[We hope you are having a great holiday season! This week, the Future of Work Exchange will highlight the “Best of 2021” as we feature some of our favorite pieces from the past five months since the site launched.]
My dear friend and fellow agile workforce pundit Jon Younger ends his frequent Forbes articles with a phrase that is essentially perfect for what is happening in today’s labor market: Viva la revolution!
Call it The Great Resignation. Call it The Great Reassessment, or even “The Big Quit.” No matter what name is tied to what’s occurring in this frenetic, volatile talent economy, it just means one thing: there’s a revolution of talent happening right now.
Yes, major pieces of the “worker-led” transformation of talent and labor are owed to a market that has been accelerated since Day One of the pandemic, as many talented professionals (and the businesses they work(ed) for) experienced the biggest disruption of their their corporate lives. Remote work became a norm, flexibility was a baseline, and empathy became a foundation for how leaders treated their teams.
However, there are other attributes that are a long time coming, such as equitable treatment, fair and living wages, and inclusive workplace cultures that promote safety and openness. There’s more discussion around worker burnout than ever before. And, critically, there’s a clear element of diversity that permeates through the job market, as well.
Looking at all of these elements converging, one would wonder, “Why would we ever go back?”
Those that worked remotely pre-pandemic can now validate the productivity concerns of such a work model. Those businesses that experienced an increase in productivity since the pandemic began now understand that they can trust their staff to get work done away from the office. And it’s not just a remote vs. in-office issue: think of the core societal changes that occurred in tandem with the pandemic. Think of the renewed focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I). From permanent hiring to extended talent, hiring managers and other business leaders are finally acknowledging real enterprise value of diversity.
Put it all together and this is what you get: millions and millions of talented professionals that know their value, know that they can work flexibly, and know that they deserve better working conditions from various perspectives.
Since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking statistics on the number of workers who voluntarily left their positions, there was no greater month for turnover than this past August, when 4.3 million Americans left the workforce (the previous record was May 2021, only a few months prior). The fact that the entire summer experienced somewhere in the neighborhood of 17+ million resignations (over 20 million if you count April in these figures) speaks volumes about where we are collectively headed.
Just a month or so ago, discussions revolved around whether businesses or workers would blink first. New BLS data proves that workers aren’t coming back unless organizations completely revolutionize their stance on the employer-employee relationship. It’s not just about compensation, it’s the fact that workers desire true flexibility. They crave work-life balance. And, most importantly, they want their own values and purpose to align with those of the businesses they choose to support.
Workers that traditionally “job-hopped” are finding that they can do so much more easily in today’s market, while workers that were once “lifers” question their career choices during a time that forced all of us (business aside) to reevaluate our lives in the face of the worst and biggest health crisis of our collective lifetimes. When people witness a family member falling ill and succumbing to a nefarious pathogen, and, when they see the terror across the nation’s hospitals as they collapse from surge after surge, it results in an “awakening” that has a cascading effect on both personal and professional thinking.
If workers aren’t satisfied, why would they stay put? With so many (read: millions!) of open positions across the country (and world), most of which offer consistent flexibility and a more soulful candidate and worker experience, why would any talented individual, in this current global landscape, want to “waste” their valuable months and years with an organization that doesn’t offer everything that they want and need? The pandemic reprogrammed many facets of human thinking; it was only natural that the same transformational mindsets would alter how we, as people, reevaluate our choices as business professionals.
Many of us lost family members, friends, and colleagues to COVID-19. Some of us attended funerals with limited family members due to social distancing guidelines. We’ve watched the horrors of the insides of ICUs on the evening news or on social media. Even though things are better than they have been in months, the pandemic is still a part of our everyday lives (even with the modern marvels that we have in coronavirus vaccines). When these morbid aspects of life creep into how we think about what exactly it is what we want from our lives (which, of course, include our careers), it’s very normal that we’d question why we spend time working for an employer that doesn’t offer flexible hours, doesn’t offer equitable treatment and wages, and doesn’t enable remote or hybrid work models.
Workers are human, and humans will always modernize their thinking due to the world around them. What is happening right now in the labor market is certainly a convergence of many factors that would have eventually accelerated critical shifts in talent engagement…however, these transformations are, to a greater extent, the result of humans questioning their choices moving forward and ensuring that one of the biggest pieces of their lives, their careers, are satisfying the personal, professional, and emotional aspects of their lives.
This isn’t just a reaction to a pandemic and its wide-sweeping business ramifications, it’s a true revolution of talent that will forever shape the Future of Work.
