Workers make a course correction
Some are changing tactics after pandemic year
In late May, Sarah Lynch pulled the rip cord.
The 31-year-old brand designer had been working at Coursera, the online education company, for five years. During the pandemic, a booming business in virtual learning meant Lynch was busier than ever — and sinking into burnout.
Then Coursera went public.
Like many workers on the upper levels of the income scale, whose savings have been buoyed by a bull market, Lynch found herself sitting on a financial cushion for the first time in her life thanks to her stock options.
“I recognize it’s extremely privileged to have this cushion now, but I can take the time off that I’ve really been wanting to,” Lynch said. “I don’t have another job lined up after this, and that’s like — I come from a workingclass background, you don’t just quit a job and not have another job.”
“I haven’t had a break in 10 years,” Lynch said, since she graduated in the recession, worked her way through a master’s degree and landed a good job. Now she’s rethinking her future: “Do I really want to burn myself out over and over again?”
Lynch is part of summer 2021’s hottest professional trend: quitting your job.
More than 3.9 million people quit in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, marking the highest quit rate — the ratio of people quitting their jobs to total employment — since the agency began collecting that information in 2000.
The number of job postings also hit a record high, with 695,000 more open positions than unemployed workers.
Workers in industries that typically have a high level of turnover, such as retail, warehousing and food service, quit in large numbers.
Professional and business services — a catch-all category that includes many of the country’s office jobs — saw the second-highest surge in quits, with 94,000 more workers leaving their jobs in April than in March.
Human resources experts say that the whitecollar workforce has multiple reasons to be eyeing the exits this summer.
Anthony Klotz, a professor of management at Texas A&M’s Mays Business School, has researched the psychology of quitting for much of his career.
He said the numbers point to pent-up demand for a change.
Brett Wells, director of people analytics at Perceptyx, a company that works with a number of Fortune 500 companies to survey employee opinion and sentiment, said his firm keeps close tabs on whether employees are thinking of quitting.
“When an employee tells you they’re going to leave, they do,” Wells said. “We’ve seen that spike, for a variety of reasons.”
The top reason for wanting to leave, Wells said, is the desire for flexibility, both in hours and the ability to work from home.
“That’s at the forefront as offices start to go back,” Wells said. “If organizations don’t meet those demands, we’re going to see people vote with their feet.”
“The good news is organizations are great at innovating, but they need to be as innovative in terms of how they manage and retain employees as they are in the core of their business,” said Texas A&M professor Klotz.