Economists, politicians, academics and newspaper editors with too much time on their hands love to make up buzzwords.

One of the most recent examples is the phenomenon that occurred soon after the COVID pandemic ended, when a massive wave of people who were fortunate enough to still be in work decided to pack in their jobs and look for something else.

The buzzword the economists and their cronies gave it was 'The Great Resignation'.

Photograph of a sticky note on a keyboard that says "I Quit"

A few even blamed it on the ‘anti-work movement’ excuse that people got so soft after so many months of being furloughed or working from home that they simply didn’t want to do it anymore.

It was a blinkered argument that didn't hold water because the reasons most of those workers quit their jobs were a lot more complex than that. For many of them, the desire to leave their companies had been on the horizon long before COVID-19 even arrived. They were already feeling undervalued, demotivated and dissatisfied, and all the pandemic did was give them the space to brew on it until they finally decided that enough was enough, life was literally too short, and it was time to look for a role that was more rewarding with an employer who actually gave a damn.

And that, to me, highlights one of the biggest drivers behind The Great Resignation:

Failure of Leadership

The reason that most of those 'quits' (as the US Bureau of Labor Statistics called then) were so unhappy (pre-COVID) was because they didn’t feel valued, they didn’t feel supported, they didn’t feel heard, and they felt trapped inside a negative workplace environment. Other reasons like not being paid what they believed they were worth and not being given the opportunities for career development were massive factors as well, although that’s all wrapped up in showing an employee how much they’re valued. You can bet those were the workers who were already very close to jumping long before most of the world knew a place called ‘Wuhan’ even existed, but they didn’t jump because they didn’t want to risk leaping from the frying pan into the fire.

How failed leadership led to The Great Resignation

For a start, a successful leader would never have let that pre-COVID discontent happen. A significant part of effective leadership is ensuring everyone on your team understands their importance, feels empowered, knows they'll be listened to, and is rewarded for their worth. They also know that if there's an issue, it will get sorted. If, as a leader, you can't do all those things directly, you employ managers and team leaders who can. When that base level of respect for your employees is in place, a healthy workplace culture will surely follow. If the leadership of the workers who quit had done that, it's doubtful that those workers would ever want to go elsewhere. On the contrary, they would have looked forward to properly returning to work when the pandemic was over.

Another reason many workers quit post-pandemic was because of how their companies treated them while the pandemic was happening. A recent Stanford University study showed that companies with a pre-existing lousy track record of taking care of their employees doubled down on their bad decisions during COVID. They were much more likely to lay off workers, ramp up the workloads of the people who survived, and treat their employees like dehumanised cogs in a machine.

Should leaders carry all the blame for The Great Resignation?

Absolutely not.

After all, another buzzword commentators like to throw around about the pandemic is 'unprecedented', and even though that's a cliché, it's undoubtedly what COVID-19 was.

Leaders were just as unprepared for COVID-19 as their employees, and they had the added stress of scrambling to keep their businesses alive when thousands of other companies were going to the wall. Unpleasant decisions had to be made, and even the best leaders were getting more than a few things wrong. Still, even though it's not a leader’s responsibility to wrap their employees in cotton wool, it is our job, as leaders, to do what we can to support them and make the unpleasant decisions as painless as possible.

A lot of leaders didn’t do that.

They just let people go without warning, compensation, or even a thank you for all their service and hard work. Or they furloughed people without topping up the final 20% of their wages that wasn't covered by the government's scheme, while the leader and top-tier managers didn't take any cuts in their own salaries. Or, for the people who continued working:

they amped up the stress by not communicating clearly what was going on (i.e., whether they'd still have a job next week)
they gave them too much to do to pick up the slack of the workers they'd laid off or furloughed
or – in the case of remote working – they didn't give them the online tools to do their job and either left them feeling totally cut off from the rest of their team (like they were working in a vacuum) or so intensely monitored that they didn’t feel trusted.

Then, when the pandemic was over, a lot of those poorly led companies:

heavily 'encouraged' people to return to work before they were ready
increased their workload without any consultation or consideration
and/or made it clear that on top of everything else there wouldn’t be any hope of pay rises or promotion in the foreseeable future.

Interestingly, even with the pandemic (allegedly) behind us, pressuring people to return to work before they were comfortable might still prove fatal for many of those businesses moving forward. Towards the end of March 2020, (in other words, more than a year before most of the world started returning to 'normal'), the billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban warned companies not to force their employees back to work too soon. "How companies respond to coronavirus will define their brand for decades," he told the CNBC 'Markets in Turmoil' special, "If you rushed in and somebody got sick, you were that company. If you didn't take care of your employees or stakeholders and put them first, you were that company. For many employees, that's going to be unforgivable."

Of course, there were plenty of other reasons why people left their jobs post-COVID too.

Industries that are dependent on their location and have a defined operating window – like restaurants, cafes, cinemas, and gyms – lost a lot of their employees because they couldn't afford to keep working there, they weren't prepared to risk their health and wellbeing because most of those industries are customer-facing with a high customer footfall and because the impact on public services (buses and trains) meant the unsociable shifts were no longer tenable. That’s why businesses that aren’t dependent on location and operating times (like food delivery services, streaming movie channels, and internet-based fitness instructors) have been raking in profits since the first lockdown.

But those aren’t the workers who were involved in The Great Resignation.

An article published in The Harvard Business Review in September 2021 made a compelling case for ‘Who Is Driving the Great Resignation’, and its results were these:

Resignation rates are highest among mid-career employees aged between 30 and 45 years old.
Resignation rates are highest in the technology and healthcare industries and "among employees who worked in fields that had experienced extreme increases in demand due to the pandemic, likely leading to increased workloads and burnout."

Not even the best leader in the universe can hold onto every employee. Sometimes, an employee can have no issues with how they're being treated but still feel like they need to move on and do something else. Or maybe they want a salary increase or promotion that their current company can't give them even with the best will in the world. But those examples are few and far between. There's a growing amount of evidence showing that most workers who joined The Great Resignation exodus did so because they were unhappy in their role and didn't trust their company's leadership.

What are the key takeaways?

This is going to sound like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs (which is kind of a disturbing visual when you think about it; how twisted was whoever came up with that saying?!), but the key leadership takeaways from The Great Resignation are obvious.

Make sure your workers feel supported.
Make sure:

they understand their importance in delivering your vision and – just as importantly,
they know you understand their importance by paying them what they're worth and giving them the tools and independence they need to do their job well.

Keep them in the loop about everything that might affect their role in the future (which is also the best way to head Chinese whispers off at the pass.)
Don't pigeonhole your employees and starve them of development. Put a realistic career progression plan in place so they have a trajectory and know that staying with your company is in their best interests.
Don't assume your employees are happy just because they’re not complaining.
When people leave, find out why. If you're doing everything you can as a leader, don't take the 'quits' personally but don't let them go without asking questions. If you find out they left because of a genuine failure in your system, do something about it. Sometimes, what you discover might even help you streamline your operation. For example, if the person resigned because they no longer felt stretched in their role, maybe it's an indication that the process they were involved in could be accomplished more efficiently by fewer people.