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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Are you resigned to the Great Resignation?

Don’t be. Whether you’re buying or selling labor, the so-called Great Resignation exemplifies the innumeracy of much of the journalistic profession, along with the statistical credulity of their audience.

The problem isn’t with the alarming-looking numbers themselves. Lots of people really have left their jobs – more than 47 million in 2021. The problem is with how we interpret this number.

The incorrect interpretation is that people are giving up on the idea of working for a living. That’s not what’s happening.

What the Great Resignation numbers are telling us is that employees have decided they can choose to leave jobs they hate. They aren’t leaving the workforce to mooch off their parents. They’re leaving the jobs they have for hoped-for greener pastures.

The proper metric for understanding workforce shrinkage is something else. It’s called the labor force participation rate (LFPR). It measures the percentage of the potential workforce that either is employed or isn’t but would like to be.

For an in-depth analysis of a complex subject, read Brooking’s “Labor market exits and entrances are elevated: Who is coming back?”, Lauren Bauer and Wendy Edelberg, December 14, 2021.

Very briefly, LFPR increased steadily from its post-great-recession low of just over 80% to a pre-pandemic high of 83% (for those aged 25 to 54 years old; different age thresholds yield different but parallel outcomes). It “crashed,“ to use an unnecessarily dramatic verb, to a pandemic-driven low of just under 80% in 2020. It’s been recovering since then, to a current level of about 82%.

The usually cited evidence doesn’t, that is, support the proposition that we Americans have given up on the idea of working for a living.

What’s real in all this is an imbalance between the number of jobs employers have open and the number of qualified applicants who want those open jobs. To a significant extent this is a consequence of how strong the economy is, not how few workers are available. To give you an idea, 64 million jobs were created in 2021, while first-time unemployment claims fell to about 200,000 from about 800,000 a year earlier.

Another view: In 2021 the economy added about 64 million jobs while “only” about 47 million employees resigned from the jobs they had to express interest in them.

One way or another, employers want to hire more people than they can find who want to be hired. What’s an employer to do? A few thoughts come to mind:

  • Don’t gripe about the law of supply and demand. You might as well resent gravity for making the direction you go when you trip and fall down. Right now, demand exceeds supply, which means prices – compensation, that is – ought to increase. In other years, when the supply of suitable workers exceeded demand, employers were happy to pay them less.
  • Keep the phrase “that’s why they call it work” to yourself. No manager can make every responsibility in every position fun. That isn’t an excuse to make a job unpleasant. If you’re in doubt on this point, buy yourself a copy of Leading IT: <Still> the Toughest Job in the World and read chapter 6, which talks about how to motivate employees, also chapter 7, which covers team dynamics.
  • Stop discriminating. I’m not talking about race, gender, ethnicity, or age, although if you do discriminate on any of these bases, shame on you, and stop it. Add to your do-not-discriminate-against list bad resume writers. You aren’t after all, hiring a resume.
  • Make onboarding more effective. The hidden cost of bringing new employees up to speed has always been large. The less time employees spend with you before leaving for greener pastures, the less time you have to amortize the cost of onboarding and acculturation. As employment time shrinks, the impact of onboarding and acculturation increases.

Bob’s last word: Once upon a time, much of the workforce was unionized, which gave them, and also independent employees some level of protection from bad managers. Think of the Great Resignation as a sort of crowdsourced virtual unionization.

Couple it with the increased willingness of employees to insist on better working conditions, the impact of the so-called “gig economy,” and the rise of the remote worker, and it’s clear that building desirability into the work environment can’t be an afterthought anymore.

Bob’s sales pitch: A favor, please. If you’ve read any of my books, it would be helpful if you’d post a review on Amazon. That’s especially true if you liked what you read (authors have egos, after all). But even if you’re less than enthusiastic, the number of reviews adds a patina of legitimacy to book shoppers deciding which book to buy on a given subject.

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|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

Politics is what happens when two or more people need to make one decision.

Innovation lives in the intersection of “I have a great idea!” and n*(n-1)/2 – the number of pairs in a group of n people. It’s why “I have a great idea” is as far as most ideas get, and why the politics of innovation doesn’t scale very well.

Imagine you have a great idea, or bump into one and like it. You think the idea should have a happy home in the organization you work in.

What comes next?

Well, you could gripe to your buddies over lunch (or Zoom), “You know what they oughta do?” The griping strategy wins you several points: Your buddies will find you tiresome, you won’t persuade anyone, and if you do persuade anyone they won’t be a member of the legendary, all-powerful group known as “They” – the ones who oughta do whatever you’re proposing.

You could, as an alternative, send an anonymous letter … yes, letter; in theory there’s such a thing as an anonymous email but I wouldn’t count on it … an anonymous letter, I say, to the CEO or other highly placed executive who is part of the all-powerful “They,” explaining the idea.

This approach works even better than griping to your buddies, because the only person or people who will find you tiresome won’t know who you are. You still won’t persuade anyone, but netted against buddy-griping you’re still ahead.

Rewind.

In any organization … in any group of people with more than one member … innovation attempts are inherently political. Within the group will be a subset that has to agree the innovation is worth pursuing. And right about here is where a lot of recommended approaches to innovation fail.

That’s because the moment an idea escapes your head and wanders off into the wild, it mutates: Every person in the subset who encounters it – the decision-makers – will, advertently or inadvertently, adjust it so it’s in tune with their expertise, personal experience, perceptions, mental models, and blind spots. And each one will adjust it differently.

For your idea to survive it will have to strike a difficult balance. It will have to resemble how things are now closely enough that each decision-maker can readily connect the dots to what you’re suggesting.

And, it will have to be different enough to get their attention.

And so, each decision-maker will alter the idea from what you originally had in mind in ways that range from trivial to important.

Then, each pair of decision-makers will have to reconcile the mutated versions of the idea that are in their heads, resulting in [n*(n-1)/2]/2 post-reconciliation versions.

Rinse and repeat. After a few iterations it’s possible your idea will still be recognizable, and that the decision-makers will decide to move forward on it. But by that point you’ll have lost all influence over how it evolves.

The process isn’t, of course, as well-organized as all this. It’s less of a flow chart and more a bunch of scattered conversations. I’m just trying to distill the essence of why and how ideas evolve.

Bob’s last word: Most large organizations have put proposal processes in place to try to make innovation more organized. These processes help everyone with worthwhile ideas understand what topics have to be covered to make the idea worth evaluating.

But no matter how well-written a proposal is, human beings will still apply a remarkable level of ingenuity in finding ways to misunderstand what they’re reading.

Which is why, if you have an idea you want to propose, your first step should be to think it through according to the proposal process guidelines, but your second step should be to find one decision-maker … just one … to propose it to first.

That will maximize the chance that your idea will survive the meatgrinder of proposal evaluation intact, minimizing the extent to which the politics of innovation shape-shifts it into a form even you, its originator, won’t recognize.

Bob’s sales pitch: In CIO’s upcoming Future of Work Summit I debate Isaac Sacolick on the business readiness of machine learning, with IDG’s Editor in Chief, Eric Knorr moderating the back-and-forth. The Summit takes place February 15th through February 17th, and looks to have a lot of valuable sessions. Our debate is scheduled for Wednesday, February 16th, at 2:50pm CST. Mark your calendar.

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