The Great Resignation is turning into the Forever Resignation

"You're better off with more choices, because you can find a thing that's a better fit." It will also be a nightmare for employers, who will need to run their organizations in a whole new way — and pay higher salaries and benefits for years to come — if they want to stay competitive.Given that prospect, it may be tempting for executives to keep repeating their current mantra of "this is just a phase." But with the national quit rate surpassing prepandemic highs for 13 straight months now — a record 4.5 million Americans left their jobs in March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced last week — it's becoming clear that job hopping is here to stay. And her new employer didn't even require her to work London hours, allowing her to shape her schedule around the needs of her family.It's easy to think the Great Resignation will fizzle out once a recession arrives, putting the brakes on the job market. It's just going to become slightly less great."That elevated turnover of people saying, 'I wouldn't have quit and taken this other job if I had to move' — that part will be sustained as long as we have remote and hybrid work," Kropp told me. "The mistake that a lot of companies are making is saying, 'We're going to offer remote and hybrid work, so people are going to love that and that's going to keep them from quitting,'" Kropp said. But the answer isn't to ban working from home, as some executives are still attempting to do in the name of "company culture." That will only encourage even more employees to depart for remote-friendlier competitors.Instead, Kropp said, employers need to do more to deepen relationships among staffers working remotely. That, counterintuitively, means building less efficient teams — ones that are big enough to keep functioning during a constant state of turnover, rather than bringing critical work to a standstill or making everyone work overtime while they wait for new hires to arrive."We've historically built really efficient organizations that are really fragile when they're hit by disruption," Kropp said. Smart companies, Kropp said, should reallocate some of their budgets for employee skill-building toward programming that promotes a more collaborative workplace culture — something that strikes me as a lot less useful than, say, being reimbursed by my employer for attending a conference or obtaining a professional certificate.But overall, the benefits of the Forever Resignation will be far greater for professionals than any drawbacks.