Before it became the tagline of the times, the “Great Resignation” was first a headline in a Bloomberg Businessweek May 2021 article on an interview with Professor Anthony Klotz talking about the best practices for resigning during the pandemic. Klotz is a professor of management at Texas A&M University and his area of research was on how and why employees resign and what happens after. It’s a phrase that had been turning in his head and he frequently used it in conversations with his wife.
Then made public, the American media finally found the words to capture a growing mindset and sentiment among the workforce and the term became a kind of lightning rod.
For me though the phrase doesn’t convey the complexity of the phenomenon because it seems as if the Great Resignation is not about resignations at all.
Resignation after all is taboo. Should anybody be alluding to that word especially here on LinkedIn? Resignation is a weak word, a passive word, implying giving up or surrender, an admission of misconduct or ineptitude. Inquirer’s Michael L. Tan expounds on this: “Resign generally has negative connotations, as when we call on a head of state or a company executive to resign. It can also mean passive acceptance of one’s situation, even when it is negative. Finally, among work-oriented cultures, to resign from work suggests laziness, incompetence, even dishonesty.”
In contrast, our current milieu is a narrative of action, of manifesting our personal realizations and convictions onto our persona at work, a form of protestation on previously unrealized disadvantageous conditions, and an optimistic mass movement for the what ifs and how abouts. It is a crack in the armor of “professionalism” revealing there are diverse individuals underneath the nondescript sea of labor.
This prediction takes us back to 2000 and Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point which “is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire” or virus. (Given what happened in 2020, we could use some new non-traumatic similes. Er, it spreads like a TikTok? No?)
Across the world we share the grace and burden of the necessity for work. Majority of us have worked like our fathers and mothers and their fathers and mothers who have worked before them. Our society is built upon the premise that in order for humanity to thrive there are things that must be done and there will always be people who will do them.
Now here is our collective unconscious telling us that while work is inescapable, a job is a choice.
Carl Jung describes the collective unconscious as a common denominator among all humans in the whole of history from which our instincts and beliefs arise. It is humans’ universal tendencies and it is said that at times of crisis, humans draw from that ancient map of meaning in order to navigate the way forward.
No matter the race, gender, or identity, our realizations are quite universal and great numbers of us have in isolation come to a common understanding of who we are as workers.
In a recent feature on BusinessInsider, Klotz expounds that "from organizational research, we know that when human beings come into contact with death and illness in their lives, it causes them to take a step back and ask existential questions. Like, what gives me purpose and happiness in life, and does that match up with how I'm spending my [life] right now? So, in many cases, those reflections will lead to life pivots."
Those existential questions used to be customarily rhetorical. Today, most of us would probably have answers. In addition, even in quarantine, it seems we are all arriving at the same conclusions.
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