About a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, a notable wave of job resignations occurred globally, with the United States experiencing a historic high in April 2021, witnessing 3.9 million workers leaving their jobs. Termed the ‘Great Resignation,’ this phenomenon garnered significant media attention, but academic research on its causes and the role of mental health has been notably scarce.
People leave their jobs for various reasons, such as pursuing new opportunities, venturing into self-employment, and grappling with mental health concerns. While the connection between mental health and the Great Resignation has raised concerns, traditional economic data struggles to analyze this link for several reasons. Administrative data often lacks measures of mental health factors related to job willingness, surveys typically offer snapshots rather than pre- and post-pandemic comparisons, survey responses on employment can be guarded, and collecting administrative data is time-consuming and costly.
A key trigger
A recent study co-authored at Cambridge Judge Business School takes a novel approach to delve into the mental health aspects of the Great Resignation. Using text analysis, the study examines posts on the content-sharing platform Reddit to discern changes in quit-related discussions between 2018 and 2021, with a specific focus on the discourse surrounding mental health issues.
“Our main finding is that mental health and work-related distress topics disproportionally increased among quit-related posts since the onset of the pandemic, likely contributing to the quits of the Great Resignation,” the researchers explain. “Our study underscores the importance of having access to data from online forums, such as Reddit, to study emerging economic phenomena in real time, providing a valuable supplement to traditional labour market surveys and administrative data.”
The Great Resignation is partly because of the usual ups and downs in the job market. People generally leave their jobs when they see better opportunities elsewhere, especially when there are more job openings. This happened a lot in 2021 when the economy quickly recovered from the worst parts of the pandemic in 2020, leading to lots of people resigning.
A partial picture
But according to the study, this normal pattern doesn’t explain everything about the Great Resignation. The United States still had a tight job market, meaning there were more job openings than people looking for work.
On top of that, the pandemic brought in new reasons for people to quit that you don’t usually see in typical economic cycles. For example, many had to deal with online schooling because regular schools were closed, and some had to take care of sick family members. These unusual factors played a big role in why so many people decided to quit their jobs during this time.
“We argue that, while the increase in job vacancies and job switching were factors present in previous economic recovery periods, the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed forces leading to quit behavior, such as mental health concerns, that were absent in previous recoveries,” the researchers explain. “These additional factors could help explain the unusually high rates of quitting in 2021.”
The study discovered that although the pandemic made people more inclined to quit their jobs, some of the worries about mental health and work-related stress got better during the Great Resignation because there were more job options available.
“Taken together our results show that, among people that were talking about quitting, mental health concerns increased after the onset of the pandemic and before the Great Resignation,” the authors conclude. “This finding suggests that distressing experiences at work and concerns about work-related mental health may have increased people’s motivation to quit.”
