(How the Great Resignation will build more robust institutions through knowledge sharing across the world).
In furtherance of my article “HR as Marketers” published by the Business & Financial Times last year, we discussed the similarities of the labor market to the product market by taking a look at how HR plays the role of marketing in the labour market. It’s been a year, and I still receive reactions to further the discussion. So today, let’s take another dive. This time around trying to understand the effect of the Great Resignation as a competition driver in the labour market.
Since the mid-point of 2020, the ‘Great Resignation’ phenomenon has rapidly spread through the American, European, and African continents largely. For those who do not know, the great resignation is the ongoing trend of employees voluntarily leaving their jobs, from spring 2021 to the present. Major drivers recorded by Forbes include lack of career advancement opportunities, stress, low pay, lack of flexibility, and bad leadership, amongst others. This came after widespread job losses in the early months of the pandemic. According to Yahoo finance, this phenomenon “shocked economists and CEOs alike in the summer of 2021 when 4 million American workers started quitting their jobs every month”. But here is what is interesting, only about one-third of leavers left without another job lined up. What it means is more people are ‘JOB-SWITCHING’. So, the Great Resignation is more like the ‘Great reshuffle’ as people are leaving toxic, unsuitable environments to pursue personal peace and happiness. In response to this fact, data from the LinkedIn Survey showed a significant 300% rise in the demand for ‘recruiters’ between June 2020 to June 2021. Yes, this seems to be the trendy specialization in HR right now. Now, high job openings paired with high quits rates are leading to what Emsi Burning Glass senior economist, Ron Hetrick refers to as a game of musical chairs.
The good thing this ‘Great Reshuffle’ is doing is that it is spreading great talents across institutions which will in effect build better industries. In the article, How Amazon thinks about competition, published in the Harvard Business Review, Jeff Bezos speaks to the indispensable place of competition in driving business success, saying “In business, however, several competitors can do well. The most important thing for doing well against the competition is to be both robust and nimble.”
As companies continue to strive for the robust, the #employeeexperience is being improved. What the aftermath of the great resignation will be is the presence of more ‘empathetic, rewarding, empowering and flexible cultured organizations”. And this is what the world needs right now.
I mean for the benefit of competition, we poach people. Competition is a driver of growth and satisfaction. Years ago, remote working was the practice of a few, and virtual interviews are frowned upon, but today these are best practices. We’ll continue to find great lessons from the #greatresignation if we see how competition can build, not break us.