UCL School of Management Associate Professor Anthony Klotz has recently sat down with the Independent to share his expertise on the sudden decline in resignations seen across workforces globally. While the COVID-19 pandemic saw the emergence of what Anthony famously coined ‘The Great Resignation’, 2023 and 2024 have suggested that many workers are now staying put in their current roles.

Highlighting the four key factors triggering mass resignations during the pandemic, Anthony points to high levels of burnout, the introduction of remote and hybrid working, sudden epiphanies during the pandemic era, and resignation backlog. However, it seemed the sudden transfer of power from employer to employee was largely beneficial for the workforce, who seemingly “got used to a form of working where they had a higher freedom in how they arranged their work day.”

This has ultimately led to the emergence of a new era: ‘The Big Stay’. The Independent’s Helen Coffey investigates the reasons why employees are no longer job hopping or choosing to leave their jobs as willingly as they did just two years ago. Coffey found that in the UK, the resignation rate has fallen from its peak of 3.6 percent in Q1 of 2021 to 2.3 percent in Q1 of 2024. This is also echoed in the US, reporting a resignation rate drop of 0.8 percent since 2022.

As we enter this new era of work, Klotz has identified that work-life balance and flexibility are at an all-time high, and people have switched to better jobs, making more employees content in their new roles. He states, “we’re in a period now where there’s a chunk of people who upgraded quite nicely and are pretty content in their jobs.”

Read the full Independent article or explore Anthony’s research.