The signs were there, but could we have stopped the Great Resignation, or now known as the Great Reshuffling? Perhaps. Gallup recorded over 35,000 individuals who exited their current roles and found two key factors that impacted their decisions more than anything else. Their analysis revealed that length of service and level of disengagement resulted in the two most reported reasons for people leaving their positions voluntarily in the years between 2006 and 2017 – three years before the 2020 pandemic even began. When considering milestones within a career, a five-, ten-, twenty-year anniversary might be cause for reevaluation. Gallup has long noted that nearly 85% of the current workforce is disengaged at work and might be cause for some individuals to seek fulfilment elsewhere.

Next, let’s consider an unlikely place for career projections: the United States Census. The 2020 findings revealed that younger individuals were moving away from rural areas and into more urban centers between 2010 and 2020… a ten-year period. The fascinating part comes when we overlay the results of the September report of voluntary exits and the areas that grew the most within the last ten years… strikingly enough, they match. While some areas may experience significant rates of turnover, their populations tend to stay steady meaning that the newly graduated workforce goes through their regular evaluation of employment. However, states such as Idaho, Kentucky, and Georgia – that saw the highest urban population growth due to inflow of residents – also had the highest rates of turnover for those in the Millennial and Generation X age range.

One could stand to hypothesize that individuals within the workforce at a disengaging job for a period of ten years or less were more likely to “reshuffle” into a new position. Harvard Business Review also noted a similar finding without the background – HBR simply noted that those leading the Great Resignation were those somewhere in the middle of their career. While these data points were revealed after the beginning of the pandemic and in line with reactionary findings, another set of statistics on the other side of the globe revealed indications of this a full year before.

South Korea has a population of which 70% of the available workforce has a college or university degree… those same individuals made up, at the time of author Daniel Susskind’s research in 2019, nearly half of those unemployed within the country. Susskind attributes this to “frictional technological unemployment.” Younger generations, that tend to lean more on technology, were not faring well within the workforce. Now as the United States begins moving to more remote workforces, that same technological friction could also impact the Great Reshuffling – some companies may be resistive to this shift to technology and cause friction within the workplace leading to far more disengaged employees.

Whatever the underlying cause, the Great Reshuffling is an issue that needs to be taken seriously, not only on the basis of having available employees, but the wellbeing of the employees as well. Those who are cared for and have a higher level of engagement are more likely to be retained. The decade leading up to this reshuffling reveals a lack of alignment of skills and available positions, straying from concentrating on employee wellbeing, and neglect of engagement within the workplace.

Sources:

1. First 2020 Census Data Release Shows U.S. Resident Population of 331,449,281. United States Census Bureau. [Online] United States of America. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/2020-census-data-release.html.
2. Pew Charitable Trusts. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2021/08/10/shrinking-rural-america-faces-state-power-struggle.
3. Susskind, R.E., & Susskind, D. (2021). The future of the professions: How technology will transform the work of human experts. s.l. : Oxford University Press.
4. “Who is Driving the Great Resignation.” Harvard Business. https://hbr.org/2021/09/who-is-driving-the-great-resignation.