The great resignation: How to decide if you should love or leave your job
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The pandemic upended the world of work – no matter what job you did, it got you.
If you were a frontline healthcare worker, you found yourself fighting an unknown and deadly disease. If your job was in retail or hospitality, you were suddenly out of work. And if your job was office-based, overnight you were expected to adapt and do it from home. It was a time of on-the-spot urgent decision-making: how to make work ‘work’ as a global health crisis unfolded.
Chartered work and organisational psychologist Kathleen Halligan says the pandemic created major turmoil around work, from frontline workers moving into hotel rooms to protect loved ones, to the suddenly unemployed wondering whether to get a new hobby or pivot career-wise. “And for office-based people asked to work from home, it was about doing this while also perhaps caring for children and elderly parents.”
Now, though still plagued by the pandemic, our gaze for several months has been fixed firmly on a post-Covid world. And many in the workforce, fresh from having their world turned upside-down, are seeking to right themselves career-wise in new ways.
What has been globally dubbed ‘the great resignation’ is playing out in Ireland too. Dublin-based recruitment consultants Sigmar has offices across Ireland and is present in all professional sectors. It reported a record-high number of job placements for July to September, up 44% on the same period in 2020 and up 20% on 2019 figures for that period. Job orders – employers seeking to fill vacancies – were trending higher in the first half of October than in any single full month in Sigmar’s 20-year history.
Sigmar founding director Robert Mac Giolla Phádraig believes the request to return to offices in September caused employees to “revolt”.
He says job areas where remote work is viable are experiencing greater movement – sectors like IT, financial services and life sciences. “Remote working has opened up a world of new opportunity no longer bound by location. This is creating significant churn in the professional skills market. This last 18 months has seen employees demand greater flexibility.”
Undoubtedly, working from home hasn’t always been easy. Sure we had zero commutes and on-tap coffee, but there was also Zoom fatigue – and back-to-back meetings, giving us no reprieve. “In the office you had some kind of break or definition – walking to another room, chatting with somebody between meetings. At home you clicked from one meeting to the next – the mind didn’t get a break,” says Halligan.
She sees the last 18 months as a big social experiment with employers learning they could trust people to work from home – “research shows not only did productivity not decline, it perhaps escalated” – and accelerating the move to remote or hybrid working.
But Halligan isn’t sure if ‘the great resignation” isn’t simply a sort of catch-up after everything was locked down in the pandemic. “There’s always a lot of movement in the labour market. This was put on pause and now there’s a backlog. I’m wondering if the great resignation is not just some big musical chairs.”
Mac Giolla Phádraig believes how individuals identify with work has changed. “Work used to be somewhere you go – not something you do. Now it’s something you do. And you do it in the proximity of your life and who you are. Our work selves have blended into our holistic selves. Our personal lives – our sense of self and identity – have increased in this period.”
He sees people identifying less with the work element and more with the personal self, with their family situation, community and society. “It has become more about the human experience of work.”
Dr Sarah Kieran leads UL-based Kemmy Business School (KBS) Work Futures Lab, where an in-depth survey of almost 1,000 people working in Ireland is currently underway. Early findings suggest 41% see their future career as outside their current organisation. “We have to wonder why that is,” says Kieran, who cites possible contributing factors as time at work (45% of respondents work up to 50 hours weekly), pace of work (75% see pace of their work as fast) and caring responsibilities, which 60% say they have to consider.
And despite the right now to request flexible working, Kieran says 15% feel they won’t get blended working from their current organisation and 31% feel it’s only a maybe at this point – yet the jobs involved can be done remotely.
Dr Deirdre O’Shea, senior lecturer in work and organisational psychology at KBS, says each of us – faced with a crisis – re-evaluates what is meaningful for us. “Meaning comes from who we see ourselves as, what’s important to us in our lives. Typically, we derive meaning from our social connections, our work, from the impact we have on others and the world.”
O’Shea says this re-evaluation is quite natural for individuals at critical time points in their lives – but because of the pandemic, this process of ‘meaning regulation’ is now happening on a grand scale across society. “An important element contributing to meaning in our lives is certainty, which we didn’t have during the pandemic. Another important aspect is belongingness. This too was threatened – we didn’t see work colleagues, loved ones.”
But while the pandemic has created a point in time where we’re re-evaluating what’s important to us, this doesn’t mean we should (or shouldn’t) change our jobs, says O’Shea.
Halligan too points to research that finds what attracts us to other organisations isn’t necessarily what will keep us in an organisation. “We might be attracted by the benefits package – but what will keep us is a sense of belonging, feeling our development is supported, that managers have our best interest at heart, that we believe in the work of the organisation and in the job we’re doing.”
But with everything in flux, many may feel themselves stuck in indecision, not knowing how to even figure out whether to love or leave their current job. Could they, for example, be experiencing burnout?
Patricia Murray, work and organisational psychologist with the Health and Safety Authority (HSA), says burnout is an amalgam of feeling exhausted, feeling cynical (lacking belief in the organisation) and lowered self-efficacy. She cautions against jumping ship if you’re questioning your job, but instead sees now as a good time to re-design elements of your workday.
Her advice is to bring things back to basics. “When everything was pared back over the last 18 months, what really worked for you? Was it having great colleagues? Or having greater autonomy? Was it increased management of people – or decreased management of people? There should be two or three things that jump out at you. Then ask what two or three things hindered you in that time.”
The question then, says Murray is: how can I capitalise on the things that worked for me? And how can I restrict the things that impeded me? “Communicate this to the people who have power in your organisation, because nobody knows what you think they know until you tell them.”
Ibec director of employer relations Maeve McElwee says there’s high employer acknowledgement that workers had it difficult during the pandemic. “There’s a lot of consciousness that people have been through a tough time and that employees worked very hard to keep businesses and roles going.”
In a strong labour market with particular pressure on businesses around recruitment and retention, Ibec’s latest HR Update Survey found employers are focusing on – and investing in – key elements of employee experience. Almost 60% of respondents plan to invest in employee wellbeing over the next five years, and close to 40% aim to invest in making the physical workspace more engaging.
As the world of work makes its way out of the pandemic, much is in flux. And in such times, even if caught in the conundrum of whether to love or leave your job, it might be good to pause, take a breath. If we can get away from what’s overwhelming us, disconnect for a bit, we may feel better when we come back, says Hannigan. “It’s about slowing down to speed up.”
*The HSA urges employers to consider a stress-risk assessment, e.g. ‘Work Positive’, the HSA free online stress risk assessment tool – www.workpositive.ie
Dr Deirdre O’Shea suggests job-crafting – tweaking our job to better fit our skills, experience and desires.
There are three simple ways to job-craft:
- Craft the task, for example, if you enjoy something that’s currently a smaller aspect of your job, request to get involved in a bigger project around that. Or, in discussion with your manager, you could perhaps craft when, where and how you do your job.
- Craft work-relationships – perhaps you have choice over who you do a task with, or you might seek out a mentor.
- Craft how we think about our job. O’Shea cites a KBS intervention, which asked employees, over a two-week period, to think for five minutes at the end of the working day about a small positive impact they’d had on somebody – and about the meaning that had.
“At the end of two weeks, people reported lower exhaustion and lower chronic fatigue. Even those who had higher need for recovery showed higher hope and optimism. This was compared to a group who didn’t do the exercise and who reported no change,” says O’Shea.
- Visit exa.mn/Job-Crafting-Exercise
Patricia Murray suggests:
- Dig deep to really know what you like about your job. Set your watch to go off at certain times of your workday, for example, Monday at 10am, Tuesday lunchtime. At that time, ask: how am I feeling right now? And what was I just doing?
“Perhaps you’ll see ‘I’m never happy when dealing with the public but I was really happy when I was doing research’. Reflect on what you really like.”
- When you identify job aspects you don’t like – being alone too long or confrontations with people – accept these are parts of the job too. Timetable them for a time of day when you feel better/stronger, for example, ‘I won’t do it Monday morning or Friday evening – I’ll tackle it on Tuesdays. I’ll have something nice to start the day with. And I’ll only do it for three hours, not for the whole day’.
“When you’ve got agency over the thing, you might find ‘I don’t mind when it’s timetabled and I have control – I just don’t like when it jumps out at me’.”
- Cultivate self-awareness and self-acceptance. Accept that every moment of the day isn’t going to be great – but you’ll manage it as best you can. And accept you don’t have to be great at everything – nobody is.
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