Everyone is calling it the great resignation. I keep turning it over, and I wonder if we're naming the symptom and mistaking it for the disease.
I don't think people are quitting jobs so much as quitting a design. And the design had been quietly bad for a long time. A forced pause just gave everyone enough distance to see it.
Consider what a year at home actually did. It took away the commute, the theatre of the office, the open-plan noise, the low hum of being watched. And once all of that was gone, a lot of people found that the job underneath — the work itself — was thinner than they'd assumed. The scaffolding had been holding up a fairly small building.
I think that's a design failure, and design is the lens I tend to reach for, so maybe I'm biased. But a job is a made thing. Someone decided what a person would do all day, how their contribution would be seen, whether they'd ever get to finish anything, whether any of it visibly mattered to anyone. Mostly, though, jobs don't get designed. They accrete.
And people stay with work that doesn't fit for the same reasons they stay with a website that doesn't work. They don't know there's an alternative. Leaving is expensive. The friction of staying sits just below the line where you'd do something about it.
Then the line moved. That may be most of what happened.
If there's anything here for someone leading a team, I don't think the question is how do we keep people. It's quieter than that. What have we actually asked them to do all day — and would we want to do it ourselves?