Beating The Big Quit

People are quitting. In droves.

Walking out voluntarily. Blue-collar and white. Large companies and small. Start-ups. Established firms. Across all industries. Tech and Transportation. Health care. Hospitality. Food. And Finance.

The Great Resignation is upon us. The Big Quit. 4.3 million workers left their jobs last month. The highest number ever recorded. A Gallup survey found 48% of the US working population is actively job searching. Nearly half of all workers. Actively searching. For a new job.

“The pandemic and the rise of remote work have changed the way we view our lives and the world,” notes UC Berkeley Economist, Ulrike Malmendier.

While the reasons for the departures are debatable, the implications are clear; this is no blip. No short-term anomaly. The Great Resignation is a seismic shift. A profound transformation. Of how workers view work. And their workplace experience.

And worst of all, “Resignations are occurring at alarming rates for tenured, long-term employees,” notes researcher Dr. Andrea Derler.

Our best people. Quitting. Ditching the firm. For somewhere better. A clear message to those of us leading teams. Update our management practices and company culture. Or pay the price.

“In the pandemic, people have talked a lot about essential workers,” writes Laszlo Bock, former HR exec at Google, “but we actually treat them as essential jobs. We treat the workers as quite replaceable.”

Replaceable?! Noooo. Not us. We love our people. And treat them well. Decent pay. Lots of perks. Flex schedules. Hip offices. Our firm is a Values oriented, fully inclusive, completely candid, utterly transparent, totally cool place to work. Check, check and check.

We will admit to driving our people hard. Maybe even to the brink of burnout. Because everything at the firm is urgent. Mission-critical. An emergency. Thus, we expect our personnel to be always on. 24/7. Meanwhile, Team members spend all day on a hamster-wheel of distractions, interruptions, and mind-numbing meetings (or Zoom calls). Forcing them to spend all night doing their actual work.

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