The Great Resignation

The image I've used for this piece is taken from a PR Newswire article from September 2021 ("Majority of Job-Changers... Were Burned Out, Wanted to Be Valued and Cared For"). If ever a picture spoke a thousand words, this image is the case in point.

When a full 28% of people resign without having another job to go into, it shows just how bad their existing jobs are. For many analysts, the great resignation exposed an underlying, systemic problem with the modern world of work: for many people, given a choice between their existing job and foregoing employment entirely, they are better off without a job at all.

According to Rashida Kamal of the Guardian newspaper (“Quitting is just half the story: the truth behind the ‘Great Resignation’”, January 2022), US workers left their jobs at historic rates in 2021, with a record 4.5m quits at the end of November that resulted in 10.6m job openings and 6.9m unemployed people (1.5 jobs available per unemployed person). And this happened against a backdrop of economic uncertainly and rising prices (which is shocking).

The older and more traditional among us may see in this proof for the long- suspected entitlement that plagues this society of self- absorbed millennials- "do they not value the privilege of employment?!" The answer to this from those quitting is quite reasonable: "no, because a job that cannot support my basic financial requirements (criminally high rent for example), offers no career progression and does not allow me to build wealth (to one day stop paying said criminally high rent) is not a privilege".

Fair enough.

All over the world, we are seeing seismic changes in the labour market, as well as an increasingly urgent need to develop digital & data skills across all organisations & job roles. And these changes are correlated with changing working patterns and employee attitudes; the linear corporate career path is simply no longer attractive to many young people, who envision a more holistic, flexible lifestyle that allows them to dip in & out of new roles.

Why...?

Common explanations for the great resignation include a lack of adequate childcare (for women in particular), health concerns (like Covid),?and good- old fashion burnout. The trend itself has been squarely focused on the leisure, hospitality, retail and healthcare sectors (relatively lower- paying industries), but there has also been significant losses in technology (which pays increasingly well). So we can't just chalk this up to lower salaries or rising inflation & interest rates; there is something much deeper, more human, at play here.

And its important to note that the trend has not been gender- neutral;?the US Census Bureau noted the impact on working mothers from “care insecurity” (i.e. maintaining adequate child care) as 1.4 million fewer mothers were actively engaged with the labor market in 2020 compared to the same period in 2019; women of all backgrounds (but particularly with children) dominate the lower- paid sectors most badly affected by the great resignation.

The great resignation is therefore not due to an abundance of alternative opportunities, but because many workers simply cannot afford to keep the jobs they already have, or sustain the personal lives that they need to be happy (i.e. why work for a life you don't want?).

Data, data, data

I think that data people can help fix this problem, particularly in organisations that are struggling to recruit and retain critical digital & data talent. The Harvard Business Review (“Who Is Driving the Great Resignation?”, September 2021 ) pointed out that organisations need to take a data- driven approach to predict which employees have the highest turnover risk, why people leave, and what can be done to prevent attrition. And this requires them to get under the skin of employee performance, psychology & happiness.

Most of our businesses struggle to explain what the loss of key workers would be on business metrics; for example, which business processes would be impacted by the loss of a particular skill? How replaceable are the most at- risk employees? And how would a loss of critical human labour affect the bottom-line (and therefore shareholder value)?

Pioneering firms like Google can attribute a large part of their success to extraordinary people management practices; they can empirically determine the impact of great managers on staff performance, conduct applied experiments to optimise working environments, and use predictive models to optimise workforce planning against specific business metrics. The attitudes of Silicon Valley are a major break from the quarterly satisfaction surveys that make most of us groan, and there has never been a greater need for data professionals to help their organisations adopt new ways of thinking about people management. If your organisation has recently appointed a Chief Happiness/ Wellbeing Officer, you better believe there is a major role for data to transform how your business thinks about its people.

The essential problem statement of talent management has changed in this post- pandemic world and data professionals need to help their organisations understand how subjective topics like life satisfaction, personal growth and empowerment can be measured empirically, applying sophisticated and creative data techniques to solve complex and nuanced questions.

Slicing the Gordian Knot

I have, regrettably, used the phrase "don't come to me with problems, bring me solutions!" in my own professional life. To everyone I said that to, please accept this as a public apology. The truth is, no- one has the answer to problems as complicated as this.

But one thing we can do is develop useful frameworks in which good solutions might be developed. So let me give you my two- pennies worth about what that might be. I think that there are four things we need to focus on to avoid recurrent great resignations.

Firstly, the problem statement is no longer the same, so let's start there. Those in charge of enterprise talent can no longer rely on blunt metrics and the odd survey; we need to understand that employees want a lifestyle, not a job. How many employers actually consider the lives their employees lead after 6pm? How they live? Where they live? What they eat when they get home? How they sleep? What they do on weekends? And how their job enables/ prevents this lifestyle? This is not a call for round- the- clock surveillance or a call back to the 19th century Quakerism of John Cadbury. It is instead a recognition that the problem of staff recruitment & retention is not one that can be solved monetarily. If we want to address the problem of talent in the modern enterprise, we have to think more holistically.

Secondly, and leading directly on from the previous point, our measurement techniques are rooted in old world assumptions about the comprehensiveness of materialistic rewards, individualistic life attitudes and a cultural reverence for high- flying corporate positions. These days people are much more likely to be impressed by someone who says they spend their life travelling the world in a camper-van than (another) sharply dressed business- type person, and employers need to recognise that seniority, wallet- size and ego are not the talent- pullers they used to be. And so we need to revise our HR scorecards to measure things like employee engagement, motivation, happiness and their sense of purpose. We need to replace "do we pay more?" with "are our employees living their best selves?".

Thirdly, responsibility for performance & reward needs to be decentralised, delegated and devolved down into functions, projects and individuals. The idea that a central team can really understand employment conditions (based on the idea that all jobs are basically the same and all people essentially want the same things from them) and optimise based on sledge- hammer interventions needs to go; individuals know how they feel and are capable of making educated decisions about how they want to work to deliver the results expected, while the people they work with know the value they bring (including key externalities). So we need to enable people to better understand their own performance and allow greater autonomy among business managers for the reward mechanisms, working conditions and career progression that matters to the people they manage. This is a tough sell to HR functions, but it is undoubtedly the direction of travel in terms of our global culture.

And finally, culture is the life- blood of organisations and we need to get much, much better at measuring it. Organisations need to understand the impact & value of mentoring networks, professional collaboration, ideas exchange and opportunities to be creative. Even things like being able to share your voice on social media without it being filtered through a thousand censorship committees (a blog like this for example!) can make a huge difference to employees who want more than a pay- check. They want to build a personal brand (like all the influencers they follow) and build a network of friends for those start- up ideas they have. People don't see themselves working in the same place for the next 20 years and don't expect their employer to offer them long- term security; they expect instead that the skills they gain over the next 2-3 years will enable them to move onto to greater things, but would love to be able to reengage later on when their paths will eventually meet again. Innovative, dynamic cultures are full of innovative, dynamic people that don't want to stay put- they want to evolve & grow, which many (especially larger) corporate cultures don't encourage.

Will the four above solve the problem of recruitment & talent management in the modern workplace? No. But as data people, our role should be to not only deliver, but inspire.

The modern enterprise is crying out for innovative, radical thinking in talent management. So let's give the people what they want.