The problem with ‘The Great Resignation’ isn’t that lots of people are quitting their jobs.
It’s that the wrong people are quitting.
It’s the workers, not the bosses. It’s NOT the people who thought it was OK to :
- bully people
- keep insisting they do more with less resources
- pay them less than their worth (sometimes, to pay them less than they could live on)
- make unreasonable last minute demands on them
- refuse reasonable requests to change their schedule
- value presenteeism above doing a good job
- discriminate against people ‘not like them’
- reward craven sycophancy
- tell employees to leave their private life at home
- fail to show any compassion
- punish those who spoke up
- ridicule people in public
- impose rules they didn’t follow themselves
- reward themselves at obscene multiples of what they paid their employees
- insist people return to the office without any reasonable justification
- insist they work through the pandemic without taking action to reduce the risk of catching a deadly disease
- subject them to intrusive surveillance
- continually chip away at their benefits
- seek to avoid their responsibility to their employees
- fail to show due care
- ratchet the levels of stress on people to get more out of them
- gaslight them into giving their discretionary effort for free
- always put cost-cutting above the comfort and interests of employees
- ask employees to go against their own morals for the benefit of the organisation
- routinely undermine their self esteem to keep them cowed
- behave like arseholes
People are resigning from bad bosses and toxic cultures.
And the people who are those bad bosses, who created and sustained these toxic cultures and normalised these bad practices, are still there.
That’s the problem. They are the cause of the the problem and they are still there.
And for some organisations, that’s going to prove terminal.