Everyone is talking about the Great Resignation, the staggering number of people (more than 24 million in the US alone) who have quit their jobs during the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it's not always the case that people quit their jobs because of poor pay or a lack of benefits, as we often assume. According to recent research by GWI, 74% of job hunters are satisfied with their current role! They're not looking for a new job because of insecurity or dissatisfaction, but because of a desire for something new.

After months and months of shifting from the office to work from home (WFH) to various forms of hybrid working styles, many employees are merely looking for a change. They want to replace this stale loaf of bread with a freshly baked one.

In addition to this, people are beginning to regain their confidence, with 55% of US consumers feeling more optimistic about their personal finances since Q2 2020. This means that now, people are more prepared to take risks, make bold moves, and follow their passion than when the pandemic started.

This is a source of opportunity when it comes to marketing products and services as people are more willing to part with their cash - if you tap into their sense of creativity. But where does this leave employers struggling with the departure and pending departure of talented employees?

COVID-19 has made us more aware than ever before of the shortness of life and how little time we really get to spend with the people we love, or doing the things we really want to be doing.

Oliver Burkeman's recently released book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, certainly drives the point home. As Burkeman says, the average human lifespan is a mere 4,000 weeks. Put that way, it sounds short. And when you see how often those 4,000 weeks are cut even shorter by disease - or even freak accidents - you might begin to re-evaluate how you spend your days.

SimiKelton Global's "Career Trends Report" found that today's employees value purpose more than their paycheck, and that they're willing to make life-altering decisions and big sacrifices in pursuit of fulfilment at work. As many as 89% of American employees would consider a career change with no financial incentive!

The motivator appears to be meaning. After all, if time is short, you want to spend it doing something significant.

If people are searching for meaning and feel that they haven't found it in their current career, they're going to search for it elsewhere: in different positions, different departments, even different industries. In 2020, I was teaching first year university students English Literature online. After a while, scrolling through blog comments on poetry became exhausting... Here I am two years later, working for Syft Analytics and learning new things about accounting, business, and tech everyday. These kind of lateral moves aren't nearly as unusual as they used to be.

As the aforementioned GWI report puts it, "Working just for the sake of it is now largely seen as a waste of valuable time." Employees want to feel that they have the opportunity to learn and grow.

Gone are the days of trying to climb to the top rungs of management. Today's employees aren't interested in linear promotions, but in moving in strange directions like children on a jungle gym or obstacle course.

It's about finding a career that means something, that has some kind of impact, that leaves you feeling like you've done something valuable and haven't wasted your time behind a desk - or a screen - for 40 years.

If employers want to retain their best employees, they need to offer more opportunities for them to try new things and to align their skills and passions with their work. And they need to offer the chance for novelty and change.

The "YOLO" (you only live once) mentality is back and thriving after two years of pandemic life, and people have had enough of staying home and following the rules. Now, they're in search of something more.

The general public are increasingly coming to see themselves as "creative" and "talented", producing hours' worth of content on social media, with the daily use of TikTok rising by 54% outside of China since 2020. And if people are seeing themselves as creative, why not give them the space to use that creativity at work?

The desire for more diverse experiences extends to a desire for more diverse workplaces. After months or even years of working from home, employees want a taste of something new. For some, this means the opportunity to travel, to turn WFH to WFA - work from anywhere. This may mean working from a holiday destination or simply a different city. Either way, people are tired of being boxed in by travel restrictions and all the other restrictions pandemic life has enforced.

Embracing creativity can feel risky. By changing job descriptions and giving employees more leeway around where they work or what they work on, you also offer them more autonomy, which many employees will appreciate.

Moreover, as we've seen during COVID times, just because someone isn't working in the office, doesn't mean they aren't being productive. And there's nothing like a change of perspective when it comes to inspiring innovation.

On the flip-side, some jobs are much easier to sell to employees from the perspective of excitement or potential for impact than others. And frequently, conversations around the Great Resignation are centered on middle-class professionals and forget the many working class laborers who were either laid off or quit as a result of poor working conditions or insubstantial pay.

The way in which journalists and members of the middle-class talk about certain work as "meaningless" can be demeaning and only worsen the growing labor shortages we have seen.

If people search for jobs that give them a sense of purpose and they hear that certain jobs are essentially meaningless, well, why would they apply for those jobs? Is it enough to say that the purpose is to contribute to society or to put food on the table? And if you are living off government benefits, you don't necessarily need a job to put food on the table in any case. So says political economist and author, Nicholas Eberstadt in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Certain jobs aren't in the least bit glamorous, but they are essential, and the stigmatization of these jobs can have a truly negative impact on society as a whole.

According to Eberstadt, the number of men and women of prime working age who stay home without jobs - and without even searching for jobs - has grown dramatically. The disdain for so-called "low-skill" jobs leaves jobs that are crucial to society functioning unoccupied, while men and women who could be working, sit at home watching television for hours on end - approximately 2,000 hours per year! And what purpose does this serve exactly? It's not, as Eberstadt says, "what Marx would have called the 'higher pursuits' of leisure", but something degrading and dispiriting.

This raises several questions about how we define meaning and purpose to begin with.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we spoke a lot about frontline workers: nurses, garbage collectors, shop workers, and so on. We spoke about the impact of the pandemic on those who couldn't work from home. Yet, it is these very jobs that are so often disparaged by those hopping on the train of the Great Resignation.

One of the latest trends online is that of the counter-narrative to having the dream job: I don't dream of labor. The makers of the "I don't dream of labor" videos are frequently people who've worked corporate jobs for years and are burnout or just sick of the relentless rat race, of the expectation of working till you drop, and of "hustle culture."

The countless "I don't dream of labor" videos on YouTube suggest a world in which building a career is no longer considered as a central part of your life; where you "Work to live" - to pay the bills and put food on the table - rather than "Live to work" - make your whole life revolve around work.

While many have argued that the proponents of this vision come from the privileged position of being able to step back from work, of having the money to take a break from the grind, to dismiss this as merely an anti-work movement created by the privileged misses some of its potential power.

If there is anything of value in the "I don't dream of labor" movement, it's this: your job doesn't have to be your whole life. Decoupling your job from your identity frees you up to find meaning outside of work. Rather than having a "dream job", you can have an ordinary job that's just one part of your life, not all of it. As one Fortune article puts it:

"What people are resigning from is a culture of "workism": the idea that we're defined primarily by our work, and everything else - i.e. life - must fit into the increasingly small space that is left. And they are realizing how backwards our thinking about work-life has been."

Work isn't separate from life: it's part of life. The idea of having a "work-life" balance is therefore a strange one. Instead, the authors of the article argue that it's time to start talking about "work-life integration."

Which means that the issue isn't necessarily labor itself - it's the way we think about labor and what it means to us.

According to a recent global survey by Future Forum, 76% of workers want more flexibility around where they work, while 93% want flexible working hours. But it's not just flexibility for the sake of it; this desire for flexibility arises from a desire to better integrate work with the rest of life.

People are leaving jobs where they feel undervalued and overwhelmed and where work-life integration is difficult.

The highest predictor of leaving a job according to a study by MIT, is what they call a "toxic corporate culture". That is a culture that fails to "promote diversity, equity, and inclusion" and that leaves "workers feeling disrespected", coupled with unethical behavior. The Great Resignation is one way in which people have responded to mistreatment and under-appreciation at work in great numbers.

Following this are concerns around job security and high levels of innovation. Ironically, while employees desire purpose, constant innovation can be stressful as it requires a lot of hard work and it can lead to burnout. Many employees also quit in response to a failure of their employers to recognize their performance and because their employers' responded poorly to the pandemic.

In response to the record number of resignations, various progressive companies are begin to rethink their approach to employee well-being. Well-being is no longer considered a benefit, but a vital element of work-life integration.

Getting your employees to stay during the Great Resignation could be a challenge, especially as quitting is contagious. But the key lies in the relationship you have with your staff.

If employers show compassion towards their employees, consider their well-being, and allow the flexibility needed for work-life integration, then their employees are less likely to leave. After all, work isn't everything and not everyone dreams of labor, but you still spend a lot of your life working, so you may as well work somewhere where you feel appreciated and are treated with compassion.

We may not all have 4,000 weeks to enjoy and that realization is enough to make anyone question their life decisions... But we all want to feel that the way in which we spend our time is significant in some way and no one wants to work for an inconsiderate or unreasonable boss.