‘The Great Resignation’ and the future of workspace

It is extraordinary how the labour market has been transformed over the past eighteen months. In the US - regarded as a bellwether for workplace trends - the switch has been beyond dramatic, going from an 80-year peak jobless rate just before the pandemic to what’s been called “The Great Resignation’, in which 4.3 million workers voluntarily quit their jobs in just one month, September 2021. Similarly in a recent poll of over 1,000 UK workers in care, transport, logistics and hospitality conducted by the Autonomy thinktank, which focuses on the future of work, 41% were considering leaving their job in the next twelve months.

The reasons behind the shift are complex. A recent Guardian article suggested some: decades-long inflation along with stagnant real wages; a pandemic-induced reassessment of the relative value of different kinds of work; a realisation (after 18 months of not doing it) of the pointlessness and emotional grind of commuting; the “importance of finding comfort in times of increasing precarity”. In the author’s view, taken together these represent “a grassroots redefinition of workplace expectations”, adding that “frankly, it has been a long time coming”.

“The pandemic forced [people] to take stock of their lives and gave them the opportunity to reimagine it.”

Some recent reports on ‘The Great Resignation’ consistently point to “pay and working conditions” or “pay and other conditions” as the key issues driving the disconnect. Others throw the net wider, citing broader societal concerns unleashed in the wake of the pandemic such as a strengthening of individuals’ relationships outside of work or a radical reassessment of personal values. Anthony Klotz, the Texas academic who coined the phrase ‘The Great Resignation’ in a May 2021 Bloomberg interview, believes that “The pandemic forced [people] to take stock of their lives and gave them the opportunity to reimagine it.”

Whatever the causes, there’s no escaping the implications for business; 75% of CEOs in the US report that labour shortages are the issue that’s most likely to disrupt their business in 2022. And whilst pay is probably the most critical element in any solution, Autonomy’s director of research Will Stronge believes that “the labour market crisis can be solved fairly easily by offering better working conditions”, one of which is the space in which you work.

If you drive a bus or a lorry, serve in a coffee shop or do shifts in a care home, that spatial environment may be secondary to primary concerns about whether you are taking home enough money for your family to live on or what happens if you are off sick. You may also feel that you have very little agency over the way your workplace is designed; after all, if you are a London bus driver that task may, unfortunately, have already been undertaken by Thomas Heatherwick.

But if you are a ‘knowledge worker’ - basically someone who works in an office - you probably feel differently. You’ve inherited a decades-old sense that the space in which you work is important, that it not only affects how well you perform your tasks but also profoundly influences your wellbeing, including emotionally. For such workers, ‘The Great F*** You’ might be a more accurate way to describe their response.

Eighteen months of working from home appears to have switched the power dynamic between employers and employees, who have learned to expect a degree of autonomy, work space that they can customise and control, proximity to family, friends and neighbourhood, minimal commuting and more. For some, these expectations have become so firmly internalised that they are rejecting employers that fail, or refuse, to meet them. Add another crucial development; the expansion of a global talent marketplace opened up by the enforced adaptation to remote recruitment, and you can see why a radical reworking of the relationship between people and work places is taking place. There are reasons to doubt that the next phase of office work will be a simple return to ‘business-as-usual’; as remote working guru Chris Herd says; “The pandemic has lasted so long that going back to the office requires more change to habits and behaviours that have now fixed than continuing to work remotely”.

What does all this imply for one of those “working conditions” - the office? After all, companies have been enticing ‘knowledge workers’ into the workplace with all sorts of shiny treats and free goodies since the ‘dotcom boom’ of the late 1990s. At one point, new employees used to talk about the ‘Google stone’, the extra weight they’d put on by gorging on free snacks and sweets in their first month at the company. When more or less everyone accepted the need to be continuously present in ‘the office’, it was a question of how to make your company’s more attractive that the competition’s.

Now that the requirement to be ‘continuously present’ is no longer a given, how will businesses approach the future of the workplace?

We see a pattern starting to emerge:

Some companies are attached to conventional work space; for them, refurbishing it to make it more usable, safer and engaging will be enough.

Others accept the transition to some form of hybrid work and know their working environment and technology are not fit for purpose. They’re ready for a redesign integrated with a tech upgrade.

Visionary businesses, however, recognise that the great resignation, or something like it, is coming for them. The pressure from newly-empowered employees and from those they’d like to hire demands a complete rethink.

We believe that rethinking work space needs to happen from the bottom up. Otherwise, companies run the risk of alienating existing staff and repelling potential hires by imposing a working environment from above, prioritising oversight and authority at the expense of both employee wellbeing and business performance.

Make no mistake; although it’s only one among many crucial elements, rethinking your workspace is fundamental to the future of your business. The great unscheduled working from home experiment has empowered anyone who works in an office to ask: How often I need to be here? What purpose does it serve? Does the work environment meet my needs and expectations?

Every business needs to have credible answers.