Longer pandemic sparks ‘great resignation’
During his 25-year career as a Minneapolis broadcaster, Eric Perkins covered all the pro sports teams, the Super Bowl, the Olympics. He playfully pitched with the Twins, dunked with the T-wolves’ mascot, fell off skateboards and floating logs.
But Perkins’ schedule — typically 2 p.m. until nearly midnight, plus traveling for road games — made it hard to spend time with his wife and kids. Working from home during the pandemic, he realized his “life/ work balance” was out of whack. “I was missing too much of their lives,” he said. “I asked myself, ‘Is what you’re doing worth it in the long run?’”
Perkins announced his resignation in July.
The pandemic has led to millions of Americans losing their jobs, but a large number also are choosing to leave voluntarily. In April, nearly 4 million people, or 2.8 percent of the workforce, resigned. That’s the highest onemonth “quit-rate” in decades.
The growing national “great resignation,” as the trend was recently described by Prof. Anthony Klotz of Texas A&M University, is due partly to pentup desires to quit that were put on hold last year. But it may also be emerging from employee epiphanies during the long lockdown about their workload, feeling undervalued or a re-evaluation of what they want from their lives.
The resignations are reaching all the way to the top of the professional heap. Even those with enviable dream jobs are now seeing their work — and themselves — through a very different lens.
Workers have resigned for many pandemic-related reasons, from the stress and risk of front-line roles to the need to supervise children. For some, COVIDrelated downtime and flexibility spurred them to become entrepreneurs or, like Meg Steuer, leave jobs they formerly loved.
Before the pandemic, Steuer found her job promoting the region’s startup community so energizing that she didn’t mind attending as many as six work-related evening events a week. But working alone at her kitchen table in St. Louis Park, Minn., Steuer questioned why she’d let her job overtake so much of her life and identity.
“Our mental health, physical health, emotional health, and personal lives are equally deserving of our time and attention as our work — and we live in a society where that’s sometimes hard to remember,” she said.
Simone Biles’ decision to pull out of Olympic competition might serve as a symbol of the great resignation, said Andy Challenger of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based outplacement and executive coaching firm. At a moment of peak opportunity, Biles listened to her inner compass and, for the sake of self-preservation, drew a boundary.
Challenger said his company’s recent survey of human resources professionals suggests that remote workers’ mass return to the office will be a reckoning of employers’ and employees’ differing expectations.
Companies overwhelmingly reported that they were not only having trouble filling roles but were concerned about an exodus of talent, he said. More than 80 percent experienced pushback from their workers about returning to the office full time. Flexibility was the top reason behind employees’ exits.
Burnout was cited as workers’ second most common reason for quitting, Challenger noted.
To University of Minnesota sociology Prof. Phyllis Moen and author of “Overload,” the “great reassessment” taking place as employees rethink how they’re willing to work and what they’re willing to do creates the possibility of redesigning work — if employers change outdated mind-sets. Foremost is focusing performance assessments on contributions vs. mere presence, Moen said.