It's Monday, ma I'm Oscar Rome Mirrors from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. The number of Americans that quit their jobs during the pandemic spite and it could be a permanent fixture on the job market. This has led to more opportunities for employees, but for employers it's been a nightmare. They're dealing with high turnover and how to keep workers happy. Simply offering
they work from home model doesn't work anymore. Aki Itto, senior correspondent at Business Insider, joins us for the Forever resignation. Thanks for joining US Hockey, Thanks for having me. I wanted to talk about the state of work in the country right now. Obviously, throughout the pandemic, we heard a lot about the great resignation, people leaving their jobs looking for better working conditions, better pay. A lot of work from home is what people were really looking for. That
figures a lot into what's going on right now. But what we're seeing right now is a new report saying that high levels of resignation could be a permanent fixture right now. The forever resignation, I think is what you called it. So for employers. It's a bad thing, right, they have to transition, they have to figure out how to operate here. For employees, they've never had more power than they do now. So it's a really interesting thing that's going on right now. So Aki tell us a
little bit about it. So, I mean, we've been seeing incredibly high attrition rates at companies across the country for at least a year now. People are calling this a great resignation and executives are just, you know, really tired of it. It's incredibly expensive to hire right now. They're trying so hard to retain their existing employees. It's exhausting, and so they're asking when it's just going to end.
But what one research from Gardner predicts is that it's never gonna end, That a high turnover is just going to be a permanent thing in the American workplace because of remote work, which isn't going away even after the pandemic um. So it's a really interesting prospect. You know, we don't know if this is going to be true,
and so the future comes. But I found the prediction incredibly compelling, and they have some interest in data to background, So for a little perspective, right, they say that it's going to remain higher than before the pandemic. The rate of resignations, let's say, and you know, so for a large company something with twenty five thou employees, that means
that a thousand employees could be quitting each year. That's a lot of training and retraining that you got to do, you know, all the new hires and added benefits everything, that's a lot that the companies would have to go through. Yeah, that's right. And that's an additional one thousand people quitting per year compared to before the pandemic. So yeah, it's it's just a tremendous amount of turnover for companies. It means that they're probably going to have to hire more recruiters,
right to replace just all of those openings. And uh, you know, Gartner says that companies are probably going to have to run their organizations in a very different way
as well. Leading up to probably today, there is this incredible emphasis on running hyper lean organizations, making sure that everybody was working at a hundred percent capacity, and you probably can't do that in the world we're entering into the future, just because that means that when you have high turnover, you know, entire teams are not going to be able to do their work, or people are going to have to work over time to make up for the person who left and they're going to burn out.
That's not sustainable. So that means, you know, hiring more people across the board, across the entire organization, which once again is also an expensive thing. That's why a lot of employers do not want to, you know, believe that this prediction is true. But I once again I find it really compelling. Right, Like you said, more recruiters and over hiring, right, So what does that do even you know, it makes a team less efficient. It could because there's
more players going throughout the thing. But you know when you talk about a company being nimble and adapting very quickly to rapidly changing situations, you know a lot of times that was with smaller groups. Right. You can do things a lot easier that way because people could take more ownership of certain aspects of it. But now it
kind of means the opposite. You need more people. So when something happens and people do leave unexpectedly, as you mentioned right now, it doesn't fall onto everybody else and everyone is overburdened at that point. So, I mean, it's a real interesting way that the companies are gonna have to adapt and kind of as we've been talking, right, one of the big things that they found was that a big chunk of people saying why they're leaving jobs, why they're looking for other things have to do with
things specifically related to the pandemic. They work from home stuff was just so important to a lot of people and for the employers, you know, trying to attract new people. Now, just saying hey, you can work from home is not enough, you know, you need to go above and beyond that,
because a lot of companies are offering that. And the remote thing specifically is people saying I wouldn't have you know, in their exit surveys at the companies that they're quitting, they're saying, I wouldn't have taken this new job if I had to move for it, But because it's remote, I don't have to move for it. It essentially means that you have so many more options right with these remote jobs than you ever had before, especially if you
were in a smular city a small town. And because you have more options, that means that there are more options to leave to you know, permanently in the future. And and that's why Gardner is estimating that volunteery turnover is going to remain so high. And here's another catch twenty two that I saw in the article too, is that according to Pew Research Center, when they talk to people of new remote workers say they feel less connected
to coworkers. And this disconnection is one of those things that causes a lot of people to quit their jobs, a lot causes a lot of turnover in the workforce. So even more birth is placed on the employers to try to figure that out, how to make everybody feel connected in part of a team, because when you are and I can attest to it, right and itcdotally a lot of people can working from home over zoom calls.
It's just not to say. And it's a catch twenty two because you know you have to you know, in this new world of work, you pretty much have to offer the option of at least hybrid work in order to get people to even interview with you. But once you offer hybrid and remote work to get people through the door, to even get them to come to your company, then retention gets a little bit harder because you don't have those in person relationships the way that we used
to back in the pre pandemic world. You know, executives might be tempted to hear this and say, oh, this means that we should just call everybody back into the office, But that's not the solution at all, because then you're just driving everybody away. That's gonna make retention worse. The real trick here is to try to figure out how do you build these connections that we used to have in the workplace, even in a remote environment. You know, it's it's really hard to do over soon, but it's
not impossible. You know, some organizations have figured this out or are starting to figure it out. So I think that is going to be really one of the big child which is for every company over the next few years. Yeah, it's really hard to take away things that you've given to employees, you know, and and to take it back is always so tough and just another interesting look at how the pandemic has really affected us in so many ways. The Great resignation now the forever resignation, right, it is
quickly changing landscape. So we'll keep an eye up for all of that. Aki Eto, Senior correspondent at Business insider. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. I'm Oscar Romrrors and this has been reopening America. Don't forget today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday. So follow us and I Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast