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The Great Resignation

• November 12, 2021

A lot of people feel like they are stuck in their jobs, with no true purpose but no motivation to look for something new, or maybe they just don’t know where to start with the whole process.

It is usually best to not just quit your job without any prior thought or planning, unless you are in a very good financial situation this will be a very hard challenge.

However, there is now the sudden boom in people leaving their jobs, a term I’m sure you have heard recently called ‘The Great Resignation’ but what does it actually entail?

Well, according to monster.co.uk, 52% of Brits want to quit their jobs though usually (with 72% of these people) it will take up to 2 years to actually follow through on this desire. Based on their research the majority of people are wanting to quit because they believe they deserve a higher salary and so look for jobs that will offer that. The next two reasons are because they need a new challenge or are, quite simply, bored.

As well as this research, Randstad UK found an even bigger percentage of people wanting to leave for a new role! They surveyed 6,000 people and found that 69% of them were confident that they would be in a new role within a few months and 24% were planning to change at some point between three and six months. Randstad stated that they would normally expect around 11% of workers to move jobs every year - so this is quite the sudden increase!

A lot of the reasoning for this sudden sway in people wanting to quit their jobs is down to burnout caused by the pandemic, meaning a lot of people feel overworked for what they are being paid to do. This alongside living through a pandemic would ultimately be exhausting and is enough to push people into leaving their current vocations.

As a result of this companies may be forced into considering handing out pay rises for staff alongside offering up further help that would help prevent this from happening in the future. This is key for the companies as the loss of each employee could result in up to £25,000! So, in order to save the company money it might be best to spend more on those extremely valuable employees.

Although living through the pandemic was awful for the world, there is a glimmer of light for some people who have now managed to see their work life from a few steps back. With the sudden rise in people working from home and trends in topics based around ‘work life balance’ meant that people had an open opportunity to assess their work lives and evaluate how healthy it was for them to stay working the way that they had been prior to the pandemic.

People learned tips from one another on how best to handle their burnout, with overworking often being the root cause of the issue. With a deadly virus going around, people were reminded that life is simply too short to make yourself unhappy with little free time for your job. So, people want to put a stop to it and ensure that they get the best out of their working situation for them.

A lot of people stayed in roles that they were unhappy with during the pandemic, likely due to the inability to get a new job when so many companies were being forced to make their staff members redundant as they were not making as much money as they would have been pre-pandemic. Now that the working world is beginning to heal, the opportunity to find somewhere new is now a huge possibility.

Companies will now need to listen very closely to their workers if they want their staff to stay loyal and stick with their company. People have been feeling trapped and unheard in their workplaces, feeling as though they are undervalued and that the company is not treating them right. Bosses will need to do whatever they can to ensure these workers are being listened to and their needs are being acted on. A company will not be successful and will not last if their employees feel overlooked by them, they will simply seek a better role for them in a company with a better staff reputation.