This article was originally posted on LinkedIn on 10th Feb 2022.

With so much media coverage on "The Great Resignation", I will focus on the clear links between the negative impact of emergency home working on individual worker wellbeing. Read on to take a deeper look at how these effects still prevail:

Work from Home in a pandemic is not true remote working - I have to start with this clear reminder and message. I am writing this from my shared co-working space in Zaragoza, where I work remotely and safely every day. Being able to choose your working location is a vital part of the true meaning of remote work. I believe that this is misunderstood by many who have only experienced home working as an emergency measure. In March 2020, Matt Mullenweg, the founder of one of the largest remote-first companies in the world, published the following blog post:

“Coronavirus, the remote work experiment no one asked for” Matt expressed concerns at the millions of organisations' and workers who would suddenly be thrown into home working without time to choose, prepare, transition and also within the context of the pandemic, with additional stressors and limits to personal mobility. Thereafter, workers took on the challenge, focusing on the task at hand and adapted – often under considerable stress, other care responsibilities and competing priorities and became competent home workers.

Almost two years later, in many cases, the same situation prevails. However, some are moving to the Hybrid Model or slowly moving back to in-office. Others are also exploring and discovering safely their local co-working, shared community space, coffee shop, library or even going to a friend’s house to mix up their home working! The more adventurous are nomading and leaving their home location, to explore the true potential of remote work, looking for community and finding it in places like the Global Digital Nomad Village in Madeira or Sende.co (Europe’s oldest co-living, in Galicia, Spain)

Ultimately remote work is about choice and flexibility, particularly in location and where you will work on any given day and fostering any approach to wellbeing needs to factor in our current context 

What has that to do with employee wellbeing? - the impact on both general wellbeing and work-related wellbeing has been recorded extensively over recent months. This chart from an extensive study by HBR, gives a clear sense of how much work wellbeing has been impacted.

In the column on the right of this image, we can see that workers have adapted to emergency home working BUT it has taken its toll in terms of the level of demands, loss of colleague connection, home-life boundaries being blurred and tendency to feel disengaged.  

Another piece of research, from Eurofound, highlights the impact of long hours worked in total during home working and that the working conditions at home are often far from adequate.  Considering how significant this impact has had been on individuals it is no wonder we have a great reflection, reshuffle or resignation occurring: 2021 will be remembered as the year of the Great Resignation.

According to the Labor Department’s latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover report, in November, a record 4.5 million workers left their jobs. Anthony Klotz, an organisational psychologist and professor at Texas A&M University, who coined the term “The Great Resignation”, told CNBC Make it: “It’s not just about getting another job, or leaving the workforce, it’s about taking control of your work and personal life, and making a big decision – resigning – to accomplish that. This is a moment of empowerment for workers, one that will continue well into the new year.”

What the data shows has driven resignations - the situation is not different in Europe. In fact, In the UK, nearly a quarter of employees plan to leave their job within the next three to six months, according to a recent survey by the recruitment firm Randstad. Feelings of a “Great Resignation” were arising even before the pandemic. Many workers were thinking about quitting their jobs in 2020, and in 2021 they actually did it! Many organisations have been forecasting an elevated level of exits based on their survey data of employee sentiment, and data from Visier Community shows that, in 2021, jobs changes happened in record volumes:

In a recent paper, a group of researchers from MIT, gathered a huge amount of data to understand what exactly drove the Great Resignation, and results show that money and salary are not the main driving forces. According to this data, a toxic corporate culture, for example, is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company’s attrition rate compared with its industry. In fact, the top 5 reasons for people to leave are the following: 

1. Toxic culture - failure to promote diversity and to prevent unethical behaviour within an organisation

2. Job insecurity and reorganisation - employment instability and restructurings influence employee turnover

3. High levels of innovation - innovation, especially when not driven purposefully and with a clear plan, can lead people to burnout. When employees rate their company’s innovation positively, they are more likely to speak negatively about work-life balance

4. Failure to recognise performance - Companies that fail to recognise and reward strong performers have higher rates of attrition, and the same is true for employers that tolerate underperformance

5. Poor response to Covid-19 - failure to give support to employees in an unprecedented

These numbers show how important mental health and wellbeing have become for workers worldwide. 

What can organisations do to boost retention? - It is too late to fix a poor response to the pandemic, but it is never too late to start putting employees’ wellbeing first and to create an organisational culture characterised by forgiveness, kindness, trust, respect, and inspiration. Surveys show that day-to-day actions are more powerful than programs and mandatory social events to improve employee wellbeing.  Leaders who are inspiring, show empathy and compassion have more loyal and engaged employees. So, as a leader, check in with your team from time to time and ask them how they are doing personally, how their families are and offer support and true care. You can also read up on how to become a more compassionate leader, in one of our earlier newsletter editions.

A note of consideration for CEO's and their challenges - no one has escaped unscathed from the impact of the pandemic and recent research from Professor Nick Bloom, from Standford University, shows that the average CEO in a 3,000 firm survey spent 12 hours a week dealing with the pandemic and managing the effects. A sobering figure and significant amount of time in any work week, which in itself illustrates the extensive demands that all leadership have had to endure, as a closing note.

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This article was originally posted on LinkedIn on 10th Feb 2022.