‘Great Resignation’ or Great Dismissal? It’s time organisations take a more strategic approach to the future, to ensure management excellence and create talent pipelines to maintain it By Clinton Wingrove
september 2021 |
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period. Employees may not remember what a company may have offered in the contract when they joined, but their future plans with the company get affected he pandemic has by the behaviour of the brought about dramatic employer during a crisis. changes in the profesDespite leveraging the flexsional world, and numerible hours of remote work ous studies show that a large and using new collaborative number of employees intend tools, many employees did to leave their current employ- not feel valued, but isolated. ers and even switch indusThere was a lack of clartries to do so. A study by ity about what was expected Monster.com put the figure of them, they did not feel at over 90% - the so-called, trusted, and were anxious “Great Resignation.” about their functions. The Given the recent high employee-employer relalevels of unemployment; tionship of trust and loyalty given that employers rapidly shattered into pieces. implemented remote workThis ‘emotional distance’ ing; why are so many consid- is still being provoked and ering leaving? Questions amplified by the virtual arise on the factors driving platforms – ironically, mass resignation despite the what enabled remote workflexibility offered by remote ing. Through diminuand hybrid work structure tion of body language and that has been in place since facial expressions, and the last year. replacement of one-to-one What an employer casual conversations with perceives of its employees more formal one-to-many is revealed during a crisis virtual meetings, relation-
ships are rapidly weakening and cognitive disconnect is increasing. Organisations must work hard and fast to recover the lost faith. While fair pay is still one of the key considerations, employees’ needs and demands are now more complex and volatile. Climate change, pandemic, the DI&E agenda, and other global issues have broadened their expectations. Today, individuals seek to work with organisations that prioritise mutual respect. As me and Dr Marciano revealed in our book, ‘Super Teams’ ‘employees want to feel respected’. The ‘Great Resignation’ issue does not lie solely with the employees. Too many organisations have dismissed the need to invest seriously in ensuring management excellence –such as frequent one-to-one interactions, disciplined risk identification and management, and rigorous and continuous reviews of the working process. HR departments of such organisations deserve the credit, along with those who have stepped up and provided tactical solutions for circumstances, that the line management had not prepared for.
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