in september of this year more than 4.4 million people in the u.s quit their jobs that's around 3
of the entire workforce and this number expands back to 20 million people
if measured back to april of 2021 i'm sure you've heard we're in an era called the great resignation
where people are quitting their jobs in droves. so in this video we're going to
explore why this is happening what it means for us moving forward and how we
as workers can learn from this so that we can design a better future for ourselves
hey guys welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is dani and i am a licensed architect
in beautiful vancouver bc on this channel we talk about architecture and design and also some
tools and strategies that can help us have more meaningful and fulfilling careers in architecture
so i left two jobs in the last two years once just before the pandemic and one during the pandemic
and throughout the past few years i've been thinking a lot about my relationship with work
how i want to spend my time and the value of my time so just in the last two years
several things happened in my life i became a registered architect i gained more experience
and i became more confident in my abilities i paid off my student loans and actually started to
have some savings and i started investing some money and i also had a lot of time spent alone
and to be completely honest i probably wouldn't have been able to leave my jobs like this if
it weren't for these factors in fact the highest levels of resignations seem to be
amongst the mid-career or almost mid-career employees or basically people who have experience
in their field but haven't really built long-term foundations in one place to really feel like
they're losing something when they leave but even if you're not at the midpoint of your career i
think there's a lot of things you could take away from this because this is not just a phase this is
a huge change in the way that people are looking at their work and their relationship
with work and i really believe this is going to transform many industries in the following years
so let's dig a little bit into why this is happening people seem to be leaving their jobs for
three main reasons either to move to a different company or to change industries or to start their
own businesses in case you're watching this video from the future 2020 is the time when the pandemic
started and people were forced to work from home with the amount of time people were spending
at home i think we started looking at our lives in a different perspective and we really started
reassessing our values personally i really realize the joy of spending time with friends and family
and the joy of giving time to myself and just like doing little things that nourish my soul and
make me happy and i think we also realize that life is really short and for a few
period of months at the start of the pandemic we had no freaking idea what was going to happen
and i think people realize that life is too short to be doing something that doesn't bring us
happiness or meaning for a lot of people i guess that was their jobs i think another side to this
is the slight detachment of work from self-worth i think especially for architects this is a bit
of a pain point because we attach our values so intimately to our work and you know the industry
is kind of designed that way like with the whole practice of judging a person by their portfolio
um but i think in these past few years we as we assessed our values and um probably by having
reduced contact with society and societal pressures i feel like people are starting
to detach their value from their work i have a colleague who recently left and went to another
firm and when she told me where she was going honestly i was a little bit shocked and i thought
it was a little bit strange because i felt like it was a little bit of a step down for her that
firm wasn't doing incredibly exciting work and it was just like very conventional architecture
but the more i thought about it it made sense she's getting better pay better work-life balance
and you know that was her trade-off in the book [ __ ] jobs by david graber he talks about how the
idea of work as a source of value is actually a pretty recent idea and it really started with like
philosophers like john locke and the puritan ideologies which basically claimed that like
suffering endured by the working classes is noble and virtuous that mindset has been passed down to
us and on top of that in modern society our jobs basically support our very consumerist patterns
of living and we justify the daily dullness of work because it fulfills our consumerist desires
where we need to buy things we don't really need to climb the social ladder which
in itself is not real and i think that's the other thing that's happened during the pandemic
our habits of consumption have changed we're not really going out as much we're not buying as much
and we don't need to spend as much and all of a sudden you realize like okay
that's where all my money was going the other reason is burnout working from home blurred the
lines between people's work and personal lives and a lot of people ended up working more than
there are a lot of number of hours because for a lot of companies the amount of work and deadlines
didn't change in fact a lot of the burden of this shift to working from home fell on the
employees especially for visual communicators like architects in order to communicate effectively
we we had to produce more presentations and more drawings but instead of having a reduced workload
a lot of that fell on the employees to have to do the extra work and put in the extra hours i think
really uh depending on how the firms handled it this pandemic really exposed a lot of the floss
in the management of the business also having to keep up productivity while being isolated
at home is really hard because you're not really getting the benefit of vibing off of the energy
of the office or your colleagues which i think has led to a questioning of the work culture
for me culture is really important it's a really important factor in my work environment i like
having company outings and friday night beers and building rapport with my colleagues because
working with people that i like helps me enjoy my work and it keeps me invested in the company but
the switch to working from home has really opened my eyes to how much time i could save and how
much more productive i could be from working from home which directly gives me more time for myself
i think more and more people are willing to trade that work culture for better work-life balance
and for more control over their work hours and schedules as the pandemic starts to slow down some
offices have made it mandatory to go back to fully working in the office but a lot of employees have
been really turned off by this because we're i mean we've already demonstrated for the past
two years that we can work independently and i think this just shows a lot of it shows a lack
of trust and a lack of flexibility in the company so i think this is gonna be a real
downside to companies that are enforcing this the fourth reason is that we are in the golden
age of entrepreneurship it's easier to start a business now than ever since january to october
this year there were 4.7 million business applications just in the us which was a 34
increase from that same time in 2019 first of all the cost of failure is close to zero
there's multiple sources of capital that you could tap into cost of testing out an
idea is super cheap you can literally just ask a question to twitter or facebook or instagram
and with platforms like fiverr and upwork it's so easy to hire freelancers also there's
a massive amount of content and communities for entrepreneurs more than ever before any person
can basically start their own thing as long as you're providing good value and good content so
if you've been working till the point of burnout and you're not so attached to your job like why
would i spend the time to build someone else's business when i can spend the time to build my own
so what this means is that for the first time in a very long time employees have leverage
for those of us who want to stay in the industry that means we can be a little bit more picky and
that we can spend a little bit more time to find a good fit it also means that we can and actually we
have to take this opportunity to hold businesses accountable i think companies are going to have
to compete for good talent and i think some of the things that's going to make certain
companies stand out are things like good work-life balance flexibility good office
culture fair pay and benefits positive missions and smart business strategies proper staffing
or even overstaffing to make sure that it's not the end of the world when somebody quits checking
in regularly with the employees and conducting stay interviews rather than exit interviews
at which point it's already too late i think we should take some time to ask what we really want
and how can we create situations that's gonna help us get that i think i realize in these past
few years that i physically can't go in day in and day out doing something that i hate i mean
work is work and no work is perfect i'm not saying that but for the majority of the times i want to
be doing something that i find meaningful and enjoyable i also realize that i need flexibility
like when i have an appointment i don't want to have to ask permission to go i just want there to
be trust and transparency and actually that's not really something you can demand from your employer
you have to gain that trust you need to prove that you can be trusted and
if your employer's values align with yours then that's going to give you more freedom and control
but you have to kind of make the first move and create that situation it also means that maybe we
can take a little bit more time to find the right fit rather than just like taking the very first
offer that comes through the door there's been a lot of issues with the architecture industry
but a part of the problem is and it always has been us and it's because a lot of us just put up
with the bad conditions and when we do this this lowers the standard for everyone in the industry
and also for the generation after us so we need to understand the value that we can bring
and we need to ask for it because you're never gonna get it if you don't ask for it and if they
say no you can move on knowing that you tried i also just want to add that i think it's always
better to try to fix the problem where you're at rather than just quitting and leaving because that
doesn't really give your employers the opportunity to fix their mistakes and learn from that
especially for architects i'm kind of always an advocate for like sticking with your project from
start to finish because that's such a valuable experience anyways whether you already quit your
job or whether you're planning on quitting your job or whether you're planning on staying put
i think we can all take this as an opportunity to reflect on what brings us meaning and happiness
and if there's one thing i've learned from these past few years is that reflection and
journaling on even the most mundane things can really really transform the way you see things
and it can help you make good decisions anyways i would really love to hear your thoughts on this
what has your work experience been like these past few years has your relationship to work
changed at all i also wanted to know i know i make content mostly about architecture
but since starting the youtube channel i've been reading a lot about business
and entrepreneurship in general and i just wanted to get a sense of how many of you would
be interested in the topic of business or like side hustles or even youtube um because i think
having started this thing while having a full-time job i have gained some insights that i think you
would find valuable let me know in the comments also i have one more announcement i will be doing
a monthly newsletter it will go out every last saturday of the month and i'll just be sharing
updates on the channel updates on things that i found things that i learned things that i read
like new insights or experiences so if you are interested in signing up i'll leave the link
below if you enjoyed this video please give me a thumbs up and if you're not subscribed already
please subscribe and hit the bell so that you can get notifications every time i make a new
video i'm gonna start having a more regular posting schedule so keep an eye out for that
you