According to Inc. Magazine, the Great Resignation is officially a thing.
People quitting their jobs in previously unheard numbers, etc.
Which is another way of saying, people are *reassessing* in unheard numbers.
The guy who quits his waiter job to go into real estate. The lady who drops out of academia to go work on Wall Street. The other lady who quits Wall Street to go work in academia.
This is nothing new. As a species, we are always reassessing our situation, because we live in a world that is always changing i.e. a world where constant reassessment is appropriate.
It’s just this time, thanks to a combination of COVID and the Internet, a lot more people are now doing it than before.
Yes, the effects on society will be huge. The good news is, by the time the changes actually happen properly, as with the Internet, as with electricity and the automobile, it’ll seem so normal we will already be well acclimated to the changes i.e life will mostly continue as before.
Perhaps if we stop thinking of it so much as The Great “Resignation”, but rather as The Great “Reassessment”, we’d have a better understanding of the root cause. Yes, COVID played a big part, but human nature played an even bigger one.
What does all this mean for leaders and employers?
People have always and will increasingly look to their jobs to supply meaning and narrative to their lives (i.e. more than just a paycheck), and the companies that win will be the ones who can help them do exactly that.
And that can only be done at scale at the cultural level.
