People have been talking about The Great Resignation for a while now.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the employment landscape has been precarious, and many people have experienced serious disruption of their financial situations.
In the beginning, many people were furloughed or laid off. Depending on the sector, some, like hospitality, were faced with capacity limits and closures, while others saw demand for products drop. The workforce has experienced a lot of upheaval, and as a result, many people have been rethinking their careers and employment situations. And a lot of people have been quitting their jobs.
Millions of North Americans have, in fact, quit their jobs since the spring of 2020. A record 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs in November 2021, the highest monthly number reported by the bureau since it began publishing this data in December of 2000. The numbers might not be quite as dramatic in Canada, however, there are those who say that we have seen large numbers of people quitting, and one has only to look at certain industries to see how understaffed they have become. One might have noticed fast food locations shuttering earlier in the day due to being short-staffed, for example, making it difficult to argue that there isn’t an issue.
What factors are driving The Great Resignation?
When it comes to what is driving The Great Resignations, it depends on who you ask and what research you look at, but some of the factors include:
Compensation
Toxic workplace culture
Burnout
Mental health issues
Lack of advancement opportunities
Work-life balance
Bad managers
Let’s take a look at these seven of the factors driving The Great Resignation.
Compensation
Industries seeing the highest levels of attrition include those where pay is traditionally lower and/or there is less job security and greater risk of exposure to the COVID-19 virus due to more interpersonal contact with other people. According to the Washington Post, the industries where the most people are quitting include leisure and hospitality, retail and healthcare, and nondurable goods manufacturing.
The results of a survey released in January 2022 indicate that most people who are quitting their jobs are doing so for better pay and benefits. That survey found that 74% of full-time workers and 51% of part-time workers are planning to quit their jobs this year. Another survey by Zety found that low pay ranked the number one reason people had either quit their jobs or were considering leaving.
In many places, workers aren’t earning enough to pay their bills and support their families and, if the option is available, they’re going to try to make more money.
Toxic workplace culture
The Washington Post’s data about attrition by industry comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Separate data from workforce analytics company, Revelio Labs, suggests that the highest attrition levels are in completely other industries, listing “apparel retail, management consulting, internet, and enterprise software” as those with the highest quit rates and places food & beverage near the bottom. A report from MIT that draws on these numbers argues that “toxic culture” rather than other, seemingly more obvious factors.
That survey also pulls from online employer reviews to determine causes of attrition and states that “corporate culture” is a more reliable predictor of attrition than compensation.
While these reports suggest different things, we can probably agree that, while compensation is one factor driving The Great Resignation, it isn’t the only one.
Toxic workplace cultures are defined in the survey as those with “abusive leadership, a cutthroat environment, or discrimination and harassment.”
Burnout
Healthcare workers are quitting because of burnout. Hospitals are understaffed, and workers are being driven to the point of exhaustion. Canada may be facing an unprecedented nursing shortage driven by factors including “an aging workforce, poor salaries. and the pull of higher-paying international jobs.”
Hospitality is another hard- hit sector. About 700,000 North American hospitality workers have quit their jobs on average every month in the past year. Tourism and food and beverage have, of course, suffered a great deal, and employees have dealt with a lot of uncertainty, while many businesses struggle to stay alive.
Pre-pandemic hospitality was already known for pushing its employees to work long hours, often for low wages. More recently, lower occupancy rates and reduced revenue combined with employee attrition can mean far fewer staff being pushed to cover more ground.
According to The Economist, dissatisfaction is especially high in service roles, where hybrid work is not possible, and employees rate the hospitality sector as one of the worst for work-life balance. And workers report that dealing with angry customers and enforcing health mandates have not made life easier. Moreover, the uncertainty of shift work and the threat of layoffs can add to this stress.
While some companies have raised wages, this might not be enough to combat the issue. Forbes reports that a survey of more than 30,000 jobseekers found that 60% would not consider working in a restaurant, bar, hotel, or other hospitality jobs. And 70% of those people said nothing would convince them to work in hospitality. Only 26% said higher pay would incentivize them to change their minds.
Mental health issues
The pandemic has taken its toll on everyone’s mental health, particularly in sectors where employees don’t feel supported by their employers, who fail to prioritize their safety.employers and don’t feel that their safety has been taken seriously. This is, of course, linked to both burnout and toxic workplace cultures, among other things.
As mentioned, customer- facing employees and workers in sectors like manufacturing often find themselves in the positions of having to enforce mandates on irate customers and/or facing the risk of getting sick themselves. Then there are the sickness and losses people and their family members have faced.
The World Economic Forum reports that only two- thirds of respondents in a recent survey said their employers cared about their mental wellbeing and that this is leading some workers to look for jobs elsewhere. One- third of workers said that they were considering changing companies for the sake of their mental health.
Lack of advancement opportunities
Plenty of research over several years has found that a lack of advancement opportunities is one of the biggest reasons people leave their jobs. For example, the Work Institute found in its 2020 Retention Report that, for the tenth consecutive year, lack of career development opportunities was the number one reason employees quit their jobs in 2020. The Institute’s 2021 Report lists the broader “career” reasons as the number one cause people are leaving their jobs.
This was an existing issue before the pandemic, and companies being thrown into a world of uncertainty has exacerbated the problem, with expansion slowing and decreased revenue at many companies.
Nobody likes to feel like they are running to stand still. We want to know that we are moving forward and advancing in our careers. If we don’t, we will move on to move up.
Work-life balance
A 2021 survey found that better pay was the most commonly cited reason for leaving a job but that the option to work remotely, along with less stress and better work-life balance, were also important factors.
Another survey found that more than half of workers said the pandemic had forced them to rethink their work-life balance. And yet another found that more than 30% of workers said they would take a pay-cut in exchange for better work-life balance, with parents willing to take the biggest cut.
This is no surprise, as school and daycare closures have had a dramatic impact on parents, particularly mothers. The Pew Research Centre reported that 2.4 million US women left the workforce between February 2020 and February 2021. One of the major factors behind this exodus of women from the workforce is the need to care for children at home.
Bad managers
Bad managers are another reason people have been quitting their jobs for as long as people have been tracking this sort of thing.
There’s a saying: “People don’t leave jobs, they leave bosses.”
Surveys have found that somewhere between 40% - 60% of people have quit a job in the past because of a bad boss, more than 80% might do so, and a third of people have considered leaving for that reason. That’s not to say someone will stay forever in a job in which they’re underpaid, but if their manager is awesome, they might stay longer than they would otherwise.
While the pandemic didn’t create bad bosses or a new reason for quitting, people might be quitting in increasing numbers because the last two years have forced us to re-evaluate our lives and what is important. And, when weighing these factors, some people might decide that life is too short to put up with the same boss they were willing to tolerate before.
