What can we learn from the Great Resignation?

(Vienna, October 13, 2023) — The Great Resignation appears to be coming to an end, economists say. But what can companies and managers learn from the rapid pace of layoffs in recent years to prevent employees from leaving? A study outside the Complexity Science Center (CSH) identifies some of the forces behind the Great Quit and suggests that mental health issues contributed to the wave of smoking cessation in the United States.

The researchers analyzed the discourse about work on the social media platform Reddit between 2018 and 2021. “We wanted to understand the reasons for the increase in dropout rates after the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States,” explains Maria del Río-Chanonaresearcher at CSH and first author of the study recently published in EPJ Data Science.

“One thing to note is that after recessions, there is always an increase in resignations. Job changes are nothing new, but the rise in departures in 2021 has reached a record level. This begged the question: what makes this time different? », Adds del-Rio Chanona.

Real time

“Reddit gave us the opportunity to study this emerging economic phenomenon in real time,” explains the researcher. Del Rio-Chanona and his colleagues focused on the “r/jobs” forum, where more than a hundred thousand people shared their work-related questions and concerns. Reddit posts are semi-anonymous and unlimited in length, allowing users to express themselves freely and in detail.

In the study, the team used topic modeling, a machine learning technique that discovers conversation topics from large-scale text data, to identify the most common concerns in workplace discourse on Reddit .

“Our main finding is that the pandemic has exacerbated already growing mental health concerns among workers, and we show that these concerns have become disproportionately present in the discourse around quit-related jobs since the start of the pandemic », observe del Rio-Chanona and his colleagues. .

New forces

The results show that posts about mental health and work-related distress – for example, expressing feelings of anxiety, stress and overwhelmed at work – were more likely to involve time off work. In other words, when talking about quitting smoking, people talk about mental health issues more often than before or than other people discussing work. People’s motivation to quit smoking may have been influenced by distressing work experiences and fears about their mental health, del Rio-Chanona and colleagues suggest.

“Our results indicate that the Covid-19 pandemic has unleashed forces that contributed to smoking cessation behaviors, such as mental health problems, that were less salient during previous economic recoveries,” assesses Ljubica Nedelkoska, principal investigator at CSH and co-author of the study. “These new forces could help explain the unusually high dropout rates in 2021.”

Changes

Despite concerns about mental health and work-related distress at the start of the pandemic, things changed with the Great Resignation – likely due to better job opportunities, researchers say. “With better job opportunities in 2021, posts about salary negotiations, job offers and promotions have increased,” del Rio-Chanona points out.

“People were talking less about quitting because they hated their job, and more about negotiating salaries and discussing job offers. Some of the people who quit in 2021 may not have liked their jobs at all in 2020, but only quit in 2021, when job prospects were better,” the researchers explain.

The future?

Tens of millions of Americans quit their jobs during the Great Recession, but fewer have done so this year, leading experts to conclude the phenomenon is over. Now the question is: what can we do from here? According to Nedelkoska, the Great Resignation gave us an opportunity to reflect on the way people work and improve company practices. Del Rio-Chanona emphasizes the importance of emphasizing the relational and fulfillment needs of employees in the future. “In light of the current debate about how new technologies are reinventing work, it is crucial to use technology to improve working conditions. »

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About the Complexity Science Center

The mission of the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) is to host, educate, and inspire complex systems scientists dedicated to making sense of Big Data to drive science and society. Complexity Science Hub scientists develop methods for the scientific, quantitative and predictive understanding of complex systems.

The CSH is a joint initiative of the Austrian Institute of Technology AIT, Central European University CEU, Danube University Krems, Graz University of Technology, Medical University of Vienna , TU Wien, VetMedUni Vienna, Vienna University of Economics and Business and the Austrian Economic Chambers (WKO). https://www.csh.ac.at