There’s a certain alluring neo-Romanticism with the idea of the Great Resignation. I like to imagine it as a whole generation of hero workers deciding to loosen their collars and permanently abandon their cubicles to pursue their passions and a chance at a better way of working (like a postmodern Marxian, Thoreau-esqe mashup fever dream).
It could still happen, a modern exodus of multitudes leaving the place where they’ve been “enslaved” in search of a promised land where they can be free and truly belong. One thing good out of the pandemic is that it has parted the sea of job security and workers now feel more confident about making a crossing without drowning.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/great-resignation-tipping-point-collective-part-1-ivy-nicolas-cruz/?trackingId=%2FxfqLapdTE2VtpH%2Ftq2%2FQw%3D%3D
However, culturally it seems less of a mass departure and more like a packed LRT ride where train passengers get slightly shoved and shuffled around as people periodically board, disembark or inch towards the exits.
Our labor situation: hard to board, harder if not improbable to find a seat and risky to leave.
In the Philippine Statistics Authority’s (PSA) Labor Turnover Survey 2020, from among their respondents “about 37.2 percent of workers resigned in the first quarter due to personal issues.”
Resigning due to “personal issues” sounds like a tenet of the Great Resignation. What do you think it means that in that same survey period 17.1% admitted to have gone AWOL?
Personal issues. Ghosting of employers. Companies should start getting worried about mass resignations, shouldn’t they? Maybe not.
On the landing page of PSA’s website is the August 2021 national employment rate of 91.9%. (For reference, it was 94.7% in pre-pandemic 2018.) In 2019, a third of respondents resigned because they were “hired by another company”. Relatively in 2020, while lower, roughly a quarter did so.
Though bleak, my LRT scenario might be more in tune with our national reality, more akin to the other great, the Great Reshuffle. LinkedIn CEO Ryan Rolansky describes it as “an unprecedented moment in the history of work where all of us are rethinking not just how we work, but why we work. To me, this is a great thing. More people will be doing work they love at companies they feel passionate about, leading to greater success for organizations who engage their employees with empathy and trust.”
A good number of Filipino knowledge workers have the skills and the talents to hop on and off the train. On the other hand, the Filipino culture of parents and extended families usually open to supporting loved ones during a job transition will allow the younger cohorts of the workforce to pursue jobs that have a connection to their passions and interests, and to actively look for companies that stand for ideas they believe in.
People are leaving one pandemic battered industry or company for a stable industry or an innovative company that built a good reputation for handling the pandemic. Career coaches nowadays advise job seekers this one question to ask a potential employer: “How did your company handle the pandemic, specifically how did it support employees?” It’s a question that should be asked not only by job seekers, but by everyone.
Millennials and Gen Z have been taking some flack for job-hopping but in the pandemic that could be an upside as it is observed companies are worried about talent retention. In the time of the Great Reshuffle, workers of all ages can use our experience, talents and skills as so-called bargaining chips to reshape the world of work or at least influence companies that are still in denial about #futureofwork.
That is why it’s crucial more than ever that sectors in our country work together to launch more programs on upskilling and reskilling. It used to be that Filipino parents believed in the notion that a College diploma is a direct line to a stable job with vertical career growth. These days, if one sticks with just that diploma, be prepared to let go of career growth which is now multi-directional, even multi-dimensional.
For example, as much as I am a proponent of digital transformation, technology is a two-edged sword. The country’s BPO industry, for instance, continued to grow in 2020. But analysts are predicting there is an increasing number of processes being taken over by bots and AI.
Robots are taking jobs from humans and humans are coming up with other kinds of jobs for other humans to do. For instance, BPO jobs in my industry would be leaning towards knowledge-based work like content production, social media management, learning and development, and data and analytics, leaving bots and AI to man the phones.
Even with the lack of institutionalized continuous learning, count on the fact that Filipinos will find a way to evolve and qualify for post-pandemic jobs. These are new jobs, many of which have “not been created yet”. However, the national challenge is how to scale in order to ensure that the reshuffle includes blue collar and service workers trapped in contractual, no benefits, low-paying jobs.
In the Great Reshuffle, how might we ensure nobody gets left behind?
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