What we're getting wrong about the 'Great Resignation'

Workers are quitting their jobs. A lot of them. So many, in fact, we’re still smack in the middle of the so-called Great Resignation. In the US, the Labor Department revealed that 4. 3 million Americans left their jobs in August 2021, or about 2. 9% of the national workforce – the highest number on record. In the UK, the number of open jobs surpassed 1 million for the first time ever in August. There are several reasons why workers are walking away – poor working conditions, fears of contracting Covid-19 and existential epiphanies among them – and researchers are discovering more as they continue to collect and mine data. “I do believe there are thousands of individuals who are just fed up. They are overworked, they feel underappreciated, ” says Jay Zagorsky, senior lecturer in markets, public policy and law at Questrom School of Business, Boston University, US. “Because many workers are in high-wage industries and are working incredibly long hours, there is a significant number of people who are just quitting. ” And these departures are “really something that could have lasting change”, says Anthony Klotz, associate professor of management at Mays Business School at Texas A&M University. Klotz is also the academic who coined the term ‘Great Resignation’, and predicted the mass worker exodus in May 2021. But he and other experts say we’re missing nuances around the impact of people quitting in droves. There may not be as many workers resigning as we think, and perhaps not for the reasons we believe. They suggest we should be looking at the sweeping generalizations about the Great Resignation with a degree of skepticism, both in how we view this wave of departures and how we can expect it to affect the workforce going forward.