The Great Resignation: What does this mean for the future of work?

Is it just a great exaggeration or is it great news for workers?

You’ve probably been hearing about this trend called the Great Resignation happening across the US, unprecedented levels of people are voluntarily leaving their jobs in response to COVID-19. This trend is happening in the UK and it’s also predicted to play out in Australia, in March 2022. Surprisingly I’m already starting to see the seeds of this first-hand in Australia and it has left me wondering, how will this shape the future of work.

Why are people suddenly quitting? One general theory is that we’re living through a fundamental shift in the relationship between employees and bosses that could have profound implications for the future of work. Employers and employees have had to be extremely flexible during the pandemic. This has allowed for new realities that used to be unthinkable. That flexibility and freedom are being seized upon by employees who have seen the light and have decided that flexible working is for them. They’re willing to quit their jobs if they can’t get it.

The Great Resignation sparks optimism for workers. Derek Thompson, writer for The Atlantic writes “The Great Resignation, is literally, great. For workers, that is.” For working professionals, there is optimism and hope for the future as they’ll have a lot more options and negotiating power. However, it’s not so great news for businesses as resignations lead to high turnover costs and business disruptions. Businesses will need to be quick enough to snap up talent and strategic enough to retain their most valued people.

However, some believe that the “Great Resignation is Greatly Exaggerated,” as stated in Forbes by Jack Kelly. Matthew Taylor, a British former political strategist and current Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation, also shares this opinion. Taylor alluded that this may be overblown, in his interview hosted by RSA (Royal Society of Arts). In the interview, Taylor mentions there have always been debates about work. Those debates generally shift and having watched these debates over the years, they all tend to be overblown.

For several years, there was this whole debate about automation and job loss. For a while, it was the talk of the town in conferences and there was an influx of books related to this topic. It was common thought that work was likely to dry up because of robotics and AI. However, we know now that technology has an effect on work but there’s absolutely no reason that it would lead to less work.

Then there was this kind of flurry of interest in precarious work, work which is poorly paid, unprotected, and insecure. It was thought that this was the nature of things in the future. However, it turns out that yes there has been a growth in certain forms of precarious work but not in all forms of precarious work. It’s not quite as we expected.

This phenomenon of the Great Resignation could just be another one of these things that are overblown. Although, in those other instances, it didn’t include a global pandemic. Whether or not you believe this phenomenon is a great exaggeration, you can’t deny that something is happening on a deeper level. The pandemic, on a global level, has given people the opportunity to reflect on what’s important to them. It has sparked workers’ hunger for greater flexibility and meaning in their jobs. It has shone a light on just how much of the economy runs on a cycle of dissatisfying driving ambition, driving consumption, which leads to disastrous results for human happiness and also to the biosphere. Pandemics reshape society at fundamental levels and there’s a fundamental shift that’s happening in the nature of work. What does this mean for the future of work? Perhaps to answer this, it would help to understand what work means to us and where does that meaning stems from historically.

What does work mean to us and where does that meaning stem from?

In a sense when we talk about work today, we tend to assume we’re talking about paid employment or self-employment. However, there are different meanings to work.

We see work as a means to provide for human basic needs. Prehistorically in the earliest stages of human civilisation, work was confined to simple tasks involving the most basic of human needs, food, child care, and shelter. A division of labour likely resulted when some individuals showed proficiency in particular tasks, such as hunting animals or gathering plants for food.

Fundamentally the concept of work emerges in the classical world as describing the things that we have to do to subsist. It’s not about paid employment. It’s generally associated with the rich and powerful wanting to avoid having to do certain tasks and that’s why they had slaves to do that work necessary for subsistence. In the ancient world, there was a large-scale systematic organisation of work, the emergence of social classes, and widespread specialisation. With these distinct economic and social classes, members of each class occupied a certain place in the organisation of work. This is possibly why we draw connections with our work to our social status, to our identity.

Then you have the concept that has grown since industrialisation, in particular around this kind of paid employment. From the 16th to the 18th century was the proliferation of industry, it was the genesis of the factory system. The organisation of commerce also changed rapidly during this period. New instruments in the fields of banking, insurance, and export marketing offered an efficient means of making capital available for investment in industrial enterprises.

We also have this idea of life’s work. This can be traced back to religious themes which are to do with work as a sense of vocation, a sense of how we impact the world, and the difference we want to make. Then we have this idea of work as a kind of fulfillment of how we express ourselves. It’s an important ideal as we spend a third of our adult life at work. Wouldn’t we want it to be part of who we are as human beings, wouldn’t we want it to be a place of self-expression? That sense of meaning and notions of autonomy and growth are all part of that.

What does this mean for the future of work?

The Great Resignation hails a new golden age for worker power and more and more people are demanding ‘good work’.

What is ‘good work’? Good work entails a lot of those intrinsic meanings that were mentioned before.

• It provides a sense of fulfillment, meaning, and purpose
• It allows an element of autonomy and control over one’s work
• It encourages and supports good health, including a work-life balance with genuine flexibility
• It provides realistic scope for growth with a prospect of getting better
• It provides the ability to fulfill human basic needs
• It balances that power between workers and employers, giving that sense of feeling valued and respected
• It’s fair and decent with safe working conditions

What stops us from achieving ‘good work’? Former political strategist, Matthew Taylor believes the reason is associated with what he calls the three C’s; Consumerism, Control, and Competition.

Consumerism
Consumerism is part of the reason we don’t aspire to good work because we have come to believe that our identity is much more fully expressed as a consumer than as a producer. Henry Ford is a critical figure because we associate him with the idea of intense control on the conveyor belt or the assembly line. Ford is significant because the deal he does with his workers is you will work in a pretty intensive way, you’ll be very tightly managed, you won’t have much autonomy but hey I’m going to pay you twice as much as my competitors pay you and by the way my car is so cheap you can buy it. This is where we forfeit quality of work and autonomy. This is the consumerist deal we make which is hey work sucks but at least you can buy stuff. That’s not a great deal, and it’s an even worse deal for people who get so badly paid they can’t even afford human basic needs.

Control
The other c is ‘control’, most work is premised on the idea that the deal is I pay you and you get told what to do. It involves the treatment by other people in those hierarchical situations. It denies people dignity, self-expression, and autonomy.

Competition
Then the final c is ‘competition’. Competition is the maximisation of profit, the maximisation of market share. Nobody lies on their deathbed saying at least I maximised shareholder value. Competition is another reason why we don’t enjoy our work because we’re told what matters is competitive success and actually, that doesn’t matter to people. That’s not something we’re going to lie on our deathbed worrying about. There needs to be a stronger motivation than getting better than your competitor or slightly boosting your market share.

What we might see in the future is a rocky road for organisations. The Great Resignation will pressure organisations to provide good quality work to their employees in order to ride out this wave of resignations. To tackle this fundamental shift in the relationship between employees and bosses they’ll need to address those 3 core issues. It will be a struggle for some organisations as some are held together by control. Some leaders are strongly animated by competition and some people think work is something you suffer in order to be able to consume.

There will need to be a shift away from how we view our identity as a consumerist. There will need to be less of this command and control, less of a hierarchical structure to give people autonomy. Organisations will need to be clear about their purpose and not just their competitive success. On a deeper societal level, this unending economic growth shouldn’t be a defining feature of what it is to be human. We need to diminish our unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth and replace it with something more intrinsically meaningful.

As Thompson nicely puts it, ‘making predictions is hard, not only because the future is hard to see, but also because the present is hard to grasp’. Maybe the Great Resignation is just a statistical fluke that won’t make much of an impact. Or perhaps it has exposed something fundamentally broken in the system and it’s leading a profound shift for the future of work.