Transcription
Why are people these days so reluctant to quit their jobs? Well, a few years ago, that wasn't the case. You might remember hearing the term "the great resignation." During the pandemic, people were quite happy to quit their jobs, looking for new opportunities. Tens of millions of people in the United States did it in the year 2021 alone. Well, that's all over now and we've moved into a different phase, something called "the great hunkering down." People are timid about leaving their jobs. And today on the show, we're going to be looking into why exactly that is. And to help us do that, we're going to be talking to the two people who coined those two phrases. From the BBC, I'm Tristan Redmond. Welcome to the Global Story on YouTube.
Well, I'm pleased to say we're joined here in the studio by Anthony Clotsz, a professor of organizational behavior at University College London School of Management and author of the book Jolted: Why We Quit: When to Stay and Why It Matters. And also by Sarah O'Connor, who's a columnist for the Financial Times and author of We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work. So great to have you with us. Thanks for joining us.
>> Thanks for having us.
>> It's great to be here.
Anthony, you coined a phrase five years ago which became famous, "the great resignation." That was about people leaving their work. And Sarah, you've coined a phrase, "the great hunkering down," about, um, why people are having to stay in their jobs. Um, and we're going to try and join the dots today between, uh, your two sets of ideas. Anthony, let's start with you. Um, what was the great resignation? What led you to predicting it?
>> So, the great resignation was a significant elevated level of quitting in the US, UK, and elsewhere in the world that started in early 2021 and went on through somewhere mid to late 2023. There were a few different forces coming together that led to this prediction. First, as we all know, during the pandemic, job stress was higher than ever. People were working in different ways and it was causing a lot of stress for them. A lot of people were taking a step back and and looking at their life and saying, "Am I happy with this? Am I living the life I want to live?" And and the phrase "pandemic epiphanies" came out of that. A lot of individuals deciding to make pivots in their personal or professional lives. And then finally, there's remote work. And so the pandemic caused many people to go from in-person work to remote work. And we have different feelings as humans about remote work. Some people switched and loved it and never wanted to go back. Some people immediately wanted to go back. and organizations were experimenting with all of these different kinds of working. And so these three forces came together leading to this elevated level of quitting in the economy. But of course, 2020 was one of the worst years ever for quitting. We were in the midst of the pandemic. And so my prediction was really about this backlog of quitting intentions building up in the market. And that if the vaccines came and the economy opened up quickly, this would be unleashed on the on the economy. at the same time, and companies weren't necessarily ready for that. It was really those three forces that led to, uh, to predicting that this great resignation was going to come.
>> Sarah, you you write about, uh, the world of work and the situation Anthony's describing here is one where it sounds like employees had more power than employers. How rare is that in the great scheme of, uh, workplace relations?
So that goes in cycles with the macroeconomic cycle. So when the economy is doing badly, uh, people tend to quit their jobs less for understandable reasons. And when the economy is doing really well, then rates of quitting tend to go up. And also, as we came out of that pandemic, there was suddenly a real kind of increase in demand. And so employers were suddenly massively on the back foot. They couldn't really get enough labor, um, to fill all of their jobs. And so that meant that employees had a much stronger bargaining hand than they've had in, I would say, what at least 10, 15 years, definitely since before the great financial crisis of 2008. Employees were kind of coming up with all sorts of random perks. So, you know, there was an esteemed law firm that started to say that you could bring your dog to the office if you wanted to. There was free food on offer. There was free coffees. The Financial Times, where I work, started offering free coffee to everyone who would, you know, deign to come back into the office after the lockdowns were over.
>> I can't imagine that many dogs in one office would necessarily turn out that well.
>> I can't imagine it either.
>> Well, whilst Anthony was having his, uh, epiphany moment in that year 2020, you were speaking to people about how their work lives were changing. And did, did what they tell you square with the experience that Anthony's describing?
>> Yeah, definitely. So, one of the people that I, um, remember interviewing during those really difficult, um, couple of years was a, a truck driver called Dominic Harris, who was under extreme amounts of stress. So, truck drivers, as I'm sure you remember, were classified as key workers. So, while a lot of white-collar workers were sort of sheltering at home and keeping safe from the virus as much as they could, truck drivers had to keep going to work. And not only that, but we needed more truck drivers than ever because everyone was ordering stuff online, right? And, um, a lot of things that otherwise people would have gone out to the shops for also had to be delivered through trucks. And so there was a huge, um, increase in demand for truckers. There weren't enough people to do that job. There's been kind of chronic shortages of truck drivers for many years, but it really came to a head at this point. So, Dominic's a British guy who lives in the southeast of England. Um, and he was driving extremely long hours. Sometimes he said he would have to get up at like 2:00 in the morning in order to get to the start of his first shift, which would be 3:30 a.m. in the morning. One of his jobs was delivering canisters of, um, fuel to people who live in sort of fixed caravan sites, so off-grid. So, they really needed this to keep going. And he said that, you know, the the roads were so quiet, so it wasn't that there was lots of traffic and stuff like that, but it was just the level of tiredness and also, you know, the worry. Um, and the government at that time, because there was such a shortage of truck drivers, they actually loosened some of the working time regulations to allow truck drivers to work even longer than usual. And these guys already work really long hours. So, there are restrictions on how many hours you can drive. But that doesn't mean that your shift isn't much longer than that because there's unloading, there's loading, there's waiting around at depots. And so he was regularly out of the house for 13, 14 hours a day. And he said he would come home and he would just collapse straight into bed. He didn't even have the energy to have a takeaway with his misses and all the things that he would usually do on a Friday night.
>> Okay. I mean, that sounds like a slightly nuanced version of the story that Anthony is telling, though, because if Anthony's talking about people who had had enough and wanted a change in their work-life balance, it sounds more like Dominic was so in demand that he just couldn't stop.
>> Well, he couldn't stop until he did stop. So, what happened was that one day he was driving, this is just as we were coming out of the pandemic. Um, and so lockdowns were over, demand was raging. Um, a customer screamed at him because something had got broken on the back of his truck, and he, he was driving along the motorway, and he suddenly started to feel incredibly dizzy and he didn't really know which lane he was in anymore. Um, he managed to kind of pull over and he drove himself to the nearest hospital, which luckily was close by. And it turned out that they said to him, "Look, you're suffering from exhaustion. This is vertigo brought on by exhaustion." Luckily, he had a week of leave that he had planned. And so, he used that week to basically decide, I can't do this anymore. I'm going to leave this job. I'm going to quit truck driving altogether, and I'm going to do something completely different with my life.
>> I mean, the story, um, that you're telling, Anthony, um, seems to be really about people who want a kind of better work-life balance. But from your research, do people want to work more or do they want to work less?
>> Yes. So, it turns out most people want to work, and, and a reasonable amount. And so, there's been a survey run every year since 1972 in the US, every two years that has asked this question about if you won the lottery, if you came into as much money, um, as you wanted and you never had to work again, would you keep working? And pretty consistently from '72 all the way up to the pandemic, about 70% of Americans said, "Yes, I would keep working even if I didn't need to financially." And there's been global surveys done that have reflected these same numbers. And so it shows that, yes, the vast majority of people at least report that if they came into a large sum of money and they didn't need to work anymore, they would nonetheless keep working. I, I will say, so I ask audiences, whether it's students or or executives or or workers, this question all the time. If you won the lottery, had enough money, um, that you didn't need to work anymore, would you keep working? And usually it is in that 70% range. But one time when I was asking that question, somebody very astutely said, "Ask us again, but ask us how many of us would keep working at our current job if we won the lottery." And so this maybe gets at your question a little bit. So I asked it again, and I've asked it many, many times since. How many of you would keep working at your current job if you came into a dump truck full of money? And only about 10% of people raise their hands. And when you ask that 10% of people what they do, it's often self-employed. It's often entrepreneurs or individuals who have chosen this path because they're extremely passionate about it. And so it goes to show there is this big gap between our desire to work and the version of work we're currently getting in our current jobs.
>> Okay. Well, setting aside the lottery factor, because let's be honest, that's not going to happen to very many of us at all.
>> That's right. We all do know people who say they want to quit their job,
>> but when they actually do, um, pass, uh, into action on this, on this front, what is it that tends to give them the impetus to do it?
>> Yeah. So, it's, it's a bit of a 50/50 situation. So, often people quit as the result of a slow increase of dissatisfaction over time. So, over a long period of time, our company changes, our job changes, and we change, and, and we find ourselves slowly drifting apart, and our relationship with work or with our job comes apart. But about another 50% of the time, it's much more sudden, and it's, and it's a single event that happens, and it could be in the workplace, outside of the workplace. This could be a major event or something quite small, like a rude comment that makes people think, "I got to get out of here. I need to quit this job." And so what we find when we study quitting is about 50% of the time, people can trace it back to this single event that flipped them from sort of being on autopilot in their day-to-day work lives to all of a sudden being a future quitter or at least seriously thinking about it.
>> Okay. "The great resignation," the the term that you coined, was during the pandemic, which was, believe it or not, um, five years ago. It feels like it was about 500 years ago. Um, and the work, world of work has changed immeasurably since then because of AI. How is that making you both reassess the things that you learned during that moment, Sarah?
>> So, we are in a very different moment right now. And if you look at the rates at which people are quitting their jobs, I mean, they've completely plummeted. So, we've gone from a period of unusually high levels of quitting to a period of unusually low levels of quitting. Um, it's partly about AI. I think it's partly because people are fearful about the future. You know, we're being told all the time that there's this tsunami of change that's coming, and nobody's job is safe, and everything might change. And so a lot of people are sort of just hunkering down and and hoping to sort of stay where they are. It's also, again, it's just a macroeconomic story. Economies are not doing very well right now, and that means that there aren't that many new job openings. In fact, job openings are very, very low, particularly in the US, but also in, in other countries. You know, there's just not as much movement in the labor market as usual, and it's very, very different to the period we were just talking about where loads of people changed what they were doing and switched things around. Now, I think the the mood is really different.
>> Sarah's phrase, "hunkering down," is what a lot of people were doing during the pandemic. And, and I think here we are again in this situation where the future of work is very uncertain, largely due to AI. Geopolitically, there's a lot of turmoil. And so, there, I think, is not, not the exact same, but there are some similarities between now and during the pandemic where, if, if you look at Gallup's engagement numbers, the disengagement is very high right now. So, you do, I think, have a lot of turnover intentions in the economy right now, but not the really ability or desire, um, to turn those intentions into reality because of how much uncertainty there is about what's coming next.
>> Can you explain what those Gallup numbers actually mean?
>> Yeah. So, the polling, and they do it on a country-by-country basis and also globally, and look at the percentage of employees who report they are highly engaged, moderately engaged, disengaged. And their latest, and they come out with these numbers every year. And their latest round of numbers just showed disengagement is as high as it's been since 2020. Mhm.
>> And again, over the past five years, these numbers were slowly, especially during the great resignation period, because of these perks, benefits that we talked about, these numbers were creeping back up, and now they seem to be going back down.
>> The other way that you can see that shift in the balance of power is all of those perks we talked about, they're going now. You know, nobody is bringing their dog into the office anymore. Not only that, I mean, there are some, really employers are really starting to kind of tighten their grip a bit. So, there have been some stories about things like employers saying you have to lock your mobile phone away.
>> Oh, really?
>> Yeah. Because it's distracting or it might be a security risk. Other employers in the US are taking away quite a lot of benefits, including, you know, family benefits, um, parental leave, things like that. So, there's been just a whipsaw in the balance of power between employers and workers.
>> Sarah, you've been talking with people who are worried about what AI might mean for their work. What have they been telling you?
>> Yeah, so I have been going out to meet people in all kinds of different places who are starting to encounter AI and robots in their jobs, everywhere from mines to, um, Amazon warehouses. So, I went to see a brand new Amazon warehouse, which has really changed the way the work there is done. So, it used to be that you worked in a very, very big open space in an Amazon warehouse and you walked between all the aisles, 10 or 15 miles a day. This brand new warehouse that I went to, it's not like that at all. Basically, there's a big perimeter fence on each floor. And inside the fence are these robots. And the robots, they look a bit like kind of robot vacuum cleaners. And they slide underneath the shelving units and they bring the shelving units to the workers. And the workers now stand in one place, um, in little gaps along this fence. And the the robots bring the shelves to the workers, and a light illuminates which product they should select off that shelf. And then they put it away. And then the next robot will bring the next shelf. And so it's gone from a job that's very sort of physical, that involves a lot of walking around, to a job that is very stationary. And I went to see this warehouse. They let me have a go at this job. I did it, you know, for maybe five minutes, and it was fine. It was very easy. I didn't have to make any decisions for myself. But to do that for 10 hours a day would be quite a different thing.
>> When you spoke to people in that warehouse, how did they feel about the fact that their job was changing?
>> I spoke to people who said that basically they found that they felt more like robots themselves, that the pace of the work was more intense because the robots were sort of setting the pace, that it was possibly even more boring than it was before, and also just sort of lonelier. I mean, Amazon would say the quality of this job is better now because it's much less physically arduous. You're not walking around all day. Injury rates are coming down. Um, but it is very repetitive. And, yeah, these guys are often migrant workers. They might have only just come to the country a few years ago. So, they don't have a lot of good options if we're talking about, um, the ability to quit and do something else with your life.
>> In this tech-heavy work environment, I'm assuming that students that you teach here in London, Anthony, have some feelings about, uh, AI and the job market they're about to enter. What are they telling you?
>> Yeah. So, in general, I think they're more optimistic in many ways than a lot of the rest of us are. And so, even though we've just seen a round of commencement speeches, uh, in the US and elsewhere in the world, where whenever the speakers would bring up AI, you know, they were booed. But, you know, my experience with the students is they're fairly responsible consumers of AI and they're excited about hopefully using AI to make the world of work better. And that doesn't mean they're not concerned about it. They see that, you know, statistics that this is maybe affecting entry-level jobs or early career jobs more than, um, than folks later in their career. So, so they, they have concerns, but I think they're also seeing like, "Hey, you know, the way my parents worked or my grandparents worked wasn't the healthiest way of working necessarily. So, maybe we can engage with this technology, take the parts of work that aren't necessarily fulfilling, and let AI do those, and then hopefully we can spend our time doing more, uh, fulfilling things." And I know this is what Sarah's been looking at, um, for a long time now. So, whether they're able to do that, I'm, I'm not sure, but this is part of what we talked to them about is how do we design a future of work that's that's better for humans.
>> Well, Sarah, I'd be interested to hear your response to that, because, uh, on, on this program, we, we did an interview with an expert consultant who speaks, whose job it is to speak to, uh, young Gen Z people about, um, their, their interests and fears for the world. And she was telling us that she believes that Gen Z are dead set against, uh, AI in many instances. That doesn't square with what Anthony's saying. What's been your experience?
>> I think both of those things can be true. I mean, I think if you're a young person now, you're being told over and over again that AI is, um, taking opportunities away from you. They've also been engaging with it, of course, throughout their education process, for better and for worse. And crucially, I think the thing that a lot of young people really hate about AI is the way it has intervened in the hiring process itself. So, it's very common now that if you apply for a job, particularly a graduate job, you might have to go through one, two, three rounds of AI interviews where you're not, you're not sort of seeing eye to eye with another human being at all. You're sitting there, you're recording a video interview, and then some AI system is going to assess what you said and whether it was good enough that, um, you can go through to the next round. Um, and so I think that feels quite dehumanizing, quite disrespectful. So,
>> those things, I think, contribute to some of the, uh, reasons that you're seeing people getting booed at commencement speeches. I mean, I do have a little bit of some sympathy with the employers, because some of these graduate employers, they will get,
>> tens of thousands of applications for like a hundred places. So, I do understand that they are desperately trying to find some way of making it both fair and efficient. But the problem is that AI has ended up making that situation worse because the employers kind of started this by using AI to filter out candidates. Then we got ChatGPT came along, and the job applicants were like, "Well, I can use AI as well now, thank you very much." And so they're fighting fire with fire. So, they're now churning out many more job applications, which means that the employers are more overwhelmed than ever. And it's become a sort of AI arms race in which actually nobody's winning, and everyone's really fed up with the process. But that's not to discount what Anthony says. And I think that there clearly is an opportunity to redesign the way entry-level jobs work. So, in a lot of professions, it used to be that the first few years of your job would be pretty dull and pretty intense. You would be doing, like, staying up late into the night going through legal contracts, or you would be grinding out, you know, PowerPoint presentations for your bosses, stuff that actually wasn't really the best use of very talented young people's skills. Now, of course, AI can do all of that stuff. So, the bad scenario would be that employers say, "Well, we just don't need young people anymore." The better scenario would be they say, "Well, we still need to hire them because we're going to need the experts of the future, but we need to rethink how we train them, and maybe we can give them better, more interesting work faster."
>> Before we wrap up, I want to lean into your respective, uh, corners of expertise. Um, so Anthony, you're known for this expression, "the great resignation." Say, for example, I was deeply unhappy in my job and wanted to go, which is not the case. Um, what would be your advice to me, uh, for, for how to get out in the smoothest possible way?
>> Yeah, if you want to get out, I think the first step is pinpointing what's the actual problem here. What is it that you're trying to get away from? And so that you have a really clear sense of that, and then have a really clear sense of what you're giving up, and making sure that whatever you're going to next has an upgrade on that, that you're actually moving into a better situation, because the majority of quitting ends up with some form of regret. And so that's what we're trying to avoid. Another way to revo avoid that regret is by speaking up and trying to fix that problem before you leave. So, if you're really simply, if you're leaving because you feel like you're underpaid, why not speak up about it? Um, I talked to one employee who was leaving because they had to work in the same room as a toxic co-worker. But right before they quit, they were working in a hospital. Right before they quit, they took a walk around the hospital and they found just an empty room. And they went to their boss and said, "Can I just move out of my office into that empty room because that would make my work life better?" And, and their boss was like, "Yeah, sure. Knock yourself out." And so pinpointing the problem and then speaking up, and even if your boss doesn't fix it, says no, you can't have that office, at least then you quit knowing, "I asked, I did what I could." And then it's all about engineering a graceful exit. And we could talk for a long time about that. Um, but the goal here is to make sure that if there is an opportunity to boomerang back at some point in the future, which is becoming more and more common, that you set yourself up for that.
>> I want to finish by asking what happened to Dominic after he decided he'd had enough of his driving job and drove his truck to the hospital.
>> While he was having such a stressful time during the pandemic and working so hard, he developed this odd hobby, which was that he used to visit a website called findagrave.com, where people would ask if there was anybody local who could go and visit a graveyard on their behalf and find a relative's grave or, um, an ancestor's grave and take a photo of it. He used to do this just because he actually really loved being in these sort of peaceful green spaces, and it was a little bit like a treasure hunt. It was something fun to do. And the epiphany that he had was that actually he could become a grave tender, because when he went and found these graves, often they were really sad and bedraggled, and he thought, "God, they would look so much nicer if someone was able to tidy them up." And so during that week that he had after he quit, he built himself a website and he set himself up as a, uh, a grave tender. And he does that to this day. I went and spent a day with him in a beautiful graveyard in South London, and he loves it. He's so happy. He said that he wished he had quit and done this 10 years ago, because now his working life is mostly outdoors. It's incredibly peaceful in graveyards. Um, and, yeah, he says that it's the best thing he ever did. And so, you know, he didn't really wait for someone to solve his problems for him in the end. He just found his own way through.
>> So, he's happily hunkering down in that job.
>> Yeah, I think he would like to do it for the rest of his life. Yeah.
>> Anthony Clots and Sarah O'Connor, thank you so much for joining us. It's been fascinating talking all of this through with you.
>> Thank you for having us.
>> That was Sarah O'Connor from the Financial Times and Anthony Clots from University College London. Thanks so much for tuning in. The Global Story is also a podcast. We're available every weekday on bbc.com or wherever you listen. See you next time. Cheerio.