It’s no secret that American workers are quitting their jobs in record numbers. In November 2021, 4.5 million people left their jobs, an 8.9% increase from October and breaking September’s record of 4.36 million. The phenomenon, now dubbed “The Great Resignation,” has economists struggling to figure out why.
We all know employees leave companies for better titles, salaries, and benefits, but this mass workplace exodus is something we’ve never seen before. Organizations are providing competitive wages and solid benefits, but employees are still hitting the road. We believe a big part of this is rooted in the frustration that’s created by communication breakdowns and the lack of visibility into the organization—more specifically, visibility into who is doing what.
While work visibility has always been a problem for organizations, the pandemic has exacerbated the issue. Digitizing everything we do has greatly accelerated since the start of the pandemic, and while technology has helped connect us, it has also cut us off. Information is now literally inaccessible across an organization, trapped in the same software designed to help us communicate.
The world has changed.
Overscheduling and burnout are rampant
Without a system for managing workload, many employees are stuck consistently working overtime, often without their managers even knowing. Employees assume management knows, but because leaders can no longer see work happening in the office, late-night and weekend work goes unnoticed, leaving employees feeling undervalued. Meanwhile, because management doesn’t have workload visibility, they wonder if people are working on the right things or even working at all, making the problem even worse.
There’s a major communication disconnect, resulting in leadership often being completely unaware of the over-scheduling issues and burnout happening right in front of them. Without visibility into the workload, organizations also don't know when or what role to hire for. Get behind on hiring when employees are already overworked and you’ve got the recipe for a “Great Resignation.”
Executives are cut off
In particular, this visibility issue affects everyone above the project manager. Because they’re not in software managing the day-to-day, they’re left struggling to understand what’s happening. This lack of visibility carries all the way to the top, with executives effectively running the business in the dark.
Company leaders are well aware that they have an organizational visibility problem—and that their existing resource management process (or lack thereof) is the source—but they don't know what to do about it. Task management tools are too granular for anyone above project managers to really get an understanding of what’s happening. Financial software and ERPs weren’t designed for the modern cross-company communication required. There’s clearly a major void in the market.
A new solution to a new problem
Like it or not, remote and hybrid work is here to stay. The benefits of saving commutes, hiring from larger pools of people, and reducing office overhead are too valuable to organizations. So, like all human progress, we simply need new tools in order to adapt.
Resource management software has been around for 40 years to provide a more efficient approach to managing a company’s staff. But it was built for a time when offices, departments, and teams were siloed, with a tight network of coworkers who had clear visibility into the work happening largely on paper.
In this new flat world, we find ourselves, the traditional model of resource management doesn’t work. We need to break down the walls of organizational structure with new ways to manage our communication challenges. Through software, we can bring everyone into the conversation, so everyone contributes to informing the team as to what they’re working on. Aside from getting people on the same page, this approach enables organizations to better establish and communicate work.
Gaining workforce and workload visibility through a single source of truth benefits the entire organization. Managers and executives get the visibility they need to run the organization. Individuals are more accountable for what they’re working on and have a higher level of control over their schedule, workload, and career path. And because the org can see their efforts, they can get credit for their accomplishments.
The end result is that, for the first time, organizations will get an accurate, real-time picture of what’s happening inside the organization. This allows companies of any size to work as cohesive units and understand what their teams can actually get done, together. This level of communication and clarity will improve relationships across the organization, prevent over-scheduling, and enable confident hiring around the actual workload.
Perhaps, most importantly, it will save us from burnout.
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