60 Percent of Australia‘s Knowledge Workers Are Ready to Quit Their Jobs — How Leaders Can Respond.

According to a recent remote work survey from Slack, almost 60 percent of Australians are considering moving to a new role within the next 12 months.

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A disconnect between employees, managers, and executives is blamed for this global trend, with 44 percent of executives hoping to return to the office full-time compared with just 17 percent of lower-level employees.

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Almost one-third of Australian workers say that they would like to work whenever, wherever, with no restraints whatsoever on their schedule — higher than any other market.

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This all suggests that unless remote or hybrid work is accommodated, we are indeed on the brink of a ‘great resignation’, leaving today’s executives and leaders with some tough decisions to make.

Worryingly, two-thirds of executives report that they are designing post-pandemic work policies with little to no direct input from employees.

In the ongoing war for talent, one that has been exacerbated by the pandemic and the growing openness to tapping global talent pools, leaders can hardly afford not to offer people some form of flexibility. Survey respondents with schedule flexibility feel over 6-times better about their work-related stress, and 3-times better about their work-life balance.

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As such, it’s a question of how to accommodate remote work without compromising sustained performance.

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How Leaders Can Respond

As I wrote in an open letter to Deloitte Australia’s CEO Adam Powick several months ago, building effective and fulfilling remote workplaces relies on the following factors.

• Move away from real-time communication towards asynchronous communication.
• Move away from an over-reliance on email towards collaboration tools such as task boards.
• Move away from a culture of “yes”, leaving our days full of Zoom calls, towards a culture of “yes, only if it’s absolutely necessary”.
• Individual conviction over group consensus in decision-making.
• The automation and outsourcing of rudimentary processes.

Read more about each of these here.

Doing so sets organizations up to win the war for talent by offering flexible work, but empowers talent to do their best work both now and long into the future.