Only in the vernacular for two years, it still goes by many names. Whether you call it the Great Resignation, the Great Reshuffling or the Great Reset, most people know that you’re referring to the millions of employees who’ve opted to switch jobs. In other cases, we’re seeing formerly employed people make the switch to contractor status. And yes, there have been another group of the workers that have decided to either retire or pull back from full-time employment, altogether. Regardless of what you call it and no matter where the workforce has gone, the end result for companies is the same: fewer qualified people on the payroll to complete work. And it’s these same changes that led us to produce this eBook, The Great Resignation for Technologists.
At Ascendle, we wanted to understand the Great Resignation through the lens of the same technologists that we’ve been serving since our earliest days. While social scientists explore the critical impact of this seismic shift, we wanted to delve into the simple question of how organizations will continue to maximize customer value even as many of the cogs within their value creation flywheel have now been swapped out for new parts.
This project consisted of four parts, each exploring a unique aspect of the Great Resignation.
Our first post on the topic explored how the Covid lockdowns forced a shift in worker behavior and how technology was ready to step into the void created when everything from water cooler conversations to quarterly strategy meetings suddenly became virtual in an instant. The Great Resignation statistics are difficult to put into context, yet they confirm a revolution of sorts is under way.
At Ascendle, where we’ve been virtual from the beginning, such changes meant little to our day-to-day. But to others, it meant dramatic shifts in how they do business. This chapter matters, as many employees used these early months of Covid to determine that – for a variety of reasons – they had no interest in returning to how things used to be.
Our second post, then, acknowledged that for technologists to continue to deliver business value, they had a few options. First, we explored the aggressive retention policies put in place in an attempt to better align company and employee expectations. Companies that found those efforts to be inadequate responded in a few different ways; either sourcing talent that wasn’t a full-time employee or outsourcing functional components of their operation, altogether. Not surprisingly, there’s no right answer, but viewing the pluses and minuses of all of the options is a great place to start.
Just as Ascendle’s virtual office structure helped us persevere through this period, an equally powerful component of our company DNA was our disciplined commitment to agile, which is the focus of our third article on the Great Resignation. The same framework that provides employees and contractors with the structure and autonomy to ship software faster offers similar benefits to organizations that have been thrust into new ways of working. The post explores which agile elements to look to first if your team is adapting to the new normal.
In our final post on the subject, we zoomed in to the Boston market, only an hour from Ascendle’s home. Relying on job postings from BuiltInBoston.com, we took a look at current openings for some of the top tech companies in the region with a special eye on how those companies are thinking remote employees fit into their strategy. At the same time, we juxtaposed this information with survey data we’ve collected from our own customers over the past month.
In total, these posts offer a comprehensive view of the Great Resignation through the eyes of the technologist. In sum, they conclude that while the workforce has most definitely changed, technology and frameworks have paved the way for organizations to thrive throughout the upheaval. We hope the same is true for you!
If you’d like a single download of all of this information, we’ve compiled all four posts into a single eBook, available for download. Please fill out the form for immediate access!
