Ep. #2 The Great Resignation

Hi everyone. And welcome to this episode of making sense of work Today I want to make sense of this thing called the great resignation. I'm really curious about what's happening to us, that so many of us want to resign and whether there's another way to see it, do I really need to turn my life upside down and start a new job? Or can I resolve it where I am now in my current employer? In getting ready for this. Today I did a Google search on the great resignation and it bought up 255 million results. Bear in mind that we didn't know what this was six months ago. It's clearly something that's resonating with a lot of people, but most of what's being written and talked about is from an organizational perspective, what should leaders be doing? But I'm really curious about. Y we as individuals, are wanting to resign and to think about whether that really is the right thing to do. In the podcast today, I'm going to explore that and look at what is it that's causing us to be in this state and what can we do about it? A number of studies globally started in the U S then Europe and now studies here in Asia showing that a statistically significant increased number of people are resigning from their jobs. When it first started, people said, well, in 2020, you know, people stayed in their jobs. The economy was uncertain. They weren't really sure. But the researchers are saying, no, this is a much more significant number of people resigning. And in fact, I saw a study today that said in the U S at the moment, one in 10 jobs is vacant and they're predicting that to go to one and eight by early 20, 22. We know here in Singapore, we've got the highest vacancy levels we've had for a long time. The other thing is that it's affecting all levels of the organization right up to the. C-suite apparently there is a higher number of CEOs and senior executives resigning, then we would normally see. I guess the question is, well, where are these people going? Well, many, many of these people are just moving to another organization. And that's part of what I want to think about today. Some are retiring early. There's a lot of people who are coming close to retirement, who have said, okay, that's what I'm doing, many are taking long extended breaks or moving into their passion project. So moving off into what it is that they really want to do. So the area, as I've said that I'm most curious about is the individual one what's happening in my working life or in our working lives that so many of us want to leave our jobs. And can I make sense of it? And is it what needs to happen? Can I do something else? And I want to start the story before COVID because whilst COVID has accelerated this, I don't think it started with COVID. In the 2018, 2019. A lot of my coaching clients were talking about how they were getting more and more exhausted. Working days were extending pressure was rising. The challenges of our roles were just getting harder and deeper. And people were really beginning to question whether this is sustainable. Then COVID hit and suddenly we're working from home. We're homeschooling. We're having to sort of panic to try and make sense of how we work well and hard and keep things on the road. Keep things moving. And many organizations in that early stage in 2020, we're really keen to say, how do we make sure productivity stays high? What can we do about that to make sure that this isn't too Rocky. And in fact, McKinsey study shows that we did just that basically productivity didn't drop in the way we thought it might. But one thing changed significantly. And that's that people's exhaustion levels rose. And this is what I'm hearing. I'm hearing from my coaching clients and from people I meet that things have just continued to get harder and harder over the last 12 to 18 months. And I'm recording this, towards the end of 2021. And a lot of people are really struggling. Not necessarily with their jobs, many people enjoy their jobs, but there's something about what's going on around it. That's making it a real stress. Studies have shown that things did get worse during COVID there's a McKinsey study that showed that meetings went up by 150% over the last 18 months. So it's not, we're not making it up. You know, when we were working in the office, we were. Get up and go and make a cup of tea. We would wander around to see people. We would go downstairs to buy lunch. We would move a lot more. Now we're working from home. Our meetings go back to back often, not leaving the home space. We're in the same space sometimes for 12, 14 hours at a time. And we then have to go out for a walk or something in the evening. So our worlds really have shrunk and things have got more different. Another factor that's happened, is that we've lost a bit of the, friendship, the camaraderie that we got from being in the office, you know, just those informal chats in the pantry, making a cup of tea or talking to somebody as you walk past their desk, the friendship and the laughter and the play is much harder to engage with when we're working virtually. At the beginning of COVID, we did a lot of informal team building that kind of seemed to tail off as people were really beginning to struggle. But there's other things happening to us. If I can sort of continue the bad news in recent coaching conversations, people have said to me that they're really beginning to feel meh, we might say not feeling great. And they're describing these kinds of things. They're saying that they're feeling that they're lacking a kind of stimulation of experience that might come from traveling, or even just commuting to work, to be honest, having that external Energy that's coming from that, that there are not so many things to look forward to for those of us who are in countries, where, where it's still very difficult to travel. It's really hard to find excitement in life if we're stuck in a small place. Many people are saying that they think their level of learning has dropped because there have been fewer opportunities for networking or learning events. Some are saying I'm disengaged, I'm unmotivated, distracted, irritated, feeling apathy. I've lost energy. It's not that I don't have an intent to do a good job, but I'm finding it really hard. And many of you will have heard Adam Grant talk this year about languishing. And that's exactly this. Basically he said, languishing is the sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels like we're muddling through our day. And it's like, we're looking through dirty glasses and really for many, many people, 2021 will be a year of that. And another study found that those looking to leave their jobs, there was a strong correlation with their emotional wellbeing. They might be struggling with all the things I've been talking about or suffering from anxiety and burn. So all of this has led to some massive questions that people are asking. A lot of people have taken COVID is an opportunity to really rethink their values. I know this happened for me. I talked about this and episode one, it's been a real period of me questioning what is it that I do in my work. Am I in the right place? How do I make sure I'm in the right place? And I know I'm not alone. A lot of people are saying, you know, is my boss right for me? Or does my organizational that I work into do the values line up with what's important to me. So there's some people looking for that kind of realignment. And then as a friend said to me yesterday, actually it's as simple as I just want something to change. I'm stuck in this kind of not knowing what's happening with COVID. I can't move. So maybe if I changed jobs, at least that will bring something fresh. I think there's a lot of context going on around it. And I, in preparing for this, I got really curious about what is the psychology and science telling us about part of what's creating the sense for us because a lot of the people that I work with a genuinely, normally very motivated people who are driven and enjoy work, and yet they're struggling. So what is going on here? Well, the first thing is that COVID left us in a situation where we don't know what's happening. We can't quite predict what's going on. It's been very hard to plan. We've been in smaller circles. There's research. That's showing that our networks have shrunk, but the main thing here is that we, we can't change anything. We're kind of moving in this space where we can't predict what's going to happen. We can't change it. So we have to try and live day to day. And we know from Eastern mysticism that living in the present moment is really good for our wellbeing and mental health. And yet we also know that it's really hard to do, and this is some of what's required for us to live well at the moment. A new understanding of neuroscience helps to explain this. Lisa Feldman Barrett as a neuroscience researcher looking into emotions and how our systems create and make emotions. And she's talking about prediction theory. So. View her research is showing that our brains are constantly trying to predict the future and they look back at the past to make sense of the past in order to predict the future. So of course, we've got a bit of a problem here. In our living memory, that hasn't been a pandemic. So our past doesn't help us to make sense of it and we can't predict the future. So we're quite stuck. It can feel that we can't change anything. If I can't predict that, then I might look at what can I predict what's within my control to change things. And so it might be that I say, well, why don't I change jobs? Because I can at least control that I can predict. Another part of psychology that I think is helpful for us here is this idea of the learned helplessness. This is when we can't change a situation. When we're stuck somewhere, we become stressed and maybe a bit passive. We lose our motivation. So what people are telling me. We experienced apathy, perhaps loss of agency. And when we're in that space, we get caught up in our emotional systems. And it's also very hard to be creative. We struggled to kind of generate new ideas and get new things going. And so again, we might say, well, why don't I change jobs? This might help me break out of the state, bring about something new and at least then I've got something creative happening. So all of this is going on for us, right. I believe that changing jobs is a really big deal. We know that from certainly from all my coaching, that when people change jobs, they go through about six months of readjusting. And that is also hard. So I'm really have become really curious about, is it changing jobs, the right answer to this, or are there other things that we could be thinking about doing before we changed jobs? We might still do it, but maybe there are ways that we can look. Life and work always have difficult times and learning to live through them can be really good for us. And that may be that we can find a way to live through this stage differently. And the first starting point might be noticing that the because were reading about the great. Resignation 255 million hits. We think, well, maybe I should do it too. Maybe this is the time we know there's masses of job vacancies out there. So maybe it's an opportunity for me to change jobs. It may just trigger that, or it may trigger you into asking questions that you might not have asked about how happy are you or not at work? We can get into a group think about it. Basically. It may be that you normally love. Corporate job, but at the moment, you're really struggling with it. And maybe when things become a bit different with COVID, you would go back to loving it. Viktor Frankl, who it was a psychiatrist and a Holocaust survivor talked about our search for meaning, and he believed that our lives were a search for meaning. And that one of the places we find meaning is in our work. And I completely agree. I feel like my own working life is about finding meaning in work and how I add value in the work that I'm doing. And if we're struggling to find meaning in our current role, it may be also part of what's causing us to think about changing it. But changing jobs may not bring about the meaning that we're seeking. And it may be that we can begin to think about how can I bring that meaning back to where I am now, what can I do about it? Another critical point that Frankl made is that we. Can't control what happens to us. That's very clear to us at the moment, but we can control our response to it. We can control how we approach it, how we're thinking about it, how we're feeling about it. And so as we go into thinking about work and our work at the moment, maybe we can think about what we can control inside ourselves and see whether that changes it. So, what can we practically do if we're in this space where we're thinking, yeah, I'm not sure I'm really struggling. Well, my first suggestion actually is to take some time off. Many, many people I know at the moment are carrying annual leave. And it's been really hard to take time off during COVID people have said, oh, you know, if I take time off, I can't travel. I won't leave my place. Living and working. And why would I do that? I might as well save it up, but actually I think this is contributing to the problem. Everybody's getting very tired. We're not getting enough sleep. We're not reading novels. We're doing enough things that are creative going and going for long walks, taking time with the family. And we're not taking time to step back and think about work. We're still in it because we're just at work all the time. So one place to start is to see if we can take some time, step back and have a look at it. And in doing that to begin to go back to the long game, when we're in a period of stress, we tend to get into very much short term thinking. So this is an opportunity to say, okay, what's my long game. Get back into thinking, where do I want to be in five years? I may not be able to plan that because we don't know what's happening in COVID, but maybe I can start dreaming again. And then I can begin to think, well, how does my current organization support my dream or my goal or not? And I can look at that and really think about it. So before I change, I know whether or not my organization might help me in that way. And then I can come back into the present moment and look at your current role and using pen and paper and writing it down. Look at what's working and what's not working. What are the challenges of staying? What are the risks of leaving? And I say intentionally, write that down because we're often really caught up internally thinking about this, flooded with the emotions about it. When we write it down, we access our cognitive thinking. That's much easier. To talk about it and to see it clearly. And then I suggest having a conversation, maybe starting with colleagues, or maybe starting with your manager. I saw it a couple of studies a few years ago that that was looking at why people left organizations. And there were such a significant number of people who left because they didn't want to have a conversation with their line manager about why they were unhappy with. And so this seems kind of simple and yet it's really hard. We don't want to talk to people about our struggles or what we're finding difficult. And yet our managers can't resolve them if they don't know about them. And I think at the moment, because of. See that it's most layers of the organization being affected our managers might have a lot of empathy for us and then be able to help us to look at the situation and work out what it is that is causing us this feeling to leave and help us to work it out. All of the organizational writing about the great resignation is about. Retention of employees. And so by talking to your manager, you're really giving them an opportunity also to think about how can I stay here? Can I make it work? Stay. And then at least if you leave, you will have had a good go. You will have seen if it works. And in those conversations, you can negotiate. You can work out. What is it that you think you might need? What are the changes? Maybe it's even a stretch assignment. It may be that you want more boundaries. You want those boundaries and around your work, you want to stop working at 7:00 PM and not look at your emails after that. Or you want to take a longer lunch break and go for a run or do something in the middle of the day. But it's worth negotiating before we do the big upheaval of leaving our jobs. So have conversations with people, talk to people, take a relational approach. And then if you do decide to stay, or even if you decide to move, notice that actually this is a difficult time in our working lives. And there are some other things that we might need to put in place to help us to stay on the positive side of the curve, to stay motivated and energized, and a few things that I've explored and done to help them. These, the first one is to make some really small changes. I think working at home, working on zoom now for two years. And one of the things that I've done is I've moved my place of work. And this is not grand movement. This is moving to a different corner of the apartment and you'd be surprised what a difference it makes. Even just if you're working at the kitchen table, moving to the other side of the kitchen table might give you a different sense of scenery, but it can be any other small thing. Do you start the day differently, do a different piece of work first end the day differently, do something different at lunch. Any small changes might help to give you a feeling that something's in your control and that you can create something different. The other thing that can make a big difference if we're not feeling great at work is accessing some creativity. When we're stressed, we tend to get quite stuck. We tend to narrow our thinking and actually broadening our thinking and looking for new and different things can help. And this can happen either outside of work. So a good friend of mine has taken up painting as a way of accessing some creativity during COVID and acknowledging that we're kind of, most of us stuck in one place. But you can also perhaps look for ways to express creativity at work. It might feel contradictory to say, find a stretch assignment or a new project, but something new it might actually bring some energy and some new thinking and learning into your role, which might actually help to re-energize. You, I've talked a bit about boundaries, about time boundaries, and I believe it's really more important than it's ever been for us to put those boundaries in around us and, and really to get them working. As I said earlier, one of the things that we've really lost is time with our colleagues and. I can't emphasize this enough, how important? I think it is to build some informal time in to maybe certainly. Lunch together. Sometimes. Even if you're just on camera, just chatting with each other, not talking about work, the beginning of the pandemic, we did loads of this, but now it seems to be that we're doing less. And that's because we're on zoom all the time. When we're in meetings all the time, or we're on Microsoft teams or WebEx or wherever we are. But it means that we're not getting that informal time, the fun, and also those relationship building times. So there were a few things that I think we can begin to do to think about this. You can, of course, hierarchy, coach and talk to somebody about it and you can change jobs. You can do all of this and say, do you know what I really want to move organizations? That's the change I'm seeking. But my point is, before you do that, big upheaval, have a good look at where you are now acknowledged that. Environment, is having an impact on how you're feeling and see whether there's something you can do about touch. Great. So we're going to move on to some questions now from the group that are with me. And thanks very much to those of you who are asking questions. There's a question here about, is there an issue around boundaries between work and everything else? Yeah, and I think I've been talking about that. I, I hear this from my coaching. All the time. This is really become a very big problem that those blurred boundaries now, and especially when people were homeschooling, they would need to spend time with the kids during the day. And so then they would work in the evenings and work just kind of spread out over the whole working day. So I think there's a real organizational conversation and individual conversations to happen. As we move into the next phase, which may bring more working from home is can we do this differently? We've been doing it for a couple of years. How can we do this different. And yes, the human connection, this fundamental human connection I think has really affecting us. I haven't really noticed myself that seen fewer people in the flesh is really affecting my kind of energy about work and my sense of engagement. I have found that even doing social calls in zoom has helped that a bit. And so I do think that helps it doesn't solve the whole problem. So somebody asked the question, what has COVID done to organizational culture and how has that possibly affected individuals desire to join the great resignation? And I think at the beginning there was actually a bit of organizational panic and it was the first time in. No in history where every organization in the world was going through the same thing and organizations were really struggling. And I think that what this did was it increased the pressure on people. And I think it potentially decreased the care for people. Organizations did some small things. But I'm not sure that enough time has been spent thinking about human care and emotion. We're talking a lot about mental health that I'm not sure that there's an actual action and managers and leaders and colleagues, individuals taking responsibility for just checking in with people. And how are they? I think organizational cultures have really begun to focus on how do we keep things on the road and moving forward. I believe that unless, we spend more time working out where people are and how people are then they will resign. They'll take the opportunity if there's open roles and they'll move. Yeah. So this question, do you think COVID has surfaced, what's been brewing underneath the surface for a long time? I do. I believe that we've been heading towards this for quite a while. I think that. Increased productivity and reduced costs, which we've been working on in our economy for so long has actually hit a wall. It's hit a point where it's really hard to work out how to do that. And it probably needs a fundamental rethink about how we work. In organizations, what what is productivity? What does it mean? How do we help people to have meaningful work lives at the same time? Some of those interesting questions that started just before COVID organizations testing a 30 hour working week and finding that productivity went up. So one of the things we want to look at is. The research that we know says that long hours don't equal increased productivity say, and are there ways that we can talk about that differently? I think COVID stops the conversation, but maybe there's a real opportunity to start that again. Another question how much of the great resignation is an individual trying to assert control over their lives. It's a way of, I want to change things. I can't. So I will, I think a big part of it. I think it's a big part of us feeling like we can't control anything so I can control this. I can move to a new environment and that will give me that feeling of control. My cushion is that I'm not sure. That in that movement, I'm going to get the control I want, because I'll move to a new environment. I'll have to learn new rules. I'll have to learn a new way of being in an organization and your culture. And actually it might remove my control for a while. So I think it gives us a feeling of control. I'm not convinced that necessarily that's what will come about. Somebody else is asking that neuroscience research suggests we do not react, that we respond by predicting based on past experiences. And is there a lack of ability to predict accurately? Yep. There is. And we're trying desperately to predict. And so we think changing jobs will help me predict. But that doesn't work either because we don't know what we're going into. If you are somebody who thinks actually I have to change jobs, do loads of due diligence so that you see if you can predict as much as you can to find out what is going on in that organization. And what's different. Yeah. There's somebody asking this question about how significant change would be most beneficial, a small changes enough to remove the level of Mer? I, I don't know. I think that we will have to try this for each of us has individually. And that some small changes might have a short term impact. I know I have to keep moving my desk because it has a good impact for awhile and then it wears off and it may be that changing the jobs is, is the thing that gives us that significant change and that impact, or maybe more beneficial it's it'll be a very individual thing I think in that space. How can we realign our thinking as to what working hours are and not what are not to feel that working at different times of the day is a negative thing? We have massive peer pressure about when we should be working, how we should be working, what time of the day it is. And I think the only way of really shifting this is to have transparent conversations with people, talk with people and say, These are my working hours and they may be split. They may be that I have the kids come home from school at three o'clock. And so between three o'clock and six o'clock I'm with the kids. And I log on again at seven o'clock till 10 o'clock I'd pick up those three hours later. I think it's time for us to have really explicit, transparent conversations about our working days. Organizations that have really embraced flexible work. Prior to the pandemic found that people did talk about it. There was no shame and saying, look I'm going to drop the kids off to school tomorrow. So I won't be at my desk 10, nobody even thought about it. It's a cultural shift in the organization and it requires everybody to do it. Not just certain groups of the population that if everybody does it, if the CEO does that, then it sends a signal that it's okay for us to do our job in the hours that are best for us at the moment. Great final question. What's the role of sleep and getting more sleep in this process and. It's easy to say, but difficult to do when we're in a place of stress. So true. When we are stressed, it really affects our sleep. And yet when we sleep well, we're better able to deal with the stress. And I massive advocate of sleep. I always have been a personal commitment to sleep, and I think it's really important that we think about what are we doing about our sleep patterns. And of course that lack of boundaries that we took talked about earlier on actually has made that harder because it's easier to kind of work until 10. Just, just look at a few emails before I go to bed and then go to bed and think that that that is okay. And actually of course our brains are on fire. Then we're thinking about the emails we've just done and we're not able to sleep. So putting more rituals in around, making sure we switch off our devices at a certain time, going to bed at a reasonable hour. Not drinking coffee too late in the day for those of us that affects. And anything else that we can do, that's going to help us. Thank you so much for the questions. And for those who've joined me in the session today, as we have seen in this time, the great resignation is real. And yet there may be ways that we can think about improving our working life without having to move jobs. And yet it may be that that's what we need to do, but we can look at that and make a good considered decision