A single-speaker YouTube monologue (uploaded April 10, 2023) arguing that the Great Resignation is primarily a corrective response to decades of substandard corporate culture: chronic underpayment, lack of respect for frontline workers, and failure to invest in employee growth and leadership skills. The speaker says COVID reduced the perceived risk of leaving, enabling workers to choose the unknown over workplaces that treat them as "numbers." Companies that have invested in strong cultures and employee development are losing fewer people.
I think we have to ask ourselves, why is the great resignation happening?
A commentary about people getting their government checks? Yes. That's a small percentage. That's not the majority. Somebody decides, you know what? This is not for me. I want to follow my dreams. Those are there, too. But I don't think that explains the mass exodus. I think one of the things we're not talking about, that this is very much an indictment against years and years and years of.
Substandard corporate culture, where for years and years and years, companies have taken advantage of or mistreated frontline workers. They've paid them less because they could. Because they needed the money and they needed the job, and they could get away with it, where corporate culture wasn't necessarily great. It was just fine. Like, how's your work? It's fine. It's not toxic. Like, I'm getting yelled at every day. It's just fine. And, you know, would I like to quit? I would like to quit. But the unknown is way scarier than the devil I know. And so we stayed put. And then Covid happened, and a lot of people got furloughed or laid off or, you know, or even just had the fear of losing their jobs, and they made it through okay. And all of a sudden, the unknown became a lot less scary. And so, faced with going to work to a place that I know doesn't see me as a human being, they just see me as a number to be calculated on a spreadsheet. And the unknown, I'll take the unknown. And so I think this is, as I said before, a huge indictment for decades of companies not focusing on strong corporate culture, quite frankly, and not seeing their people as people. And so this is a correction. We know stock market corrections happen when they're grossly unbalanced. Well, this is a correction in the labor market because it's been grossly unbalanced. So for those that underpay pay clearly is one of the things. But I think also, as you said before, like, when you join our company, we see you as a human being. We want to see you grow. We want to see you learn. We want to put you on a path to help you to achieve what you want to achieve. And whether you stay here for a short time or a long time, we want you to feel that the time you spent with us was worth it. And you're a better version of yourself because you were with us. And I think companies have no choice but to invest in their people, to invest in learning, in leadership. One of the things that I find astonishing is how little leadership education there is in companies. You know, we give people tons of training when they join the company to teach them the platforms and the products. And we give them tons of training when they're. We give them, you know, mentors and they can apprentice also that they can be good at their job. But as they make their way through the organization, we give them little to nothing. We don't teach people listening skills. We don't teach people how to give and receive feedback. We don't teach people how to have an effective confrontation or an uncomfortable conversation. You know, we don't teach those skills. They are just skills. And when you wait many, many years of not doing that, what you get is exactly the situation we're in now. It is worth noting that the companies with very strong corporate cultures who have been investing in these things are suffering a lot less. Yes, they're still having people leave to follow their dreams and those things, but we, you know, those are positive. But the ones who are, you know, giving a certain finger as they're walking out the door and saying, I don't need this, those companies are suffering those situations a lot less because their people have gratitude.
