By Andy Medici – Senior Reporter, The Playbook,
14 March 2022
Workers are clearly tired of being tired.
It's no secret that burnout is pervasive in many industries and quit rates remain at or near record highs amid what experts have dubbed "The Great Resignation."
Those factors are fueling an intense desire for increased flexibility — often illustrating a disconnect between employees and businesses — but they also show how the pandemic has changed the way many workers view their careers.
It's a shift that could have broad implications for businesses as they seek to navigate this intense labor market.
A survey from Prudential found 70% of workers say they have prioritized, or are considering prioritizing their personal lives over their jobs and careers, while 20% said they were willing to take pay cuts if it means they could have a better balance with their personal life.
Nearly 48% of employees in a recent survey by invoicing firm Skynova said flexible schedules were more important than salaries, and 39% said flexible work schedules were more important than pay raises. A whopping 90% of them agreed flexible schedules can help businesses keep workers.
“It's no longer work-life balance, it's life-work balance.” said Ron Hetrick, an economist at data and analytics firm Emsi Burning Glass. “When we’re not talking about the service-level workforce, I think the idea of flexibility is very, very strong.”
Hetrick pushed back against what have become office culture norms. How much does it hurt for workers to get a few more days of time off and how important is it for companies to force employees to come into an office or work the same set of hours?
Meanwhile, workers have found their lives changed for the better, whether it’s by moving to a better location, having more time to spend with family just altering their own lives for the better — and they are not interested in having work dictate those terms anymore, he added.
He said it’s a drastic but understandable departure in the role work plays in everyday life. Baby boomers entered the workforce in great numbers, and so did more women from the 1970s onward, creating a wealth of workers and making it harder to advance in their careers, Hetrick said.
“Work defined them, but that generation is all retiring out. The next generation grew up detesting the amount their parents were working. They are not devoted or married to work the way the boomers were married to work,” Hetrick said.
Overall, the so-called quit rate dropped slightly to 2.8%, down from 3% in December. That means about 4.2 million Americans quit their jobs in January, according to preliminary numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Quit rates also continue to be the highest in accommodation and food services, at 6% and retail at 4.6%, according to the BLS.
Meanwhile, businesses across the country are pulling out all the stops to bolster pay, offer better benefits and find ways to cope with a shortage of workers exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and worsened by long-term demographic shifts that experts don't see going away any time soon.
That search for flexibility doesn’t just translate into demands for remote work or high quit rates — Americans are starting their own businesses in droves, according to an analysis by Emsi Burning Glass. New business applications from firms likely to hire employees surged as well, from 987,500 in 2019 to 1.4 million in 2021. A separate recent report by LendingTree found the number of people filing paperwork to start a business rose 25% from 2019 to 2020.
Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, said in an earlier article that the pandemic forced a moment of great introspection among workers.
“As much as people talked about the Great Resignation, it’s really kind of a great reassessment of life and priorities and values in a lot of ways too. People's worlds have just been rocked so hard over the past couple of years. Even if they’ve kept their job and their income has been relatively stable, so many other things have changed,” Schulz said. “You can see it might embolden people to take a leap that might not have otherwise have quite wanted to do before.”
Workers are also clamoring for greater flexibility in remote or hybrid work and in scheduling. About 82% of full-time American workers would trade in their five, eight-hour days for four, 10-hour days — the same amount of hours worked — and do it for the same pay they would be getting now, according to a poll by Maru Public Opinion conducted for The Business Journals.