In this, the first ever LIVE broadcast of the Being Human Is Good For Business podcast, the team at Trilogy Effect discuss the Great Resignation of 2021. What's driving people to leave their jobs in droves? What can a leader do to stem the flow?
Recorded as a Live broadcast on LinkedIn on October 1st, leadership experts Heather Marasse, Wendy Appel and Mary Beth Sawicki look at what's behind this trend and offer great advice and practical tips to help leaders navigate it.
COVID continues to affect every corner of our lives. And “This pandemic has given everyone a chance to see what was really important in life,” explains Wendy Appel, Founding Partner, Trilogy Effect. “When lives are at stake, when your children's lives may be at stake, people are reprioritizing. While work is important, people started asking themselves some tough questions. For instance, do I want to spend so much time away from my family travelling for business? Do I want to spend two hours of each day on a commute?”
Recent statistics show that 4 million Americans quit their jobs this past July. And a survey of Canadian workers found that 42 per cent of employees would quit their job if remote working is not offered going forward. This presents an enormous challenge for today’s leaders.
It’s clear that, despite the impetus to return to work, people are not ready to give up the flexibility of working from home. And yet, leaders must continue to make decisions in running their businesses.
Trilogy Effect’s Managing Partner explains, “Leaders are in the throes of making big decisions about the business models, about real estate, their operations. And they answer to boards, to shareholders and to the public. We’ve been in a holding pattern for more than 18 months, but we are now realising that the return to work is not a problem which needs solving, so much as it is a journey we’re taking together that is full of continual shifts and course alterations. And we don’t know what the end looks like.”
The trend is not so much the great resignation as it is the great ‘awakening’, according to Mary Beth Sawicki, Trilogy Effect Founding Partner. “Business leaders need to recognize their responsibility in supporting people in their lives as well as their work. It’s more than work/life balance, it’s work/life integration. They need to listen to their people, and ensure they feel seen and understood. To successfully navigate through these unusual times, leaders must let humanity flourish.”
Listen to the full LIVE episode to learn:
Why are people leaving their employers?
What are the hot button issues behind the great resignation?
Why is being human good for business?
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MACHINE GENERATED TRANSCRIPT
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Being Human is Good For Business Podcast LIVE
Sherrilynne: Hey everybody, we’re live! I’m Sherrilynne Starkie and welcome to the, first ever, live broadcast of Being Human is Good for Business, the podcast for business leaders who want to build high performance teams. Today, as you can see on our screen, I am joined by Trilogy Effect’s Senior Management Team, Heather Marasse, Wendy Appel and Mary Beth Sawicki. Say hello ladies.
Ladies: Good morning.
Sherrilynne: So, it's been more than a year now, since we launched this podcast and this is our first time that we're doing a live one. We've been putting out two episodes a month for more than a year now. We launched it to help people discover who they are, as a leader, and as a human being, and to help them unleash the full potential of their organizations.
That's something that Trilogy Effect has a lot of experience in. Among their clients are many globally recognized brands and a lot of Fortune 500 companies. They have also helped lots of tech leaders become really great leaders.
So, today we are here to talk about one of the biggest trends of 2021 so far, I mean, I have to say, so far, because things change so quickly. Industry statistics show that four million Americans quit their jobs last July, and a recent survey of Canadian workers found that 42% of employees said that they would quit their jobs if they're not offered to work from home going forward.
So what we're here talking about today is that great resignation of 2021. So ladies tell us, why are people leaving the jobs in droves, Wendy?
Wendy Appel: I think that COVID, it affected everyone, and continues to affect every corner of our lives. One of the things that I hear from clients and, I feel myself, is that COVID gave people a chance to see what is really important to them. You know, when lives are at stake, when their children's lives are at stake, people start reprioritizing, and so, while work is really important, people start asking themselves, for instance, ‘Should I scale my business? Why should I scale my business, to what end? I’ve been on a plane constantly for work and do I want to come back to that life again? Do I want to go back to the life of commuting? It takes huge chunks of my time and it takes me away from my family, takes me away from things that are important.’ So I say that it is a given people time to pause.
Sherrilynne: Would you agree with that, ladies?
Heather Marasse: Yes, I'm hearing the same thing and feeling the same thing. I think that it's been a long extended moment, about 19 months of it, but it's really been a pause and a shift in what work looked like, felt like, seemed like, and I think it's given people a lot of opportunity to reflect on how they want to use their time.
Sherrilynne: So, what’s important in life, how it’s going?
Heather Marasse: Yes.
Wendy Appel: Well, I just wanted to add one extra point and that is that, typically, when we're in the workplace, our managers or bosses are overseeing and watching and looking at productivity, and productivity equals how much time you're in the office and so on and so forth. That has become invisible to people, to managers and bosses, in terms of how much time you're in the office and how much time you're working, yet the work is getting done and done well. So, on the management side of it, it’s going to cause, if it isn’t already causing, people to look at the definition of productivity and refocusing on quality, quantity and timeliness, as opposed to how much time you’re in the office.
This has been a struggle for years and years and years, and now COVID is forcing that shift. On the employee side, it's giving everybody a taste of freedom and adulthood in a true sense of self-leadership. You know, ‘I don't need to be supervised and watched over in that way, but I want support from my managers.’
It's shifting how people are being led and managed and it's shifting to how ‘I'm leading myself and managing myself. I have more freedom and like the flexibility and, frankly, I need that flexibility for my lifestyle, my kid’s, schedules, and taking care of elderly parents, and the work is getting done and fitting into my schedule. I’ve bought that time from not having to do the commute.’ I just want to put that in here as well.
Sherrilynne: What you're describing is a total kind of shift in paradigm for the workers, but now we need to get companies and leaders and managers to have a similar kind of paradigm shift. Would you agree, Heather?
Heather Marasse: I think it’s happening. You know, before COVID hit we would deal with people who are starting to come up against the end of their careers, because we work with a lot of senior people. So it was a moment of reckoning, where they started to realize that work was not the “superset” of their lives, it was actually the “subset”. Yet, when you get so embroiled in your career, and you have a lot of accountability and you want to do a good job, so you start using the edges of your life for the rest of it. Then when you hit the point where you're starting to think about retirement, it's a huge wake up call. What's happened with COVID is it has caused all of us, no matter what our age, is to spin the reset button of life. ‘My life is a “superset” work is a “subset”, inside of it, important, but it's not the whole beef.’
Sherrilynne: I feel like, it doesn't matter what you do for a living or where you are in your life, we've all been asking ourselves tough questions about this over the last 19 months, for sure. So how are we seeing it play out in the workplace, Heather?
Heather Marasse: Well, one of the things that we're hearing a lot about now, I'm sure you're all hearing about, is the idea of hybrid, because people are grappling with how to get back to the office. It's not simple, but the hybrid is starting to develop kind of a bad reputation, because we're trying to apply the rules of “fixed-ness” to it.
We have to, somewhat, be pragmatic about it, but what we're hearing about, from a management perspective, there's a demand or a requirement for ‘Let's get some clarity and predictability around when people will be in the office and when they won't be,’ which is called hybrid. For example, ‘Maybe we'll ask people to work three days in the office and two days at home,’ etcetera.
Still, what we're hearing is that’s not really a one size fits all. It doesn't work that well, but what people really want is flexibility, because I think they have proven that the work can get done, for the most part. They just need flexibility at work for their particular lives, so it's going to require a lot of customization and specificity within organizational life.
Sherrilynne: Because, for those employers or managers who don’t want to be flexible, people are voting with their feet, right?
Heather Marasse: Exactly.
Wendy Appel: I think I have an answer. I just read that one in four women are looking at leaving the workforce. As it stands today, a lot of the day-to-day responsibility for child-care falls on the shoulders of women and they really need that flexibility in order to deal with children's illnesses and schedules and so on and so forth. So, that needs to be accounted for if people want to keep women in the workforce.
Mary Beth Sawicki: The health care and elder care, a lot of people are looking after their parents, as well, and that disproportionately falls to women as well. So there are demographic differences between who needs what. To Heather's point, the one-size fits all doesn't really work, so flexibility just becomes more and more important.
Heather Marasse: Then, there’s the partners, you might have a family and traditionally, the man, but it might be, you know, another woman, but it's a partnership. It has an impact on her partner too, because everybody needs to be flexible around their family and their life situation. The demographic I hear about and feel the worst for is probably the thirties to mid forties. There's a demographic thing happening, in the twenties, you’re starting your career and you’re looking for some social connection and building a network and starting to hone your craft, if you like. So there is a requirement and a desire to have some gatherings, so you're up for it, and you have a little more flexibility, usually. Then the thirties hit and you start having to “adult”, as some people call it, including my children. Suddenly you’ve got a mortgage, you’ve got children and you have concerns about childcare. That is, ‘I may have my kids in daycare, but the daycare may shut down because there's been a COVID case in my daycare.’ Then there's school. ‘So my kids are in and out of school for the same reason,’ and that demographic is really getting squeezed.
They're also in a period where, often, their careers are really getting demanding. So that's been an interesting time for them, to put it mildly, and very stressful. So they say, ‘When my life is this stressful, I better be working on something that I really like and that I'm appreciated for, or else, it's not worth it to me.’
Sherrilynne: Several millennial women of my acquaintance have voted with their feet, and have decided to opt out, to make some serious changes in their careers over the last several months, just because they’re stressed. They just not coping, right?
Heather Marasse: Or they’re going to go and find a place where they feel more appreciated, where they have more flexibility and they’re doing work that they love.
Sherrilynne: Yeah, that reminds me of something that Wendy touched upon a second ago. It's about visibility, visibility of work, and women are often the people in the workplace that are doing the invisible work. So, when you’re not even in the workplace, present physically, there's a real risk that your work isn't seen or recognized.
Mary Beth Sawicki: Yes and I think that's a challenge and an opportunity for leaders, it’s to figure out how to ensure that visibility is equitable. It is a challenge to make sure people are engaged, are recognized and are appreciated.
I was reading something about Google putting in massive screens for the people who are in the office, so that the people who are connecting virtually show up bigger than like in little tiny boxes. It’s just one way it's being done, but it's important.
Sherrilynne: Yes.
Heather Marasse: I'm going to come back to the demographics, because there's something else happening, demographically, which is really interesting. That’s in the 55 and above, or even early fifties, where COVID has given them the opportunity to take a look and take a pause and go, ‘How much do I really need?’ I can't tell you how many of our clients have checked in with their financial planners to discover they’ve got enough.
So something else is happening with this great resignation, and it's the great moving on to whatever's next. There's also people leaving the workforce earlier than they had planned, which creates opportunities.
Sherrilynne: It’s a whole mental reset. People enter their career with an expectation that they’re going to work till they’re 55 or 60. Now, maybe, in their early fifties, they’re like, ‘You know what, I think I’ve had about enough.’
Heather Marasse: Or, ‘I don’t need as such, so maybe I’ll do something that’s a little less demanding and feeds my soul, feeds my passion a little more.’
Mary Beth Sawicki: That's something else that I was reading about, it's the opportunity, in organizations, for people to pursue that, while they're working. Perhaps it means working a 30-hour week instead of a 40-hour a week or there are other opportunities, within the organization, where if somebody had some interest in something that was outside there current role, that they build an opportunity for that.
Sherrilynne: Yes, and of course there’s the whole remote thing, like, you could very easily work from your sailboat, if you wanted to, and do things differently, have a different attitude and approach to how you work.
Wendy Appel: Well, along with the great resignation is the great migration. People are migrating all over the place, people are moving, they’re going to lower their cost of living. I don't know how many people I know who have moved to lower their cost of living because they can do their work more remotely. There’s less financial pressure and they live where they really want to live.
That's only one reason that people are moving, but it has afforded the opportunity for people to make real lifestyle choices for themselves and their families. To move closer to their parents, because the baby boomer generation has gotten older, and it’s a huge population, and they’re the ones starting to need more care, or the kids want to be around their grandparents. There are just so many things that are causing the great migration along with the great resignation.
Sherrilynne: Yes, I feel like we need to talk a little bit about contagion and the millennial women I was talking about earlier. When one of them leaves the workforce or leaves the company because of stress, obviously it's not beyond reasonable that other people in the office are also feeling that same level of stress and then one leaves and the other one is like, ‘Oh my gosh, she got out of here, she's so lucky, maybe I should go too.’
Heather Marasse: ‘Where did she go?’ This has been happening since the dawn of humankind, it’s we migrate in communities. So, you see that happening in organizations too, where somebody leaves and within six months or twelve months, a whole bunch of others follow. It is because we tend, we build our community as our career advances. We start to find out who we like to work with, and it's not like we don't work with people and continue to meet and develop new relationships and there are some we want to stick with throughout our life, just like in our personal lives. We see that all the time in businesses and now we're seeing that even more with this great resignation/ migration, moving on.
Wendy Appel: In addition to what Heather is saying and to build on it, it opens possibilities for people, people see somebody doing something else and they kind of sit up and take notice like, ‘Wow, they're doing that. Maybe I can too.’ Because often people feel trapped in a situation, in their lives, and a job. They don't see the possibilities, but when other people make changes, it opens the door to possibility. I remember the “great divorce”, in the sixties and seventies, when women started seeing they didn't have to be trapped in marriages and it was contagious, back to your point, Sherrilynne and it does become a bit of a contagion.
Sherrilynne: I feel like a lot of people though, the reason we saw that big bump, that statistic that I said at the top of that in July, four million people. I feel like people were forced into a decision at that point, because they're starting to get demands to return to work.
Heather Marasse: You’re probably right.
Sherrilynne: So Mary Beth, why was the return to work such a divisive issue?
Mary Beth Sawicki: It's been tricky in a few ways. People have had this taste of some flexibility and freedom and working from home, as well as being trusted to get their work done well, working from home, so returning to the office can feel more limiting.
We were all speaking about this a few days ago and Heather made a really interesting point about how this feeling, being more contained at home has actually led to more freedom and more desire for this freedom. So, I don't think there's a return from that, I don't think people will forget that.
Many people are still navigating, as we spoke about earlier, the childcare issues and the elder care issues. Kids have returned to school, for the most part, but kids are testing positive, so there's unpredictable school closures happening as well and really just an overall lack of childcare options for people we’ve talked about. We haven’t specifically called out single parent homes and it's particularly a challenge there.
So this return to the office, particularly if there hasn't been any consultation in the decision making process, has been tough for people. The issue of compliance, in general, is what we've seen come up. For example, certain corporations are requiring vaccinations, United Airlines is one example of this, or frequent testing is required. That is a bit of a hot button issue for some people and it can lead to, again, particularly if there hasn't been engagement around it or consultation about it, just, talking with your people.
There can be some resentment underneath that, like we've been feeling forced into a lot over the past 18 months. So we had this brief glimpse, maybe June-ish, that things were going to kind of open back up and maybe return to somewhat normal or some sense of freedom and for it to have gone the other direction, I think it is difficult.
I'll speak for myself and it’s been sobering. I remember when the pandemic first started and Wendy, of the three of us, saw the long haul of this. I can remember, for myself, just thinking, ‘A couple of months from now, we'll be back to concerts, like I love, and traveling and all of that,’ but that's not the case, as we’ve all learned. So that is a struggle for many.
Wendy Appel: I think, personally, it's a little premature for the” back to work.” right now. I'm talking to clients who are anxious, and they are stressed. They have kids and somebody in their child's classroom just tested positive for COVID. ‘What do I do? I’ve got an elderly parent at home. Do I let the kid go to school, or don’t I? What if we catch it, because there’s breakthrough cases,’ and so on and so on and so forth, so this is still very much at play.
It's not like COVID is gone. We are in the middle of it, particularly if you have young children and they want their kids in school because the consequences of not being in school are huge. So I really do think it’s premature to start pushing people back into a work setting. Given everything I'm hearing that people are anxious, they are stressed and there's so much going on to add that on top of it.
Sherrilynne: So what is there for a leader to do, how can a leader manage through this, Heather?
Heather Marasse: I have a lot of heart, as well, for the challenges, especially at the very senior levels, there are some big business decisions to be made. Decisions about the business models and the real estate, these people have to answer to boards or to the public and shareholders about the way they're operating. So there's been kind of a holding pattern, but it can't go on forever and yet it's not clear what the new pattern should be.
So one of the things that I think is important is to remember that nobody's been through this before, so this is not a problem to solve so much as a journey that we're on. We're going to going to have to treat it like we've got trim tabs, instead of a solution that we've got to figure out and launch and implement. I don't think there's going to be that, I think it's going to be a series of continual shifts and alterations. Perhaps new models will emerge, but I wouldn't treat any of them as the endpoint, certainly not for the next, I'm going to say 12 to 24 months, as unsettling as that sounds.
Sherrilynne: Yes, you're right about it being a journey and it's a journey without a map, right? I mean, Google is not going to direct us on how to get to the end of this.
Heather Marasse: The last pandemic was over a hundred years ago and the world has changed. So, even if I was a survivor of it, I couldn’t give much guidance.
Sherrilynne: Wendy, tell us, what is it that people want then, what is going to make them happy at work?
Wendy Appel: I would say we were looking at one overarching theme, its meaning and purpose, it is really the nexus of everything, because it’s caused people to re-evaluate that for their lives.
So, for organizations to be able to provide meaningful work and connect people back to the work that they're doing and how it's connected to the greater vision and purpose of the organization is going to be critical, as opposed to sort of a mechanistic piece, assembly line model. You know where you’re just doing one piece but you don’t know how it's connected to the whole or how you're contributing to the larger vision of the organization. So, number one, I think is, meaning, in all of its implications and all of its definitions is critical.
Engagement, I mean, talk to your employees, for instance, maybe you're going to bring people together for critical meetings. Where people are longing to be together and connecting people with each other. So it's also those meaningful connections and engaging your workforce, and your leaders, around coming together for just those meaningful, connection opportunities. For where it's going to be really useful to be together to co-create together, to collaborate together, but not sharing information, which can be done with emails and newsletters and so on and so forth.
So really look at meaning, at the top of the hierarchy and, and meaningful connections. Our clients long for it when we create space in our zoom meetings for people to just meet in pairs and just talk about how they're doing and what's going on, being human together. That is really helpful to people, especially in this time of change and stress and anxiety, to just take a breath and connect human to human. So that’s where I would start
Heather Marasse: I'd end there too.
Sherrilynne: Mary Beth, what do you think about the advice about trust? We talked about it earlier, about forcing people to come back from home so that you can be there in their environment and supervise them. I feel like what we're getting to here is that leaders need to learn to trust.
Mary Beth Sawicki: Absolutely. I think that trust that you've hired adults, right, and they can be counted on to do what they're tasked with. People work to make a difference, it's not to pass the time, so trust is going to happen, whether it's from home or from the office. Engage with your people.
We spoke about flexibility and that being really important. We've talked about the great resignation and migration, but I think we're also going through the great awakening about what's really important, what our priorities are and the importance of connection and meaningful connection with each other.
So, we talk about being human is good for business and recognizing that, I love the way you put it earlier, when we were talking about this, Sherrilynne, ‘Let humanity flourish within your organization.’ Whether it's literally in the office or working from home, and the importance of understanding and recognizing your responsibility and supporting your people in their lives, as well as their work.
So we talk about work-life balance, but I think it's more like work-life integration. It's if we think that work is separate from life, it's a false belief there, so to have some appreciation for that. When we work with our clients, we talk about listening a lot, we say, if there's one tool that we could really teach our clients, it's around listening.
Really listen to your people, take the time for that. It can feel like maybe there isn't time for that, but it will pay dividends, I promise, because people want to be seen, heard and understood. So yes, listen and connect and take this opportunity for the great awakening I think, and trust that the work is going to happen.
Heather Marasse: The work will get done.
Sherrilynne: Yes, the work will get done, and I love what Mary Beth was saying about that, this is actually an opportunity; it's not a problem. It might be a bit of a challenge, but it’s more of an opportunity and it's a time for you to really kind of tap into the power of the humanity in your team.
Wendy Appel: We talk about our clients constantly, who bring us in to help people develop their leadership and self-leadership, well, here’s the opportunity.
Heather Marasse: Exactly, Mother Nature handed it to us on a platter and she’s not done.
Sherrilynne: That's right, we're on a journey and it's a process and a wonderful opportunity.
Heather Marasse: Also to have compassion for how difficult it is to move through this journey collectively and individually, without knowing what the end looks like, which is really the story of life, we were to tell the truth.
Sherrilynne: Indeed it is the story of life. It's clear, from our discussion today, I can see that people may be resigning, but they are not resigned. Having lived through the worst pandemic in a hundred years, they're probably more engaged in work and in life than ever before and this energy is a good thing. It’s not to be afraid of, and it’s not, what’s the word I’m looking for?
Heather Marasse: Endured.
Sherrilynne: Endured, yes that's it perfectly and it takes great leadership to be able to tap it and channel it for good. So that is the opportunity for leaders.
So thank you ladies for joining today on our first ever live show, I had fun doing it. I certainly know that there's a lot of value for our audience. So thank you for doing this and thank you to everyone who joined us today. Please check out the Being Human is Good for Business podcast, and it stars these three leadership experts. We publish about two episodes every single month.
We also have a blog and a newsletter and each of those are chock full of useful tips and advice, and it's free to subscribe. We've also recently published a leadership guidebook that's downloadable from the website and that's free. You just need to download it. We hope that you take advantage of all these resources so that you can be your best self as a leader.
Goodbye from Heather, Wendy and Mary Beth and goodbye from me Sherrilynne Starkie and remember Being Human is Good for Business. Thanks everybody.