Who are the mobile employees? How to catch and keep them

We are now more than two years into the massive COVID-spawned work disruption that we loosely term the Great Resignation. We have received anecdotal data explaining why people are modifying or changing their jobs and, on the other side of the coin, surveys indicating how managers and supervisors report feeling about remote employees.

Our hard data has been macroeconomic. Worldwide, the International Labor Organization reports that 114 million jobs were lost in 2020, 9.37 million of them in the United States. We added 6.4 million jobs in 2021, which still left us three million jobs behind to simply get even. The U.S. unemployment rate was below 4% in December 2019 and has returned to below 4% now, after ballooning to about 15% in early 2020.

The April 2022 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary still showed there were 11.27 million job openings and only 6.27 million unemployed job applicants, creating a record five million more openings than available workers. There were 1.8 jobs for every unemployed person. Even though there were jobs available, more than four million workers left the job force in January of this year, another four million left in February and another four million left in March.

The departure of workers from the labor force is balanced by the return or the new entry of workers. From January to March 2022, some 2.9 million women and 2.5 million men entered the labor force each month.

Who is switching jobs?