The Great Resignation Was Never That Real Of A Narrative
There has been so much hand-wringing over labor statistics and employment quit-rates, i.e. “The Great Resignation,” in the past six to eight months. Almost every narrative out there is a complete joke. Let’s just run through a couple of things quickly on this topic, if we may.
First of all, the reason people typically leave jobs is because they get (a) treated like shit, either by management or customers and then (b) they get paid like shit while being treated like shit. If you want to solve the “resignation” problem, you essentially need nicer, self-aware people in management ranks, you need customers who aren’t entitled a-holes, and you need salary that allows people to keep up with the ends they need to meet. This is very hard, though. Companies don’t like to pay people money, and America loves itself some convenience, which often leads to people being entitled assholes to servers and customer-facing employees.
Second off, put aside the “Dementia Joe is offering socialist free money” narrative for a second. A lot of that is just ideology and not fact. Many of those provisions expired months ago. Are there still people out there getting handouts? Yes. Are there people scamming and working the system? Yes. Will that always be true? Yes. Does it account for all the various labor market discrepancies, i.e. people just don’t want to work anymore? No.
Third, almost every article written about this topic tends to quote HR people — who know nothing about how businesses run, writ large — or executives, who have a vested interest in “the old way of working” and want to keep costs as low as possible. They sometimes also quote “thought leaders,” who generally know nothing and last sat daily in a cubicle farm 14 years ago, or journalists, who also know nothing because journalism is a much different type of work than retail or updating CRMs. All these hot takes NEVER quote someone who really knows what’s happening with workers, or someone that understands the realities of the job market. Case in point: 60 Minutes weighed in on all this last weekend, and they used as the fulcrum point a minority woman, with degrees from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford, who already has a high-up title at LinkedIn.
That woman will never want for work. She will always be in demand by someone. Will it be hard for her if she’s a mom? Yes. Absolutely. But she has no real understanding of the labor market and suppressed wages, because all she does is see rows of LinkedIn aggregate data. That’s different then going and sitting with a family in Youngstown, OH who can only afford two meals a day anymore. It’s basically elitism.
Next: there is this narrative that “employees have all the power now,” which is comical. Employees have all the power? Have you heard about words like “automation” or “suppressed wages?” Employees have a blip of power in this moment in the form of cheap signing bonuses and a few “will train” job posts. Broader power? Absolutely not. The house always wins, and the house in this case is employers. They also have all the legal protections. Almost every state in America is at-will. You can get fired, tomorrow, for anything up to and including side-eye’ing your boss the wrong way. That’s hardly “employees have all the cards.”
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People need income, and they need things to do, and they need pathways to their own definitions of what “success” looks like, however flawed that can be at some points. So no, people aren’t going to just stop working because of “free money” or “companies treating them badly.” There are definitely millions of people reconsidering basic things right now, which is why you see young mothers exiting the workforce, or career pivots, or Boomer retirements, etc. But are we whole-scale reinventing work, despite what women with three advanced degrees from the best places on the planet tell you? No. The narratives are misguided.
The final point that needs to be considered here, probably, is that a lot of this is ultimately a reflection on the consumer more than the worker. See, most of the industries with the highest quit rates — with the possible exception of construction — are industries where you face customers all day, all shift. Ever seen this meme?
That’s the core of the issue in some ways. Consumers are entitled, and feel they can belittle and berate people for problems that those people didn’t even cause. The issue might be the entitled notion discussed above, stemming from too much convenience and comfort in people’s day-to-day lives. Go work on the farm, ya heard? Put in some real labor. Then treat those who serve you as kings, not paupers.
Most of the narrative around quitting and resigning is just flawed, and we’re listening to the wrong people. Now, if you want to understand how to reduce turnover in a real way, I’ve got a little bit for you.