The Myth Of The "Great Resignation" and Three Deeper Work Shifts

I've been told by no less than three executives in the past week that the "great resignation" is why increasing numbers of people are leaving their companies.

Is this the real reason? What does "great resignation" mean?

I've been exploring these questions over the past few weeks and while I think the "Great Resignation" is mostly media hype, I think there is something interesting bubbling beneath the surface of this story. Something that I've experienced in my own journey over the past few years and also that I've heard from hundreds of others as part of their own shifts with their relationship to work.

Before I dive into those things, I want to explore what's made this meme so powerful and share a bit more nuance around the data on what's happening in the US across the industry.

Why has this "great resignation" meme taken off?

It is the rare storyline that also has no strong opposition. Everyone is on board!

• Journalists love the buzz and media organizations love that their journalists have a place to vent while also benefitting from higher subscriptions + ad revenue from those clicks
• Executives get a cover-your-ass explanation of increasing turnover without needing to go much deeper into cultural, development, or compensation issues
• Employees get joy in hearing the stories of individuals fighting against managers or employers (we might call this the "Office Space impulse")

The Internet Empowers Spontaneous Uprisings to Emerge That Are Broadly Against Things

An interesting lens through which to see all of this is through a combination of John Robb’s?networked tribes?and Martin Gurri’s?book Revolt of The Public.

Robb argues that the internet enables people to quickly find each other and rally around certain topics. His perspective on this was shaped by what the US military was facing in Afghanistan after 9/11. Empowered by mobile devices, terrorist groups were much more fluid and less legible than militaries had seen before.

Gurri adds a second piece. A former CIA analyst, he wrote a book about the large-scale movements that started in the Middle East in 2009, or the “the Arab spring.” While most people were hailing it as a victory for democracy, he saw that these groups didn’t really have clear leadership, structure, goals, or priorities.

These groups also started unexpectedly, mostly via social media. They all shared one thing:?they enabled alignment by being broadly against things. Gurri cites many examples (anti-trump, anti-capitalism, anti-work, anti-elite, anti-establishment). The problem with this kind of movement is that they only unite people in their shared repudiation of a broad ambiguous cause and because individuals are bringing their own individual perspective, reaching any sort of consensus about what the group wants is impossible. As Gurri says :

Rather than transform society, the objective is to express the emotive force of an identity by its opposition to power. Being against is an existential posture more than a political stand.

I think this is what is happening with the flood of anti-work sentiment on the internet. I recently spent an hour scrolling through Reddit's r/antiwork channel and I could not find anything coherent. It's really 15-20 different grievances with work, labor, and capitalism broadly.

The smoking gun for this narrative seems to be the “Quits” numbers in August from the BLS, which came in at a record 4.2M. This was definitely high but not wildly out of line with trends of the last ten years:

Breaking this down by industry, however, we see that a lot of this is driven by construction, trade (supply chain issues?), construction, and hospitality.

My conclusion from this: too soon to tell if there is a widespread increase in people really quitting their jobs and leading to a sustainable shift in the nature of the labor economy.

Why? We still haven't fully priced in the changes from covid, existing subsidies, pandemic regulations, and transitory inflation to draw any long-term conclusions. Data from the next few months will definitely be interesting to watch but I'd need a few more months of increasing quits data to see this as a long-term perspective.

Three Deeper Shifts

For the last several years I've had conversations with people about their relationship with work. Since mid-2020, however, the nature of these conversations and the kind of people that reached out to me shifted.

I've noticed three big themes:

#1 The "performance" of work seems awkward as people return to the office

Many people have returned to the office and are finding it a bit weird. They have been working remotely or in a hybrid state for the last two years. Everyone has been relaxed about clothing, schedules, and all the other formalities of office work. Going back into "office mode" feels a bit silly because while people sense they should act more "professionally" they also know that era of work is over.

Look no further than the global climate summit to see a lot of this performative language and politics in action. Does anyone have faith in these leaders to do what they say? Of course not. But why is it so apparent now? Mostly because we've given up the show in our own lives.

Right now many people are finding themselves in a liminal state where no one knows what norms will emerge. This is complicated by the fact that there are 100s of experiments underway in terms of remote work and ways of working. Navigating a career shifts from bringing a set of "professional" skills from one company to another to needing to know how to live, work, engage, and operate in totally new ways.

#2 People are more willing to talk about their relationship to work

A few years ago the most common thing that people would share with me is that they didn't tell anyone in their lives (not even their spouses) about their deeper questions about their relationship with work. Now people are having more open conversations and aren't afraid to admit that a path isn't working for them.

Which leads us to #3

#3 The shame of quitting your job is less than pre-pandemic (though this may be temporary)

People have treated this ongoing pandemic period as a great reason to make almost any kind of life change. In normal times, the question, "why are you doing this, that seems crazy!?" stopped people from making a decision but now everyone has a default reason that almost everyone accepts: "It's the pandemic, silly!"

I left my job almost five years ago and at the time it was a really hard thing to do. Most people in my life were not changing up their relationship with work. Most were deciding to double down and work more, When you step away from the way everyone else is doing things, you need some sort of reason. I had all sorts of reasons at the time. I didn't believe most of them but that's the challenge of making a life shift - it often involves wandering into the unknown.

Now, people are feeling a softening of the judgment of others and also able to default to the pandemic as the reason that they are doing something. This is great! No need to make up reasons like I did.

For many people, shame is what keeps people from leaving their current paths. They are afraid of being judged and being seen as a failure.

For now, people are sensing it might not be so bad.

?? I'm launching a group coaching experiment with people in November to help them reimagine their relationship with work. If you're interested learn more here .

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