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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Five Minutes Podcast.
Today I like to talk about The Great Resignation. And I learned about this topic just recently when I saw an interview with Professor Anthony Klotz from Texas A&M University. He was given this interview to the Washington Post, and he was the creator of this name. And he said, why? For example, in the US, 4.3 million people decided to leave their jobs. Let me just repeat; they decided to leave. They were not fired. They asked to leave, they resigned.
This is the surprising thing because you would not be surprised if I was recording this last year, and I would say, oh, 20 million people lost their jobs, means, when you lose your job means you wanted to continue, but the organization or the entity did not want you to continue. But now it's, you don't want to continue. And why this is a very important topic. And during this interview, he presented four topics to justify these massive numbers.
The first one is a backlog of 2020. So what happened in 2020 when the COVID-19 crisis exploded? What did everybody do? And this is, was this smart thing to do. It's you try to hold in your chair, right? You decided to hold in your job. It's not the time for you to say, oh, let me find something new. Because that time was a time for people to look for, I would say a safe cover. And now, because the pandemic is shifting, people are saying, okay, now it's time for me to move. So there is this backlog of 2020.
The second one is the Burnout people were talking about, and the Burnout was a problem before COVID, but COVID-19 intensified in a dramatic way the concept of Burnout because even a more for, I would say, single parents for people, with young kids, where you need to work and take care of the kids is staying all home. And this was a very complex scenario for you to work in. And most of the people probably you will agree with me. I don't know anyone that said to me, oh, I went to work remotely, and I'm working less. Everybody's working more. Everybody's having more meetings it's having, I would say more work to be done. It seems that we want to prove more because of staying, working from home. So what is the take here? Burnout is a big predictor of turnover. So people want to leave because they feel the Burnout.
The third one is that this is very interesting, is that shift of identity. You suffer so much during the COVID that now you are revisiting your own life. You want to move to a different place. You want to move to a different job. You know you don't want to work in the type of activity you have been working on for 20 years. So you want to do something else.
And the fourth is remote work. I know that many people want to go back to offices, and they feel that. And I feel too, but many people are in a panic about going back to work because it was hard for them to adapt. But now they have, I would say, more control of their own lives, and they don't want to come back. So many people may not come back to work.
So these were the four predictors in one key thing is that it's common for us to see that top jobs. People are extremely well-qualified deciding to leave, but what is happening now? It's that even low-paying jobs, even not extremely skilled professionals, want to leave.
So this is a little bit the opposite and why I want to share one thing with you. It's because you may be in one group or another group, or even on both groups. First, let's suppose you are one of them. So on your people side, so you suffer, you have pain, you thought you had some stability and you, when you face COVID, you saw that stability is just a word in the dictionary and you decided to disrupt yourself. And I love the concept of disruption, disrupting yourself. This was created by Whitney Johnson and she has a fantastic book about that.
And I'm talking a lot about this topic. It's that from time to time; you need to disrupt yourself to find new opportunities. And what happened in the past two years was a massive trigger for disruption. You know, a very relevant trigger. For example, you thought you were in a trampoline trying to jump, and suddenly you look back, and you see someone cutting your trampoline with a saw, and you say what this trampoline will collapse anyway. So now it's my time to make a perfect jump and do something else.
So for these people, take advantage of this. I would say this very stressful moment in your life and this very changing moment to really disrupt and positioning yourself with more happiness and this. So I really encourage you if you really want to change that, to do it and do it fast. No, let's talk about the second part. Imagine now you are an organization, or you are a project manager, or you are leading a project or leading a team, and you are the victim.
I'm coating victim of this great Resignation means every single day, someone goes to your desk, say I'm leaving, and they'll say, but we have such a happy team. We are working all as a family and this, but now you left it. What is happening is that you need to identify what makes people stay. It's not necessarily money, but you need to identify what is triggering people to leave and how I can reduce that trigger. You need to rethink how will people work in the future.
Will I require them to go physically to the office or not? How will we play around with the commute item? And you will face dramatic competition for resources. I live in Portugal, here just to give you an example, probably this example is pretty much anywhere. Civil construction here, it's becoming so competitive for resources that you cannot find a plumber. You cannot find an electrician. You cannot, they are, out track.
I would say the required topic, people are looking for them, and they are competing to bring these talents. Because what happened is that you have a growth in this kind of service. And several people did not want to work in that field anymore. They are changing. Did you see, so this is the big trend and why I recorded this Podcast and put the title "Why We Must Pay Attention to the Great Resignation In Our Projects. Why? Because it's impossible for you to deliver projects without people. And if you don't have people, if every single day, someone in your team as to leave, you will not deliver.
You will not, full stop. There is no way you can deliver without a resource. Any, it's not money. Money does not build a house. You cannot pile money and build a house. Money is just a way of buying the resources to build the house. If you're not able to buy the resources to build the house, your house does not exist, even with millions in your bank account. And this is the challenge we face today; for example, we are talking about transformation. I gave some examples on construction, but iIT? Technology? Oh my God, these environments are changing so dramatically.
People are facing Burnout for transformation; it's transformation on the top of transformation, people are just leaving, and they leave in the middle of a transformation. And imagine for you, and you know that you leave a cook in your restaurant in the middle of the preparation of a meal, and someone needs to jump in and say, did you put salt or not? This is what's happening. So we need to think about that. Otherwise, we don't deliver our projects. And I think this is a big trend. And I truly believe that this is a big shift in the way we manage, we handle. And we work with our human resources.
So think about that. Then see you next week with another five minutes Podcast.
