It’s been dubbed “The Great Resignation,” “The Big Quit,” and “The Extraordinary Exodus.” Whatever you call it, the phenomenon is the same: According to a government report released at the beginning of January, more than 20 million Americans quit their jobs during the second half of 2021, including a record 4.5 million resignations in November alone. The Ticker connected with local players to learn how close to home this nationwide trend is hitting.

According to Rob Dickinson, regional director of business services for Northwest Michigan Works, the organization has seen “an incredible amount of turnover lately” as it has sought to assist local employers with their hiring needs. Dickinson attributes the trend to a long list of factors, including early retirements, employee burnout, mental and physical health issues, scarcity of childcare, and a job seeker’s market that has enabled workers to explore what else is out there.

Manufacturers are in particularly dire straits: Dickinson says they’re facing “all-time high” turnover rates and realizing that old strategies for filling positions or retaining employees – raising wages and offering generous overtime pay – aren’t working anymore.

“Quality of life and time spent outside of work is now more important to employees than it has ever been before,” Dickinson explains. “Employees are now rejecting overtime hours with overtime pay – and also rejecting second and third shifts, even if they offer more pay – as time with family and friends outside of work now overshadows pay.”

Don Howe, vice president of Century, Inc. and chairman of the Grand Traverse Area Manufacturing Council, says labor shortages aren’t new for the local manufacturing sector. With so many manufacturers in the region -- and so few local students pursuing post-high-school pathways in the skilled trades -- “Now Hiring” signs have become near-permanent fixtures at local industrial parks. Still, COVID has exacerbated the challenges, in part because companies like Century had to lay off good workers early in the pandemic, many of whom have since left the workforce.

“There were people that were near retirement who were just out,” Howe explains. “Then there were families that [before COVID] had both a working mom and dad. During the pandemic, one or the other was forced to work from home, or was laid off, and they realized, ‘We can make this work on one income.’”

Paul Britten, founder and president of Britten Inc., echoes Howe’s comments. According to Britten, the business came into 2020 “full steam ahead.” COVID shutdowns wiped out the events sector, which in turn wiped out Britten’s project slate. Over the course of the pandemic’s first year, Britten went from 300 employees to 125. The business is back to 210 employees now, but Britten says the unavoidable layoffs left the door open for other businesses to scoop up core talent.

“Many of our legacy employees and some of our very best people were recruited by much larger companies than ours,” Britten says. “Some were being offered substantially more money – in some cases $30,000 to $40,000 per year more – than we had historically been paying. So, we lost some wonderful people.”

Between workforce departures and employees who were recruited away by bigger out-of-town companies, Howe says northern Michigan’s pool of manufacturing talent is now unsustainably small.

“Essentially, we’re just pilfering workers from one another,” Howe says. “But it’s a great time to be an employee, because there’s a lot of options out there for you to move around with. And the countermove is that every manufacturer I’ve talked to is looking internally to make sure they're building the culture and creating the infrastructure to retain the people they have.”

The focus on culture and employee retention is big for other industries, too. For David Ford, president of Traverse City-based Ford Insurance Agency, emphasizing culture has been a vital part of the company’s push to attract younger workers to a profession that has historically skewed older. In the past two and a half years, Ford says the business has “retired out five people” aged 66 or older – a quarter of his 20-person staff. But by recruiting friends and family of existing employees, the agency has also been able to build a strong base of employees in their 20s and 30s. That recruiting strategy hinged heavily on the company’s culture, which emphasizes social gatherings outside of the workday, strong staff camaraderie, and incentives for strong performance.

Culture and work environment are also focus areas for Rehmann, the accounting, advisory, and financial services firm with offices throughout Michigan and beyond. According to Steve Peacock, principal of assurance services for Rehmann’s Traverse City office, one reason for the Great Resignation is how the embrace of remote work has made competition for talent more global. To counter the extra competition, employers have to up their game.

“Right now, you could live in Traverse City and work for an accounting firm in Los Angeles,” Peacock explains. “And the pay scales on the coasts are higher than they are in the Midwest, which makes it very difficult for Midwestern enterprises to compete if you're competing with employers on the East and West Coasts. So, the question becomes, what do we do to be different?”

At Rehmann, Peacock says the key to “being different” is the company’s emphasis on employee growth and development. Because Rehmann is a full-service accounting firm, the company offers a long list of services to clients, ranging from bookkeeping to auditing to tax planning to M&A support. That variation also creates lots of options for employees, and rather than locking personnel into their initial department or specialty, Rehmann supports workers who want to learn new skills, train toward promotions, or change paths entirely.

“We're a big enough firm that we have a menu of options people can pursue,” Peacock explains. “If they're getting bored doing one thing, they may want to try something else, but they stay within Rehmann. You could have 30-40 years in this job, and you might change your career path half-a-dozen times, but you never have to leave your work family. That helps us in recruiting and retention.”

One common assumption around the Great Resignation? That employers are driving personnel away by requiring COVID-19 vaccinations. So far, the statistics don’t bear that out, at least not on a large scale. A recent survey, conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, found that just five percent of unvaccinated workers – and about one percent of all workers – have left a job because of an employer vaccine mandate.