From The Great Resignation To The Great Opportunity

People leaders and HR departments across the globe have been dealing with the many unfolding changes that the pandemic simply accelerated during the last two years.

An abundance of opportunities has led to a unique situation in the last year—the Great Resignation. Workers, for once, have been in great demand, and companies have been seeing a massive increase in the amount of regrettable turnover, as workers find better opportunities and pay elsewhere.

And now we stand on an uncertain precipice of a potential economic downturn and the slowing of new job creation.

But as we head into an inevitable rebalance of the job market, it’s important that companies learn lessons from the past two years. Because even if the talent shortage rebalances and the supply of talent outpaces job opportunities, there still is the long-building problem of employee engagement. And the lessons from the past two years shine a light on how to help resolve this problem.

What if we reframed the Great Resignation as the Great Opportunity?

It’s an overgeneralization to view the motivations behind the Great Resignation as simply being about money or people not wanting to work. Nothing is further from the truth.

A lack of workforce engagement has been building long before the pandemic—and it’s now caught up to us with upticks in burnout and resignations. This serves to highlight a much deeper problem in the way work is designed.