reached.
