What’s the vaccine for the resignation pandemic?

As organisations come out of the darkness of the pandemic, blinking into the sun to face the ‘new’ working world, we’re seeing the impact of ‘The Great Resignation’. 

The phrase was used a lot in 2021 and demonstrated the very real impact of giving people the opportunity to refocus on what was truly important to them.  

The need for us all to band together and work from home to protect the NHS meant that we were all given the chance to take a proverbial breath and look again at what we value.  

In a lot of instances, this wasn’t aligned to what our employer thought, and so we decided to part ways. 

People realised that they didn’t necessarily need the funky office with the coffee machine the size of a small car. Instead, we found the value in the intangible – having breakfast with our children, being able to take the dog for a walk during our lunch break, spending the day in slippers. 

UK household savings in 2021 increased somewhere between 18 and 20%, largely from the restrictions that we experienced from the work commute, visiting pubs, restaurants and shops. Although this will no doubt have an impact on the economy (a storm we may yet have to weather), it means that some people no longer felt the financial pressure to work in a job that they didn’t find fulfilling. 

So, what do people want? They want honesty, a sense of connection and adding value, as well as the chance to develop themselves both personally and professionally. 

I see this especially in the work that I do with graduates and apprentices, who have coined the phrase ‘gradmin’ to describe the seemingly endless filling in of spreadsheets to keep them busy. 

Working from home has given people the ability to finish with one organisation on Friday, receive their new laptop over the weekend and begin their new role with a new organisation on Monday! 

Workplaces up and down the country are examining what their new ways of working will be in 2022, so how are you going to provide a working environment that is hard to walk away from?