'The Great Resignation’ is coming. So what can you do to prevent a mass exodus in your organisation?
Workers are steadily burning out and walking out, as the Great Resignation makes its way to New Zealand. But there are lessons to be learned from abroad - and opportunities to dial up purpose and play, autonomy and social connection, in order to encourage people to stay.
(Photo by Keagan Henman from Unsplash)
Sophia* is wondering about the sustainability of her situation. She’s a consultant in Auckland, New Zealand, and she feels herself burning out in the face of high workloads and “crazy” deadlines, with little social support. As she puts it, “With lockdown, the team communication and connection are getting a lot worse. In the office you have a chat with people and some breaks, and I can walk up to my manager if I need help - but at home you have none of that. It’s difficult to deal with the hard parts of work, without the good parts.”
Meanwhile, Melissa* is over it. She’s been working at home in the UK for more than a year, in a creative organisation that hires passionate people, and exchanges that passion for long hours and limited pay. Her role feels purposeful, but she no longer wants it to encroach on every other aspect of her life, and to be the defining pillar in her identity. She’s plotting her next move.
While these two tales are geographically a world apart, they tell a similar story. Workers are steadily burning out, and walking out, as the Great Resignation makes its way to New Zealand.
Recently published data from Employment Hero indicates that close to 40% of Kiwis are planning to look for a new job in the next 6 months, and close to 20% are already looking. Likewise, AUT’s Wellbeing at Work survey found that around 46% of Kiwi employees have ‘high turnover intentions’.
The Great Resignation was first noted in the US, when a record number of workers resigned in April 2021, then again in July and August. In August alone, 4.3 million US workers left their job, as reported by Forbes.
At present, the New Zealand data indicates that people are leaving their roles in search of better pay, with churn concentrated most heavily amongst labourers and factory workers, health and support services, and sales / customer service / retail roles.
But the Great Resignation isn’t just about the dollars. Job-related anxiety is on the rise amongst Kiwi employees and managers alike, according to AUT Wellbeing at Work researcher, Professor Jared Haar. We are likely to see an increased prevalence of burnout and turnover, as people experience high mental arousal from work, and low levels of pleasure.
So New Zealand workers feel stressed out and underpaid. Overworked and underappreciated. What’s the cure? And is there anything we can learn from the experiences of others, overseas?
We’re seeking purpose and play
The concept of purpose at work has been topical for some time – since at least 2010, when Simon Sinek gave his soon-to-be viral TED talk on finding your organisational ‘why’. The talk has now been viewed more than 56 million times.
Covid has ultimately served as a bit of a wingman for purpose. As Jack Kelly from Forbes puts it, “Covid-19 . . . forced us to face reality. We only have one short life to live, and we don’t want to waste it on doing something we don’t like. Instead, people are reimagining their work-lives and seeking out careers that offer the chance to make a difference in the world”.
Organisations will more successfully retain staff if leaders can articulate a clear and compelling purpose. Ideally, that collective purpose will also align with the individual aspirations of each team member, as Diversity Works CEO Maretha Smit explained, in a recent article for HRD New Zealand.
But no matter how passionate you are about your job, and how purposeful it may be, we aren’t designed to work without rest. And it’s incredibly difficult to carve out time for rest and play, when organisational workloads don’t flex to account for people’s specific work situations, and when so many of us are working from home and wearing a multitude of hats - parent, teacher, playmate, cook, counsellor...
In these conditions, senior leaders and managers need to focus on managing the workload of their team members, according to US burnout expert, Christina Maslach in Time Magazine. It’s no longer enough to focus on individual solutions to the collective challenge of burnout and lack of play.
We want autonomy and social connection
Commentators and academics such as Adam Grant assert that the Great Resignation is being driven by people seeking greater flexibility and autonomy about when and how they work. And employees are understandably keen to hold onto some of the benefits that lockdowns delivered – including commute-free days, reduced managerial oversight, less presenteeism, and the chance to be assessed based on outcomes delivered and value produced, rather than simply ‘hours on the job’.
Autonomy and flexibility are already recognised as key building blocks of thriving at work. For instance, in his book ‘Drive’, behavioural scientist Dan Pink asserts that autonomy is a core tenet of intrinsic motivation, and a survey by LinkedIn and Citigroup found that nearly half of employees would forgo a 20% raise in order to have more control over how they work (cited here).
But just because we want autonomy over how we work doesn’t mean we want to be left alone in our work. Humans need connection to others – without it, feelings of loneliness and isolation skyrocket, and loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Or to quote a less scientific source, my dad would often say “It’s called a company for a reason”.
Flexible working can make it harder to connect with your team, potentially eroding the sense of camaraderie that we enjoy in each other’s physical presence, and undermining psychological safety – or the feeling that we will be accepted and not judged for asking a question, raising a concern, or sharing a mistake.
In the current context, managers will need to be intentional about building and sustaining community - in ways that don’t make employees feel controlled. It’s a tricky balance, and one that’s likely to be found via trial, error and adjustment. There could be value in short, voluntary team rituals, such as an afternoon quiz. Or organisations could establish an ‘outreach by default’ policy, in which managers check in with their team once every one to two weeks. Because employees may feel their manager is too busy to provide assistance and support – but a short, regular catch-up goes a long way towards keeping people in the fold, and it takes far less time than recruiting and training up a new staff member. As for how to help people feel supported, during these regular chats? That’s where empathy comes in.
Empathy is the leadership superpower that we need right now
Empathetic leadership may just be the ‘Secret Sauce’ that prevents a mass exodus of employees, according to research by EY published recently in Forbes magazine. The study of 1,000 employees found that 54% left their last job because “their boss wasn’t empathetic to their struggles at work” and 49% said their employer was “unsympathetic to their personal lives”.
Empathetic leaders view their people as just that – people, with complex lives and changing needs, rather than automatons who are consistently productive and effective. In short, empathetic leaders know that context matters, and they seek to establish an enabling context in which people can do good work, even through a global pandemic.
That sounds like a big ask – but the best place to start is to ask. In the Time article noted above, Jennifer Moss, author of The Burnout Epidemic, recommends that managers ask their people three questions each week. “How are you? What were your highs and lows this week? And what can I do to make next week easier?”. If managers genuinely ask, and listen, and seek to drive change within an enabling environment that has been established by senior leaders, then work contexts will get better over time. And employees will be more likely to stay.
We can’t afford to ignore wellbeing
The wellbeing of workers is critically important – to avoid The Great Resignation, but also more generally. When workers are doing well, businesses and economies do well too. Or as AUT researcher Professor Jared Haar put it to Stuff, “Holding on to current employees and looking after their wellbeing is key to keeping the Kiwi workforce, economy and society at large as healthy as possible in these pandemic times”.
* Names changed