According to all reports, we’re in the midst of a Great Resignation. People are leaving their jobs in great numbers, but what it is actually all about?

Pew Research reported that the Majority of workers who quit a job in 2021 cite low pay, no opportunities for advancement, feeling disrespected.

“Workers aren’t just looking for higher pay, more time off, or more days at home (though those things would surely help in the short term). They’re actually questioning the whole meaning of the daily grind. Why do we put so much of ourselves into our careers? And are we getting a fair deal from our employers in return for all this stress and heartache?,” said Inc. “The period of prolonged uncertainty of a year and a half is going to make people consider their priorities on many, many levels, including the work they do.”

Forest through the trees:  Before you can address a problem, you need to identify it for what it truly is. We understand what ‘resignation’ means, but the term also implies ‘resigned,’ meaning accepting something unpleasant that one can do nothing about, and let’s face it: people had been forced – resigned – to spend a year and a half indoors, masked, quarantined, isolated. It was the ‘New Normal.’ Now we’re seeing people leaving their jobs in large numbers, but is it the ‘Great Resignation,’ or is it what the Harvard Business Review calls the ‘Great Rethink.’

When you’re resigned to spending that much time in isolation, one is prone to start rethinking one’s life and what’s truly matters, especially when the overriding message that the media delivered during that period was ‘going outside or getting close to another person will kill you!’ Again, the New Normal. Might have caused something of an existential crisis, what, eh?

Let’s also not forget that prior to that 18-month period, anyone in the startup world or even in tech at large knows that there’s really no such thing as the 40-hour work week. Working longer hours was de rigueur and as we witnessed during those eighteen months, unnecessary. Tech workers were programmed to think that way. Then again, isn’t tech all about programming?

Collateral damage: Those 18 months may well have caused a hard reset.

The wake-up call here is that every new industrial age changed the way people worked. The last industrial revolution is what heralded in the eight-hour workday. Prior to that, people were tethered to assembly lines for 10-12 hours a day. Tech industry workers weren’t on assembly lines, but instead at their desks, plugged into laptops for eight hours. We’re no longer in the assembly-line era, for the most part, and if nothing else, those 18 months illustrated that the 40-hour work week, with workers tethered to an in-office desk, might be in need of a long-overdue revision. Wasn’t the Great Promise of the advent of the Age of Technology to make our lives easier? Potentially, we may well be there. Advertising agencies have long had a Summer Fridays policy, where the office was either closed on Fridays, or closed by noon or two. We also wondered, if it worked in summer, why it couldn’t work year-round?

Team days could also be part of the new work week, where everyone is required to participate either in person or online (taking remote workers into account here) one day a week. The technology’s there. In fact, didn’t it work during that in-office gap?

One thing is certain: the 40-hour work week is a legacy concept in this Age of Technology.

Time for C-suite to realize that we’re in the midst of a Great Rethink and time to reconsider the work week itself. As unpalatable as that may be from their point of view, it’s time for them to face up to it and they will, no doubt, albeit with Great Resignation. Onward and forward.