According to The Atlantic, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review, a new phenomenon is afoot.
People are resigning their jobs in droves: 4 million quit in July and 4.3 million in August. August was the fifth month of near-record resignations, with 3 percent of the workforce leaving, nearly 9 percent in the food-service industry. The Harvard Business Review says the highest rates come from workers between 30 and 45 years old. People under 30 and those over 70 are more likely to stay put and leave the wander lust to those in the middle years of their careers.
Problems in the labor force have been well documented since the middle of 2020. Currently, nearly 11 million jobs are unfilled and most industries are struggling to operate at normal levels, due to the difficulty in hiring. Lots of reasons have been cited, but until recently, no one had noticed the resignations.
Trends and levels of reality are discovered statistically long before they can be seen with the naked eye. The newly coined “Great Resignation,” a.k.a. the “Big Quit,” is a trend that surfaced from economic and employment data. The data are silent on the causes. The Atlantic, Forbes, and Harvard Business Review have stepped up to offer explanations. They fully agree on the data and the trends, but not the narrative that explains the data, except that the pandemic was the catalyst.
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According to Derek Thompson in his article in The Atlantic, the pandemic has led to several other “Greats”: the Great Rudeness, the Great Reshuffle, and the Great Reset. Being locked down, working remotely, and only partially employed at best had several effects on most people. They were and are frustrated with the loss of what had been their normal activities. Thompson says the frustration has led to people becoming more aggressive, short tempered, and gruff in public. Thus, the Great Rudeness. He cites a report from the airlines on an all-time record pace of difficult travelers; a previous Atlantic article by Amana Mull described bad behavior at a Trader Joe’s. It has become common to hear tales of customers abusing service employees over masks or other COVID policies.
The other “Greats” in the Thompson article are the Reset and Reshuffle. In a narrative that also appears in other articles, people rethought their lives during the pandemic. They realized that work and careers had been playing too large a role in their lives, eating up too much of their time and energy. A person working 50 to 60 hours a week has little time for family, recreation, or anything else, except eating and sleeping. In returning to work, people didn’t want to give up the freedom they had experienced or the social time with family and friends. In that narrative, when going back to an old job or taking a new one, people were left unsatisfied by a return to pre-pandemic working conditions. Anyone unsatisfied with a job often resigns.
The pandemic is also spurring a significant increase in new businesses. Many people learned to use the internet more effectively during the lockdown. The increased skills in the e-world have led to more people establishing e-businesses. But the lockdown also allowed people enough free time to plan other new businesses. Starting a new business or dissatisfaction with the old working conditions, of course, produced more quits.
An article in the Harvard Business Review by Ian Cook added another dimension to the issue. Cook used some of the same logic about people becoming more dissatisfied now than before because they’ve had sufficient time to rethink their lives. In Cook’s article, however, companies are encouraged to develop metrics to help understand the problem, then come up with strategies for job satisfaction and retention. The Harvard Business Review then suggests in its iconic manner using the metrics to measure the success of strategies.
Forbes has yet another view of the subject. In an article by Bryan Robinson, pay and benefits, while important, are not the primary reason people quit their jobs. Robinson proposes that a lack of empathy in the workplace is primary. Indifferent bosses who lack empathy have pushed people out the door. The article provides a template for increasing empathy in the workplace. It cites statistics on the difference in retention rates in empathic and non-empathic environments to make its case.
Whatever the reason, people are leaving their jobs at record rates.
Normally, in a high-unemployment economy, people stay put. When employment is hard to find, a job is valuable and should be kept whenever possible. But in this economy, there are jobs, lots of jobs, millions of jobs begging for someone to take them. And those employers are competing with one another for employees. In most cases, that means higher wages, better benefits, and if you are lucky, more empathy.
The casino industry is a service industry and by that definition, it’s among the industries with the highest turnover rate and the largest number of unfilled jobs. It is a major challenge for the casinos.
There probably is not a magic bullet for solving this dilemma. The situation is in flux and it may be a long time before all of the post-pandemic trends are fully visible. However, in the short-term, for the casinos and other service businesses, it probably means learning to reorganize work so that fewer employees are necessary. It may also mean that better pay and benefits are required. And it quite probably means that casinos have to focus on empathy and quality-of-life issues if they want to attract and retain employees. All of that is much easier said than done.
