New levels unlocked: Inside The Great Reshuffle

The worker ants are increasingly restless. Many have left the farm. Others have transformed into bumblebees, pollinating at will, demanding a greater say in the productive process.

The catalyst, of course, is the pandemic. “Loss makes you rethink your life and question your purpose,” says Leena Chatterjee, professor of organisational behaviour at BITS School of Management. “People have started re-examining their life and career choices and focus on ‘why’ they work over ‘where’ they work.”

In the worlds of human resource and corporate management and among scholars who study the evolution of how we work, two terms are being used to describe the phenomenon: The Great Resignation, and The Great Reshuffle.

Anthony Klotz coined the term The Great Resignation during an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek last May. In late 2020, he told Wknd, he saw signs that indicated there would be a wave of resignations in 2021.

It seemed counter-intuitive, admits the organisational psychologist and professor of management at Texas A&M University. A lot of people had been laid off, the pandemic was still dragging on and the global economy was reeling, but, as he saw it, four factors were at play. And as it turned out, they did combine to cause the wave he predicted.

In September 2021 alone, 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs. The US Bureau of Labour Statistics termed this a historic high for a single month, spawning a wave of debates on what this meant for the world, and the world of work.

Mint (like Hindustan Times, published by HT Media Ltd) reported in November that India was seeing the highest attrition rates in five years, 15% higher than in 2019. According to research company Gartner, the attrition rate in India rose from 10% in 2020 to 20% in 2021.

India’s top three IT services companies, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro, hired a combined 51,000 employees in the quarter ending December 2021.

“Tech companies have been hiring more than they were before the pandemic. There’s been a 24% increase in hiring overall between February 2020 and December 2021,” says Sashi Kumar, head of sales for India at job search platform Indeed. “This indicates huge churn in the hiring ecosystem.”

Now for the four factors — with a caveat.

The factors Klotz noticed building up in 2020 apply largely to a thin slice, particularly in the Indian population: educated, urban / metropolitan, white-collar employees with the ability to choose.

Then the other factors kicked in: there were cuts or stagnation in pay and perks, including time off; workloads increased and became more stressful in the work-from-home and school-from-home model; and there was an existential awakening (what some are calling pandemic epiphanies).

“More people experienced death more closely than before. There was a sense of exhaustion and burnout. People realised that a better time to quit wasn’t coming anytime soon,” Klotz says.

Those reassessing their lives were beginning to ask how much they really needed, what they wanted to do with their time, and whether there wasn’t a simpler way to make both ends meet.

Amid the layoffs of the first year of the pandemic, there was, crucially, far less stigma attached to being temporarily unemployed. There was less fear attached to being jobless, as most of those in the first wave of layoffs found new ways forward. Additionally, people were realising how much they could do, with just a laptop.

Two of these factors came together to push Arvind Sivanuri, 36, to quit what had begun as his dream job: a pandemic epiphany, and a realisation of what he could achieve on his own.

In 2019, Sivanuri was hired as national sales head with a global news media company. “I was very excited and I enjoyed my job,” he says. As offices closed in 2020, he took to the road. Life as a digital nomad meant travelling to Mumbai for shoots, returning to Goa for the weekends, working from the hills of Ooty, the jungle lodges in Kabini and the mountains of Nepal.

He is now lining up projects for his own filmmaking venture. He will continue to work on the go, but with control over the hours, the projects, and eventual creative output.

RE-WORK

This is The Great Resuffle. “A chunk of employees will refuse to go back to the humdrum of regular work life and will instead look to explore, innovate and do things differently,” Klotz says.

This period of re-evaluation is also being called The Great Reprioritisation, The Great Re-Invention, The Great Contemplation. Among women, especially mothers, it’s a shift triggered by simple exhaustion.

A Deloitte global study titled Women@Work, released in May 2021, surveyed 5,000 women working in 10 countries and found that only 33% considered their mental well-being to be “good”, down from 68% before the pandemic. The key stressors cited were remote schooling and caring for ailing family members alongside an increased workload (77% said the workloads at their jobs had increased during the pandemic).

In Ghaziabad, Rashmi Gupta, 57, an English teacher at DAV Public School, says these have been her hardest years in a 30-year career. She’s gone from not owning a laptop to using apps for everything; she spends hours more per lesson, trying to devise ways to make classes more effective long-distance; her new schedule stretches “far, far” beyond the seven-hour school day and five-day school week.

Her husband and daughter see how bogged down she is and pitch in to help with housework, she says. “Despite that, I wish I could have more time for myself. I miss my old lifestyle.”

LinkedIn’s Future of Work study, conducted by market research institute GfK and released in September 2021, surveyed leaders, founders and directors from a mix of small, medium, and large businesses with 2,269 respondents across Asia-Pacific, 736 of those from India. A vast majority of business leaders, 80%, said they felt pressured to offer greater flexibility in the workplace than they had in 2020.

The Randstad Employer Brand Research report for 2021 found that the top driver for employees when vetting potential employers is work-life balance, a shift from attractive salary and benefits, which topped this list in 2019.

“We have recently identified and categorised the talent pipeline to ensure succession or passing on of leadership roles to existing employees, instead of looking for new talents,” says Ratnadeep Ray, vice-president, head of HR and global talent management lead at Pune-based software company Druva.

“We use an internal guideline which checks for intention and motivation through our hiring conversations as more people look for purpose-led jobs. This raises the bar but ensures longevity,” says Dhruvil Sanghvi, founder and CEO of Mumbai-based global logistics automation company LogiNext.

Companies such as Virgin Group and Netflix began to offer open-ended leave policies even before 2020. Amid the pandemic, some governments are playing a role too. Portugal passed a law in November 2021 that bans bosses from contacting employees outside work hours.

Policies like that one might make the workplace more balanced, and keep employees like Sivanuri from leaving it altogether. He is expecting to earn about a fifth of his last-drawn salary, at least for the first eight months. “But there will be creative respite,” he says. “And I’ve come to realise in the pandemic that being content is what matters.”