What the Great Resignation means for jobs, people and business

It seems that not one year can go by without the media beating the drum about the latest great catastrophe, like Chicken Little squawking that “the sky is falling”. Most recently, it’s been all about “the Great Resignation”, but just how real is it? asks recruitment expert Richard Triggs.

How many times have you heard this phrase in the last couple of years, especially in our post-COVID world. “It’s not my/our fault we can’t retain our people, it’s the Great Resignation”. It’s as if everyone drank the Kool-Aid while working from home, and they woke up hating their boss, their employer, and their profession, and all wanted to quit and join the circus.

“Especially the younger generation, who want the world and show no loyalty to their current employers”, shouts the older senior executive whilst themselves talking to me about looking for a new job and an extra $100k. Ahhh, the joys of hypocrisy.

Let’s look at the facts about job satisfaction

In 2010, a global poll conducted by Gallup uncovered that “out of the world’s one billion full-time workers, only 15 per cent of people were engaged at work. That means that an astronomical 85 per cent of people were unhappy in their jobs”.

Average professional job tenure in Australia from 2000 to 2022 has consistently sat at around 3 to 3.5 years. This means that people are changing employers roughly every three years. A recent PwC report on the Great Resignation, “What Workers Want: How to win the war on talent”, found that 38 per cent of Australian workers intend to leave their current employer during the next 12 months. Which is, guess what? A tenure of about 3 to 3.5 years. So, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

There is no Great Resignation; it’s just media doom and gloom being fed by consultants trying to sell more snake oil (anyone remember Y2K?).

So what’s really happening with jobs and people?

My simple explanation is this. During COVID, many people wanted to change jobs but chose not to do so because they felt the risk of change was too high. “What if I change jobs and then get COVID, but don’t have any accrued sick or annual leave?”. Or “What if I change jobs and then my new employer is negatively impacted by COVID and I end up getting made redundant?”

So they stayed in jobs longer than they would have normally because it was “a safe harbour in a storm”. Now that COVID is largely behind us, these people are resigning for new opportunities. COVID was just a bottleneck and now the employment market is returning to normal. The statistics prove this.

I know countless CEOs and business owners who have been able to retain all of their top performers both during and post-Covid. They have invested time and money into building their brands as Employers of Choice, and in maintaining a performance-based culture that encourages and rewards exceptional individual and team performance.

How does the younger generation feels about jobs?

When I finished university over 30 years ago, just finding a job was challenging. The mentality back then was to be loyal to your employer and work really hard, get married, buy a house, have some kids and live the “great Australian dream”. We worked in an office with our peers and bosses and benefitted from the culture and mentoring this enabled.

Many younger people now have vastly different goals, plus they may be working at least some of time from home. They may feel that with the cost of housing is so inflated, that home ownership is a pipedream. They have seen that their parents’ loyalty to their employers was rewarded with wide-scale redundancies during the GFC, Covid and other events. They are not getting the mentoring we did, because their bosses are often in a completely different location.

You don’t have to be a genius to realise that of course this is going to have an impact on retention. Great employers have realised this and are making efforts to adapt to the changing desires of their younger workforces.

A simple solution

Ask each of your employees individually to give you the three reasons why they work for you rather than someone else. What you will quickly realise is that everyone’s motivations are different. As long as their desires are reasonable and there is reciprocity (i.e. they do their job well), make sure you keep giving them what they want. Retention is not a “one size fits all” solution. Take the time to ask and listen and you will be delighted with the results.

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