The “great resignation” – a mad dash or something else?

working relationship, employee leaves, great resignation

The “Great Resignation” and “The Turnover Tsunami” are two terms to describe how the pandemic has resulted in a wave of resignations or intentions to resign like nothing we’ve experienced in our lifetime.

It’s headline and front-page news so it must be the truth, right?

Should we believe that all of a sudden millions of humans will quit their jobs because of a moment in time? Surely as survival species, humans don’t make such spur of the moment decisions that will impact themselves and others abilities to thrive?

As Adam Grant so eloquently states, “the Great Resignation isn’t a mad dash away from the office” rather “a culmination of a long march towards freedom”, so, then, what’s really at play here?

The game of human is a long game – human beings will at times make snap emotional decisions particularly when they feel threatened, however, mostly they’ll seek to understand, observe and diagnose patterns, and once weighed, will make a considered decision. Before the pandemic struck, humans in workplaces were well into playing the long game of human and didn’t like what they were experiencing in the workplace.

The wilfully blind are having their eyes opened up – There are many individuals who have chosen to look away and remain willfully blind to the disengagement, demotivation and despondency in the workplace for years. All of a sudden, they’ve opened their field of views and seen what they can’t unsee. This has been so bitter that they now choose to hide behind some statistics to cover up what has been an underlying issue for decades. It helps justify their own existence and remove themselves from the responsibility that they’ve created conditions where those in their care will choose loyalty over leaving.

Box ticking is only palatable for so long – the short-term way has been to get done “shiny stuff” like lunch and learns on wellness initiatives and put beanbags and arcade games in the office to “keep people happy”. Box tickers beware, humans are onto you right now and somewhere between the initial excitement of the sleep pod and the reality that nobody gets to use them because they’re too busy is where we’ve landed. Humans have been disengaged at the same level for as long as Gallup has been running engagement surveys (approx. 40 years).

Don’t fence me in – flexible work hasn’t been as flexible as espoused. It’s now apparent that managers who still work to the, “I can’t see you therefore you can’t be trusted to be working” have for years fenced humans into their own little pen and the genie is now out of the bottle. Work can work when you’re not 100 per cent in the office. Once again, this frustration didn’t happen overnight. It’s been building for a long time, and humans are tired of it. They’ve been marching this long march to freedom for some time.

Is there really a mad dash caused by a point in time pandemic?

If you believe this then you’re practising what author Margaret Heffernan calls, “willful blindness”.

Have you truly engaged, listened, understood and shown empathy to the humans in your care? I’m not talking about in the last twenty months, but more the last twenty years.

Perhaps that’s a starting point for ceasing the justification that humans are madly dashing to some kind of pandemic created professional oblivion?

Start playing the long game of human.