When Covid-19 pandemic ravaged the world in 2020, wiping out trillions of dollars of assets and resulting in massive loss of livelihoods exacerbated by mass layoffs, long furloughs and rampant unemployment, the worst was yet to be witnessed in the labor markets in 2021. Workers had become disillusioned at work and by work, that in the summer of July 2021 alone, an estimated 4 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs, the numbers peaking at 4.5 million in the fall of November and sustaining the tidal wave of resignations still in the winter of February 2022 at 4.4 million. The Great Resignation synonymously known as The Great Quit or The Great Reshuffle was coined and predicted by Texas A&M University professor Antony Klotz and since the manifestation, its causes and ramifications have dominated industry and academic thought leaderships, spurning research, debates, discussions, white papers and countless scholarly literature around the globe.

Ian Cook, the pre-eminent global expert on peoples’ analytics and his team conducted an in-depth, extensive survey on more than 9 million employee records spanning more than 4000 global companies to unravel the mystery behind this phenomenon. The findings revealed two overriding trends:

1. Resignation rates are highest among mid-career employees aged between 30-45.
2. Resignation rates are highest among healthcare and information technology sectors.

The above two sectors assume significance as these experienced higher burnouts during the pandemic among the working population. A study conducted by renowned Pew Research cited three dominant causes for employee attrition. They were wage stagnation (63% of respondents), lack of opportunities for professional and personal growth (63%) and a feeling of marginalized and disrespected at workplace (57%). An estimated 48% working women decided to call it quits due to increasing pressure on child-care issues whereas 45% respondents became dejected by long working hours and another 43% resigned due to poor employee fringe benefits in insurance/healthcare and negligible paid time-off.

Global experts on organizational change, leadership, innovation and behavioral science like Dr. Isabell Welpe at Technical University of Munich has done extensive research on the Great Resignation and the future of organizing work. According to a study conducted by Adobe, the great exodus was driven by Millennials and Generation Z as these cohorts were more dissatisfied with work than others. The emerging consensus is that organizations will become more marketized in the future for the younger generations who will decline to be tied to a single organization at a given point in time. Instead they will likely be offering their labor power to 6 different organizations simultaneously in different projects with unprecedented advancement in digitization and digitalization technologies and the future of remote or hybrid work. Gone will be days where an average employee would have held 6 or 7 jobs in his/her career trajectory spanning 25-35 years of productive work.

Asynchronous working model will replace the current brick-and-mortar work places in a hierarchical, command-and-control workflow structure. Many companies in the US have declared that employees may not have to return to offices full-time and that hybrid work structuring will be the future norm, requiring employees to be in office only 1-2 days a week. This new normal that is imminent will have profound implications in hiring, staffing and training of the workforce. Though counterintuitive in current considerations, an organization of the future will warrant quantum changes in leadership styles centered on self-leadership rather than a hierarchical, top-down communication structure. Hiring decisions will hinge on self-motivated individuals in a flat organizational model (Holacracy) where they are self-accountable in taking responsibilities and delivering results. Office spaces will probably be reduced to cultural touchstones for just recruiting people, hold customer meetings and venue for occasional boot camps for interpersonal and socio-cultural exchanges between employees and stakeholders. This change will be accelerated and augmented by rapid technological developments based on Blockchain based systems creating a decentralized economy. A decentralized economy without intermediation will create what experts and futurists believe a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) that will function on a public blockchain mediated by self-executable rules framework and decentralized governance.

An astute analysis of the current trends of the Great Recession, industries with low location and time independence where employer and employee have to be in close proximity at the same place and time had most resignations. Healthcare, commercial airlines, dine-in restaurants, ship cruises, sporting events, music concerts etc. had most layoffs and worker attrition during and post-pandemic. On the contrary, those industries characterized by high location independence but low time independence where employee and employer have to do work at the same time but not at the same location will have low incidents of Great Resignation and therefore greater survival probability in the future. Consequently, the world will witness an explosion of live streaming, OTT platforms, delivery restaurants, online consulting, online retailers and telemedicine in the future.

Many US corporations, are devising contingency strategies to retain talent and thwart attrition by introducing a host of enhanced employee benefits. Target Corporation, the US big box retailer has volunteered to pay 100% of tuition fees and text books towards employee wards education expenses. McDonalds, the fast food chain has raised hourly wages for company owned restaurants. Fortune 500 behemoths like Walmart, Starbucks and Walgreens have implemented hitherto unprecedented financial and non-financial incentives for its employees to dissuade them from joining the bandwagon of disillusioned workforce. A sub-Reddit counter-culture known as Antiwork has quickly gained momentum on Reddit, the social news aggregation and discussion platform. Their campaign was not against work itself, but how work is organized under capitalism, its inherent orientation for seeking economic rents, exploitation, rigid hierarchies, work-place bullying and other coercive tactics to make workers stay in employment. The CEO of Slack Technologies, the B2B messaging platform Steward Butterfield is championing hybrid work week in the future which, he believes will a key differentiator in workplace desirability for potential future employees.

According to a Thomson Reuters report, the gap between worker productivity and employee pay has increased substantially since 1979. This productivity pay gap and decrease in median income adjusted to inflation has significantly eroded the purchasing power parity of the average American worker. Though nominal wage rates have increased marginally, Consumer Prices Index is growing at its fastest pace since 1982, concerning Washington policymakers and rendering any wage gains futile. Similar social protest movements are occurring in China referred to as Tang Ping where protesters took to the streets in defiance of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) endorsed “Chinese Dream” of overwork and its attended societal and family pressures. The disillusioned youth of China are rejecting the 996 working hour system enforced by many companies that require workers to expend their labor power from 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week thus jeopardizing work-life balance and mental health. The ripples of the Great Resignation could be felt as far as Australia and India and across the Atlantic in the UK, Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Shareholder capitalism that is only concerned with short-term profits of the shareholders is at the crossroads. This quest and greed for amassing disproportionate wealth has reduced employees to a dispensable commodity, who face the enhanced threat of labor displacement and redundancy through automation. The Great Resignation is the culmination of a collective resentment against the haphazard policies of corporations that are depredations on employee welfare, aspirations and their growth. The time is opportune for corporations around the world to radically rethink the purpose of their mission and vision that should predominantly include employees as the major stakeholder, an asset and not as a bottom-line cost on financial statements. This paradigm shift in thinking will define the nature of work and future of corporations because any company devoid of enterprise is just a crowd.