The Great Resignation
Recently, I saw a post on LinkedIn, where the focus was on The Great Resignation. The Great Resignation refers to individuals who are leaving their jobs in great numbers and people choosing to stay at home or work from home rather than going back into the office. I think that people not physically going back to work makes perfect sense, and the phenomenon that’s happening right now is not really a phenomenon. This is similar to the Great Recession of 2008. During The Great Recession, people didn’t want to go to work either because they were able to make more money sitting home.
In today’s time, I think people mostly think about the organization understanding and watching for shifts and changes, but employees are now watching for those shifts and changes as well. For example, employees are able to understand the fact that they have sat home for a year and a half and have noticed that they’ve been able to get the same amount of work done. Everything that their employer has needed them to do they’ve been able to get done staying home, including having time with their family, spending time with their kids, as well as being able to get things done around the house. And so, with that, they’re asking themselves the tough question of why should they have to go back to work? It doesn’t make sense for them to commute, sit in traffic, or get up super early to walk into a building and sit at a cubicle to do what I have been doing for the last year and a half at home.
And business owners can see that their business hasn’t decreased, and employees haven’t lacked productivity because of it. I think that people are a whole lot smarter now and the pandemic has allowed us to see things that we haven’t seen before. The reason why The Great Resignation is happening, and people choosing not to work again, is that the pandemic has forced them to do things and stretch themselves in manners that they’ve never even dreamed of.
And as a result, you have so many people in record numbers starting side hustles and businesses. At this point in time, there are opportunities for them to get the extra education that they’ve never had the time for previously with the demand of their jobs. And so now with the extra education, they’re realizing that the amount of money that they’re making can be replaced, that they can now earn that amount and more. And think about this, some people have lost their job and said, I’m not ever going back to work.
This is even though people might have called them back or they had other opportunities, but they chose to say no instead because they’ve figured out how to survive without it. They’ve had enough time to see it through. They had an entire year’s worth of a cycle to go through to see how they can feed their family and make ends meet. And some people have been able to do really well during that time period, and now they understand that they don’t need to go to the job. They don’t have to be around the boss or coworkers they don’t like. And most importantly, people are focusing on family a lot more than they ever did because they had no other choice. If you’re still in your marriage, then that means you probably have a renewed sense of love and hope for the marriage because you went through the Pandemic.
Maybe you’ve been together for 15 years and you spent eight or maybe 10 hours a day away from each other. And now, you have been around each other all day and you survived that. And in that survival, you realize that you can, in fact, do this. Life is not going to be over because you’re not getting up and going to work. It’s not that people don’t need the money. It’s not that people don’t need security. It’s the pandemic. In my opinion, it has forced people to find other sources of security and in finding those other sources, they feel more comfortable submitting their resignation.
