The Great Resignation is real! We’ve never had a job market in the 21st Century like the one we have today!
The Great Resignation
Lately, it seems like everywhere I go I see “Now Hiring” signs. When I meet with other business leaders, they talk about how many open positions they are struggling to fill and how difficult it is to retain people. Every time I look at the news, I see a story about “The Great Resignation.”
Given the tendency of people to exaggerate, I decided to go straight to the source and download the raw data directly from the U.S. government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Wow! People aren’t exaggerating. We really are living in an unprecedented moment in today’s labor market.
The charts below show the stats for the BLS’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for the Total Nonfarm workforce over the past 21 years. As you can see, we’ve never had so many people quitting and so many job openings. Today there are 25% more job openings than there are unemployed people! No wonder people are having so much difficult filling empty positions!
Solution?
So, what’s the solution? I’m not sure, but before we get to solutions I think it’s important to first understand the problem. Employees want, and deserve, more from their job than just a paycheck. They want to be part of something important. They want to work with people they respect and who respect them. They want to learn and grow and advance in their career. And they want a life outside of work!
It’s time to start seeing our employees as real people with hopes and dreams, families, hobbies, and commitments outside of work. For too long, too many employers have treated their employees as things. On company P&Ls, we call things “assets” and people “expenses.”
Peter Drucker taught, “The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity.” To attract and retain employees and excel as an organization in today’s environment, you need great leaders who can create an environment where people feel inspired, know what to do, and are unleashed to find creative solutions! As Stephen R. Covey said, “You can buy a person’s hand, but you can’t buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can’t buy his brain. That’s where his creativity is, his ingenuity, his resourcefulness.”
Organizations that learn to see people as assets to be nourished, supported, and encouraged will find it much easier to attract and retain employees. More importantly, they will find their organization performing at a much higher level when people are filled with creative excitement and volunteering their highest efforts towards a noble purpose they believe in!
