Maintenance

'Big resignation': Employees want 'work to fit into their lives and not the other way around'

Many sectors of the US economy are struggling to find employees, after the phenomenon that has been dubbed as the "Great Resignation".

Here, a restaurant looking for employees in New York, August 5, 2022. © Andrew Kelly / Reuters

Text by: Ariane Gaffuri Follow

7 mins

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to an effect now known as the “

” in the United States: the number of people who left their jobs there exploded, reaching 4.5 million people for the month of November 2021, according to the US Department of Labor.

In early 2021, Anthony Klotz, a Texas professor of organizational psychology, coined the term in a book of the same name predicting such an effect.

The numbers proved him right.

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Anthony Klotz

I started thinking about this theory towards the end of 2020. At that time, there was a lot of optimism about the effectiveness of vaccines, their rapid distribution to bring the pandemic under control, and the hope of a quick return to normal life.

This assumption also existed in the business world.

about returning to work as in 2019, before the pandemic.

My field of research, let us specify, concerns the resignation of employees: why some left their job more or less quickly, and what reasons motivated their choice?

At that time, I sensed that if the American economy regained strength, instead of workers rushing to their jobs, there would instead be

.

Four reasons for this: the first is due to a backlog of resignations.

Because of the economic difficulties, the uncertainty, linked to the pandemic, 2020 was not a good year to quit your job or change your career.

So people who intended to leave waited for the economy to pick up to do so.

You should know that the number of resignations has continued to increase over the past ten years in the United States.

This goes to show that people's relationship to their work was already changing and this has been accentuated with the pandemic and other events in 2020. 

In addition to this backlog of quits, I was struck by the number of burnouts within the workforce.

Many of the front-line workers, those who have helped us through the pandemic, were doing poorly: professionals in retail, food service, health care, even my management students, said they were exhausted.

Business leaders and executives, parents who worked full-time from home while educating their children, also seemed at the end of their rope.

All these people wanted or needed to take a break.

Some were able to take a sabbatical, but often the only way to ease off when work is wearing you out is to quit, change jobs, or quit.

This generalized burnout has also pushed people to quit.

The third indicator that struck me that is unique about the pandemic is that it is not just an economic crisis, a recession;

it is a public health crisis.

And there is a theory in social psychology, called " 

 Fear Theory suggests that when people are faced with illness and death, they tend to reflect on their lives existentially and ask themselves if their life is meaningful, if they are living the life they want. they wish to live.

At the same time, the pandemic has given people time.

It allowed them to make plans, to consider a career change more in line with their aspirations.

Many of them have embarked on business creation, changed jobs or taken early retirement.

Finally, the last factor, which has been widely talked about in the media, is of course remote work.

People have discovered that working from home gives them a lot more freedom and autonomy than face-to-face work.

Telecommuting, hybrid working, or face-to-face work, of course has its pros and cons, but remote work lasted about ten months, which is long enough for people to adjust to newfound freedom.

And history shows that when you give people freedom and then take it away, it doesn't go well.

These are the four somewhat unusual forces that together caused these sudden resignations.

How have employers reacted to this wave of resignations

Some companies thought that nobody wanted to work anymore.

They denounced the lack of commitment or loyalty of young people.

But that's a small minority of them.

Most recognized the problem and tried to solve it in several ways.

First by talking to their employees and asking them: “ 

 Some companies have increased the salaries of their staff, others have invested in offering new social benefits.

For example, the big distributors here in the United States, after the big quit started, offered to pay their employees' college loans, which is a big plus here.

Some companies offered career advancement, granted more flexible working hours.

Others have reorganized workspaces to make them more pleasant to live in.

Companies have been very reactive to keep their employees, which has stabilized the number of resignations in recent months.

►

How do you see the future?

Has the pandemic permanently changed the world of work in the United States

Remote work, hybrid work, digital nomadism, career breaks, were already on the fringes of the world of work before the health crisis, but they have been reinforced.

Employees are now asking their future employers if their position includes telecommuting or hybrid working, and it wasn't a question they asked before.

They now expect work to fit into their lives and not the other way around.

Many companies have announced that their workforces have stabilized, and figures from the US Department of Labor attest to this.

The quit rate in the United States is 25% higher than in 2019, but today seems stable in this high range.

Did the “

I'm still hesitant to answer this question for several reasons.

First of all because I am a psychologist and not an economist, so I do not study labor market trends on a global scale.

Moreover, the United States tracks these trends more closely than most countries, even though it has only been for 22 years.

The labor market is therefore easier to observe in the United States.

There are certainly studies that have shown increased quits in the UK, Ireland, India, Singapore and beyond.

This is

, but there has been no global survey that proves it.

It seems to me that this phenomenon has affected the United States more than the rest of the world, but it is difficult to say.

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• United States

• Employment and Labor

• Coronavirus

• Economy