Finding Your Happy Place Takes Longer Than 40 Hours

Life is short, and people are rethinking the importance of a work-life balance to a very pointed end: “I quit.”

Back in 2019, CIO magazine published an article detailing nine reasons good employees leave jobs. Those reasons include: not being engaged in their jobs, not having room to grow within the company, and their employers being behind the bleeding edge. Cut to present time where people are leaving the security of their jobs because of the growing attitude that 40 hours a week (or more) at a job simply isn’t fulfilling.

Around four million people in the U.S. have quit their jobs every month between April and July, 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, setting the lives of hiring managers up for failure. With massive supply chain shortages occurring across many industries, businesses are also suffering from a dwindling number of employees and a lack of applicants to backfill their roles. Finance and customer service leaders are met with empty talent pools when it comes to hiring qualified individuals required to run critical business processes in the procure-to-pay and order-to-cash cycles.

Those who need to “do more with less” have leaned on technology for years to help fill in the gaps. Now more than ever, it is critical to help businesses survive the pandemic economy by implementing tools that increase automation and enable your teams to focus more on exception handling and creating stronger, more loyal customer and vendor relationships. 

After more experienced workers leave in droves in search of a better life, what are businesses left with? Younger generations have even more expectations of their employers in today’s world — expectations that don’t meet the status quo. A GALLUP report states that above all, Gen Z and Millennials want an employer who cares about their well-being. How are you creating future leaders? One could wager that the answer is NOT “pigeonholing them into a workday of mundane, manual tasks that never let their creative, intelligent minds out of the box.”

Over the past 8-10 months, I’ve heard from managers, directors and VPs alike that they’ve had open positions for up to a year. In a time where “I quit” has become the answer for employees, employers are facing major recruiting obstacles. An inability to figure out what to do in the absence of human capital has become a risk to many organizations’ sustainability and success. As for the businesses that embraced digital transformation before the pandemic began affecting economies and supply chains? Well, many are having a much easier time evolving with economic changes and handling new levels of demand.