Is there really a ‘great resignation’?

The coronavirus pandemic and a skills shortage have apparently combined to prompt hundreds of thousands of people to resign en masse, leaving many businesses with a vacancy headache. How far is this really the case and what can business do about it?

One of the unexpected outcomes of the coronavirus pandemic has been the upheaval of how we work. From hybrid working to the need for new skills to changed expectations of what an employer should offer, Covid-19 has impacted how, where and why we work.

This has, in turn, led to both employers and employees reassessing what they need. And this reassessment has led many to label what is going on at the moment as the ‘great resignation’.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. And major moments of upheaval are wont to have unexpected consequences. In the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of thousands of employees have decided it is time for a new challenge in what is being called the ‘great resignation’. 

What does the big quit look like in numbers?

Certainly, people are talking about the great resignation. Data from Google Trends shows it was a term that was barely used before June 2021 but experienced a huge spike in October.

Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.

The data would suggest people are not just talking about resigning. The total number of resignations in the UK hit a 12-year high in the third quarter of 2021 - a high that was made to feel even more dramatic by the huge drop in resignations at the start of the pandemic. Job vacancies are also at record levels, reaching almost 1 million in the same period. 

Dr Charmi Patel is associate professor of international human resource management at Henley Business School. She believes the conditions have been perfect for the mass movement of jobs due to the push of the pandemic and pull of new roles. 

“Suddenly, the very micro concept of leaving a job - which people always do, for numerous reasons - becomes a macro thing, triggered by an external environmental event, like the pandemic,” she says. 

“But we’re not simply seeing people resigning,” she continues. “We’re seeing excessive mobility of employees. People are quitting jobs and joining others which they think are a better fit, because job vacancies have risen but the supply of talent for those jobs has not risen in the same way.”