You know how they say it costs 3x as much to get a new customer as to keep a customer? Or how employee retention vs recruitment can cost 90-150% of an annual salary?
Here’s my new prediction – when this pandemic shakes out we’ll have a new stat: cost of employee turnover on strategic partnerships.
My goodness, the Great Resignation keeps gaining steam. So much that I can see it affecting the numerous partnerships in and around the Economic Development Coalition. At a recent staff meeting, I think every person’s report included some anecdote of how a person has “moved on” or “got picked up” by another organization – and the logical set backs that follow or need for further relationship building.
This brought up three posts we’ve been sharing internally I’d like to pass along:
The Great Resignation Is Accelerating
The great resignation is not the only Great R-word overhauling the labor force.
Leisure and hospitality workers might be saying “to hell with this” on account of Americans deciding to behave like a pack of escaped zoo animals. Call it the Great Rudeness. Airlines in the United States reported that, by June 2021, the number of unruly passengers had already broken records—doubling the previous all-time pace of orneriness.
Meanwhile, the basic terms of employment are undergoing a Great Reset. The pandemic thrust many families into a homebound lifestyle reminiscent of the 19th-century agrarian economy—but this time with screens galore and online delivery. More families today work at home, cook at home, care for kids at home, entertain themselves at home, and even school their kids at home.
Finally, there is a Great Reshuffling of people and businesses around the country. For decades, many measures of U.S. entrepreneurship declined. But business formation has surged since the beginning of the pandemic, and the largest category by far is e-commerce.
Work-Life Balance Is Over—The Life-Work Revolution Is Here
Work-life Balance flamed out in 2020. The life-work balance revolution blazed in its place.
Back in the day, before Covid-19, we struggled to squeeze a bit of our lives into the consuming vortex of work. We charmingly called this “work-life balance” while knowing such “balance” was a lie.
Then Covid-19 hit, and we traded our platinum miles to sleep in our own beds, care for our aging parents and reconnect with our childhood friends. We drank from the well of our cozy, messy, maddening, nourishing lives, only now realizing how thirsty we were for non-working time and experiences.
Now that we’ve felt it, we’re not going to give it up.
Yes, lots of us are itching to break out our work clothes or make a trip to the office to convene with colleagues around a white board. But this movement is much bigger than the work-from-home debate.
We changed the math. We looked the lie of work-life balance in the eye as we experienced its mirror equation: life-work balance.
A Profession Is Not a Personality
Are you a self-objectifier in your job or career? Ask yourself a few questions, and answer them honestly.
- Is your job the biggest part of your identity? Is it the way you introduce yourself, or even understand yourself?
- Do you find yourself sacrificing love relationships for work? Have you forgone romance, friendship, or starting a family because of your career?
- Do you have trouble imagining being happy if you were to lose your job or career? Does the idea of losing it feel a little like death to you?
If you answered affirmatively to any or all of these, recognize that you will never be satisfied as long as you objectify yourself. Your career or job should be an extension of you, not vice versa.
What are you reading? What should we share? Send us a note and let us know.
