Michael Hyatt:
Yeah, I think this is an opportunity to take what’s been called The Great Resignation and turn it into The Great Renovation. Hi, I’m Michael Hyatt.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller.

Michael Hyatt:
And this is Lead to Win our weekly podcast designed to help you win at work and succeed at life. And this week, we’re going to be talking about something that’s been on all of our radar, I’m sure, The Great Resignation. And if you’re a business leader or a business owner, what you can do about it.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah. I saw just this week, the jobs report come out for November and it was much more significant than anybody anticipated. We had 4.5 million people, I think, who quit their jobs in November, which is really an astonishing number of people. So I think as business owners, we probably all hope that this was a short term kind of blip and I think what we’re seeing is that it’s a trend that’s continuing and one that we have to be pay careful attention to, and really create a response to that is adequate or will be on the wrong end of it.

Michael Hyatt:
As you think of through the impact of how this impacts businesses and governments and non-profits and all the rest, you need people. Most of us, we have teams, we need people in order to get the work done and when you can’t find people because they’ve decided they don’t want to work for whatever reason, and we should get in the reasons in a minute, but for whatever reason, it makes it really challenging. We have at our business accelerator coaching program, some restaurant owners who can’t run full shifts because they can’t find enough people to fill the stations and do what they need to do. And that’s true across various industries where they just can’t get enough people, can’t keep their production up to where they could before the pandemic and I agree with you Meg, I don’t think this is like a transitional thing. It’s not going to be like, we’re going to wake up one morning and read the papers that everybody decided to go back to work. I think this is probably a permanent change for reasons that we should explore

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Let’s do it.

Michael Hyatt:
What do you think is driving this? Here’s what it’s not happening. I don’t think it’s because… First I thought well, government keeps cutting these checks, people can sit at home and make as much money seated at home as they were before but that stopped several months ago. And they’re people who are leaving the workforce also that were employed, but just decided to quit. So what’s driving that?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, I think there are two categories that are important to get consider here. We have people who are leaving their current jobs to go find some kind of a better opportunity, so that’s one group of people. And then we have people that are exiting the workforce all together. And I think the people that are exiting the workforce all together, at least in my experience, in my conversations with other business leaders is primarily affecting those in certain industries where you have to have onsite workers, you have hourly workers, those kinds of things where… I’ve read a number of things. I’ve talked about people retiring earlier, people who are concerned about their health and safety due to COVID, those kinds of things.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I think that’s one thing and then I think the problem that many of us have faced or are contemplating what it would be like if we had to face, is the scenario where people are leaving for other reasons to go to a better opportunity and that’s really where I think we have the most urgency as business leaders to address those issues. But I think they’re two distinct groups of people leaving for two different reasons or sets of reasons.

Michael Hyatt:
This morning, early, I was doing some reading and I forwarded to you an article from Barons and it was called I’ve Been Studying Work-From-Home For Years. Here’s What’s Coming. Now, this was a really fascinating article because the author of this article said that he thinks the future is this. He says, 50% of workers can’t work from home. These are retail jobs, emergency response kinds of jobs-

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Medical staff.

Michael Hyatt:
… medical staff, customer service jobs, jobs that require the presence of the workers full time. Then he said about 40% of the people are going to be able to work from home in a hybrid manner. And he said, what that’s going to look like for most people is that they won’t come into the office on Monday and Friday, but they will only work Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at their office, which shortens their commute and gives them that focus time that they want and that they experienced during the pandemic where they got so much done.

Michael Hyatt:
And then he said, 10% of the workers are never going to go back into the office. They’ve figured out how they could work from home. They’ve actually been more productive. These are knowledge workers by and large, be more productive and he said, one of the upsides of this is that a lot of these people are moving to places that are less expensive, rural areas that have taken a big whack in the last couple of decades as people have moved more to the cities for jobs. But he said, this is going to reinvigorate the rural areas because people can now live there and work from anywhere and as long as they’ve got the infrastructure to be able to do Zoom or whatever else, they can live anywhere and especially they can live where it’s cheap. Now, what difference does that make? He said the 50% of those people, that they missed sort of the work from home, he calls it the work from home bonus, that during the pandemic, they still had to go in.

Michael Hyatt:
They had to subject themselves to kind of more risky or dangerous situations. They had to commute. And he said, a lot of those people are angry about it. They’re frustrated that they’ve kind of missed what they can conceive of as, or perceive as a benefit and they don’t have that benefit and they’re ticked off. I don’t know what we can do about those people. But then I think the hybrid situation, I think there are some business owners, old school business owners that think, okay, we’re going to go right back to a five days in the office kind of work environment but the problem with that is people are now more aware than ever how much of their life gets sucked up in commutes.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right.

Michael Hyatt:
Right. And how unproductive it is. And so those people are going to… If you insist on that, I’m afraid those people are going to leave their jobs to go find something where they can at least work remotely part of the time.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I think partly what you’re talking about here is that people have the opportunity to really think about what work-life balance looks like and what it looks like to have the margin back from a commute to attend to their personal life. If you think about the fact that some people are driving 30, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, one way into work. So you’re potentially losing one to two hours a day commuting or 5 to 10 hours a week.

Michael Hyatt:
That’s a lot.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
That’s a lot of time. And for some people who are working hourly jobs, even in an environment that is maybe not frontline, those are unpaid hours. Right. They’re certainly unproductive hours. You’re not getting anything of value done during that time except maybe talking on the phone. That kind of trade off just isn’t there. When you think of 5 to 10 hours, that’s time to exercise, that’s time to spend with your kids, that’s time to clean your house, that’s time to make dinner, instead of takeout. You’re saving money on gas, you’re saving money on takeout. You’re present in a different way. You’re sleeping longer. Who wants to give all that up?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
The cost benefit from an employee perspective is just really not there and I think the tolerance for that, which was really just ignorance. I think most people had not experienced the flip side of that before the benefits of working from home, is totally untenable. Like we’re just not willing anymore to make that trade and basically give away 5 to 10 hours of our time, it’s the only thing we can’t get more of. Right. We talk about this all the time. And people are just… They’re over it and the reality of course is for employers, you’re really not losing anything, in fact, you’re gaining something, especially in a competitive labor market, like what we have, by allowing people the autonomy to work from home part of the time.

Michael Hyatt:
Right. I don’t really know what to do for those businesses that actually require people to be in the office and can’t find enough workers for the reasons we’ve articulated. I don’t know that I’ve got really much to offer them, but for those that do have the option of remote work, I think as a leader, one of the things you’ve got to do is look in the mirror and if you’re resisting it, ask yourself, why am I resisting this? Unfortunately, there’s a lot of old school managers and leaders who think that if they can’t directly supervise people, if people are at home working remotely, they’re going to just be scrolling through Facebook or Instagram or watching TV or doing something unrelated to the business and that’s just not the case. That was not our experience during the pandemic.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
No.

Michael Hyatt:
It was not our experience prior to the pandemic, because we’ve always had a hybrid model and what we found is… I think we’ve found a couple things… Initially, we were all remote and we found that they were some huge advantages to being together at certain times during the week but certainly we saw the big advantages of people being able to work remotely and being able to really be focused and that sense of urgency and balance that they have, where they can actually be there when the kids come home from school or a service person needs to call on their home and for them to be there and let them in or whatever.

Michael Hyatt:
I think most people fell asleep to that or they were never aware of it because they just took for granted that working meant that for the next 40 years or the next 35 years or whatever it is, you’re going to be commuting and you’re going to forget that it’s miserable. You’re going to find out something else to do with your time. But once we had the pandemic that came into sharp relief and people realized that this was very unproductive way to use their time.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, I know like even just today I ran downstairs at lunch and I put some laundry in, right. And I got some stuff that needed a defrost for dinner and set it on the counter and then I made my smoothie and I came back upstairs to record this podcast but that was all happening. It wasn’t any loss to the company that I took a few minutes and did those things, but it’s a huge benefit to my life that I couldn’t have done if I was sitting in an office offsite from my home.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And certainly not every day I worked from home, but man, it’s really great when I do I can get to see my two and a half year old when I go down for lunch. She’s often eating her lunch at that time with our nanny and I can say hi to her and that’s great. So one of the things that was interesting by the way in that article, I don’t know if you remember this part, this is that Baron’s article again. And by the way, we’ll put this link in the show notes so you can find it. What was the title of it again, dad?

Michael Hyatt:
I’ve Been Studying Work-From-Home For Years. Here’s What’s Coming.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah. So, if you don’t want to wait and look it up in the show notes, you can Google it when you’re not driving. Don’t do it while you’re driving. But one of the interesting points that he makes is that there are certain kinds of workers, in particular, individual contributors. So think of people like copywriters, editors, accountants, various other financial people, people who do administrative work, who really can do their jobs completely remotely because their creative work or collaborative work is really minimal. What they mostly need is the ability to have focused quiet time where they can go deep. Cal Newport talks about this and calls it deep work where they can kind of go deep into something and not be interrupted.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
People who are in leadership or do more collaborative work, it will be necessary for those people to come into the office, at least some of the time to really get the maximum value from collaborative efforts. There’s something a little bit lost, at least we found in most of the people we’ve talked to. In a completely remote environment, there can be something lost in terms of that in-person collaboration but when you’re doing especially solo work, there no value in doing that in an office.

Michael Hyatt:
No, there’s really not. And this is all coming at a particularly challenging time, I think, because there are some articles that I’ve read that said, well, you’re just going to have to pay people more. Well, the challenge with that as a business owner is that, in my experience and again, our experience isn’t that broad, but we’ve got about 600 clients in our business accelerator coaching program. So we interact with business owners quite a bit. And one of the things that we’ve noticed anecdotally, although we haven’t done a study on this, is that a lot of business owners had great 2020s. In other words, 2020 was a banner year largely because the government was stimulating the economy. A lot of these businesses also didn’t have the expenses that they had before. In our own business, for example, we weren’t putting on live events.

Michael Hyatt:
Although we were doing virtual events, which were a lot cheaper. So we were enormously profitable in 2020, a lot of businesses were, and they saw a lot of revenue growth. People were at home shopping, they were bored, they had more cash, all that stuff. But this has been different in 2021, it’s been harder. And somebody said to me, they said, well, if you take 2020, the huge growth we had, and you average a with 2021, that kind of normalizes it. That was like more sort of, we had the kind of average growth, if you spread it out over two years, but all that to say is that people don’t usually just voluntarily go backwards. And so you got a situation where people made a lot of money, did really well in 2020, and now in 2021, they didn’t have such a great year and maybe they’re not in the best position to give raises or to give increases because the business isn’t prospering as much and this is the very time where a lot of people want more money.

Michael Hyatt:
But, I personally don’t think it’s all about the money, because that wouldn’t explain why so many people are quitting their jobs to start their own businesses or to take lower paying jobs in exchange for the option to work from home. And I would say that quality of life, work-life balance is more important than it’s ever been and as a business owner or a business leader, if you don’t own your own business, this is the time to reevaluate how you do what you do. There’s nothing in any rule book anywhere that says everybody has to work from an office 40 hours a week. So if you’re going to create the best possible environment for people to prosper, for people to want to stay at work, for you to be able to attract the best talent, what does that got to look like? And if you’re not in position to just pay gobs of money, what can you do in addition to that or in place of that, that makes it attractive for people to stay to come?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Absolutely. And I think what you’ll find is that you’re also going to get better performance from people who have a healthy work-life balance. That’s why we’ve been advocating for this for so many years is that we really believe there’s a connection between succeeding in your whole life and winning at work. And so those things are really inextricably linked and they matter. So it can actually be a performance lever for you as you’re thinking about that as well. In other words, it’s win-win.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
So work-life balance is one piece. Another thing that you can really double down on is culture, because I think 2020 was a difficult year and then into 2021, in many ways, I heard somebody say the other day that 2021 was kind of like the hangover from 2020 and I think there’s that sense of that feeling of just sort of like dazed and confused a little bit, where businesses were really struggling to figure out, how do you culture? How do you nurture and develop culture when there’s so much uncertainty externally and so many limitations about all the ways that we have forever thought about bringing people together, literally and figuratively, right? And so I think there’s a real opportunity here on the backside of that 2021 hangover to reinvest. I don’t mean money. I mean, intention, goals around this, articulating this to your team in your culture.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Things like getting people together for an annual team meeting. Maybe you didn’t do that in 2021. Maybe you let your vision and your goals just sort of go by the wayside and you weren’t really communicating about out those things because it was more about survival in the moment. But one of the things we know about engagement is that people want to be connected to something bigger through their work. Dad and I we’re talking about this when we had lunch on Monday, that it’s really interesting. This is kind of a cultural phenomenon outside of COVID that as time has gone on over last many decades, if not longer, that people as they’ve moved away from spiritual institutions, as fewer people are having children or they’re having children later, fewer people are getting married or they’re getting married later. Fewer people are living in the same place that they grew up.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
They have less of a sense of identity, meaning, connectedness. Their spiritual, emotional, psychological, social needs are not necessarily being met outside of work in the same way that they used to be by all these institutions. They’re really coming to their workplace with all those needs and they’re really hoping to have those needs met, self-actualization et cetera, inside their work. Well, that could be a whole other podcast that we could talk about, because I think some of that is misguided and problematic. In some ways as employers, the more we can connect people to our mission and our vision and their contribution to that and then with each other, the more that we meet deep, emotional, psychological needs that our people have and the more satisfied they’re going to be in their work with us.

Michael Hyatt:
One of the things I’ve noticed that our team has done over the last six to eight weeks is post a lot of comments from customers that are experiencing transformation and I think for the most part we’re doing that because it’s just a feel good kind of moment to know that a customer has had a positive experience with a lot of our products, but I think it really serves a strategic purpose, in that it people’s work to the final result. And for years, decades, I worked in a business that was kind of a black box in the sense that I was so isolated from customers. All of our products were mediated through retailers, so we didn’t have much direct encounters with customers who were experiencing the transformational benefit of our products. We kind of had to take it by faith.

Michael Hyatt:
But we’re in a situation where we sell a lot of stuff direct. We have a lot of direct interaction with customers, but I would say if you’re running a business of any kind, the more you can collect those stories and help people, help even frontline workers see that what they do makes a difference. That the work that they’re doing is directly connected to those positive feelings that customers have or the positive achievements or the results that they’re getting or whatever. The more you can connect that… I think ultimately that’s what everybody wants. They want to know that their time on earth was meaningful. That it counted. That they weren’t just spinning their wheels. And I think that as employers, as leaders, it’s our job to do that, to connect the dots for people, because in the nitty gritty of life when you’re dealing with customer complaints or production delays or supply chain challenges, that gets lost and if you’re not careful all use see is the problems and you kind of forget why you’re in the game.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
One of the other things that has come up for us this year as we were planning our own year and really finalizing what our annual initiatives were going to be, which our team at the time of this recording hasn’t even heard yet, is that we realized that we wanted to double down on this culture piece again in 2022 as well and the reason for that is not that we haven’t been focused on it, but that there have been so many obstacles. We had at least a couple of really important in-person events for our team that had to be canceled due to COVID and it was so disappointing. We really, really had spent all this time planning, we had this awesome fall festival that we were going to do where people were going to bring their kids and they were going to be dressed up for trick or treating it was going to be a really special time.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And we added a bunch of new team members this year, so getting to meet their families was going to be a real high point of the year and we just had a big spike of COVID with the Delta variant and then it rained and so we couldn’t be outside and we just had to cancel it, so disappointing. And so Erin, my chief of staff and I were talking about it and we said, okay, we want to really prioritize getting people together in person in a way that is not putting the business at risk. So we got to kind of think about that piece too, depending on what’s going on and so we were talking about, okay, how can we come up with in-person events that are much more responsive to the environment that don’t take weeks or months to plan. Those things we can put together in a week and we see that we’re going to have a beautiful day next Wednesday, that kind of thing.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And we did this for our Christmas party this year. We had a gingerbread decorating contest at a local vineyard here that we were able to put together quickly when we saw that we were going to have a beautiful day and it was so much fun. It was so fun to be together in person. We were able to do it safely. So I think part of what it looks like to be intentional about connecting your people is coming up with creative ways of getting them together, that don’t put your business at risk where everybody’s going to be out because they all got each other sick. That’s a real concern, depending on what’s happening. At the time we’re recording this, that’s a concern for us. But at the same time, people need to get together and so how can we do that creatively? Because that human need for connection with the people you work with. For most people, their best friends are the people they work with, so how do we facilitate that?

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah. And I think even in a virtual environment, we can up our game and I occasionally do Zoom conferences with people that have really terrible lighting and the camera’s crummy and it’s just not a great experience and I know what’s happening. Those people are thinking that, Hey, this is temporary. There’s no sense making things better because we’re all going to go back to where we were before. I heard somebody say the other day, you never stand in the same river twice. That sounds like something Confucius would say. But you never stand in the same river twice. We’re not going back.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
No.

Michael Hyatt:
The virtual interactions are going to be an increasingly important part of how we do work and incredibly, there’s some really great resources out there. Zoom keeps getting better, for example. I stumbled upon this site. I want to just offer this up as a resource to people. I gave this to Erin the other day, your chief of staff. I don’t know if you saw it, but it’s a website called With Confetti.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Oh, no. I didn’t see this.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay. This is so cool. So it’s basically, if you go to the page, unforgettable team building experiences, and so these are like all ideas that you can do for the most part virtually.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Really?

Michael Hyatt:
But it says browse through hundreds of team building ideas and instantly book amazing vetted experiences on a one of a kind online platform.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
How cool is that?

Michael Hyatt:
Isn’t that cool?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
People are trying to help us out there.

Michael Hyatt:
They are. But as long as we keep denying reality and we keep hoping for the good old days, we’ll never get there. And I think that what we will see years from now looking back is that we’re living in the good old days. Right. And I can think back at some of the most consequential, tumultuous times in my lifetime when everything was changing, when the world order was changing, so to speak. Yeah, there were challenges, but some really good stuff came out of that. And so I think we need to look sort of for the silver lining in these clouds and say, how does this unique set of circumstances create an opportunity for us to create something we’ve never created before and to do it with excellence and really build something beautiful.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah. And one of the practical ways that you can think through that is what are some of the basic human needs that you know your people have and how can your company become a vehicle for meeting those, in a way that’s win-win, in a way that’s good for the organization, but that’s also good for the retention and the cultivation of your top talent. And I think if you think about that, these are things like meaning, recognition, connection. These are the kinds of things I’m talking about. How can you intentionally build those us things into your culture?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And like you said earlier, they don’t necessarily have to require a big financial investment. What they do require is thinking differently and bringing some creativity to the table and then really getting a plan on that, that you can execute and I think that really brings us all into the game in a way that we can be competitive because this is going to be harder for larger companies that are less nimble and so for most of our listeners whether you’re a business owner or you’re a leader of a team inside an organization, these are things that you can do no matter where you are and have a great impact.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah. Don’t let those limitations limit you, because constraints foster creativity. If there’s one thing we’ve said consistently on Lead To Win, it’s that, and it’s because we’ve experienced it and it’s a easy to resent constraints, whether they’re financial or they have to do with your time or your creativity but honestly, that’s where the big breakthrough ideas come is because you have that constraint. So this is an opportunity, not something you just have to kind of endure until we get to the other side. There is no other side. We are on the other side. This is the reality that we have right now.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
It is just the reality and there are so many great opportunities, so much opportunity for becoming the kind of organization that’s on the right side of this Great Resignation. That has the opportunity, by virtue of the choices you make right now and in the months ahead, to be the kind of company that people are looking for when they’re one of those 4.5 million people leaving their jobs. Right. Where they can be in alignment with their values, where they can have the kind of work-life balance that matters to them and where they can make a meaningful contribution. All of us can make that happen inside our organizations or on our teams, if we’re thoughtful about it.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah. I think this is an opportunity to take what’s been called The Great Resignation and turn it into The Great Renovation. This is an opportunity to renovate our companies, to be able to build them out for the future and to create the future. Two kinds of people, most people watch the future happen, but there are a few people that make it happen and that’s our opportunity as leaders to actually take the initiative and make it happen. We can do this.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, guys, hopefully this has given you some great things to think about as you are considering how to respond to this whole conversation about The Great Resignation in your context. We look forward to being back with you next week, until then lead to win.