Employees quitting continues to be Canadian trend

At Durty Nelly’s Irish Pub in downtown Halifax, manager Niall McGuinness said he hasn’t seen many employees quit recent.

“A lot of people have been here for 10-plus years,” said McGuinness. “We are looking at about maybe five-to-10 people a year.”

However, there are times when staffing levels fluctuate. Younger staff tend to come and go, especially following the busy tourism season.

“The big one that we always see is the seasonality of it,” said McGuinness. “There are a lot of students in Halifax, and they are not available from September.”

A recent Wagepoint study examined 30,595 Canadian businesses, from 2021-2023. It found:

• 57,584 employees quit.
• 45,477 quit for another job.
• 5,178 quit to return to school.
• 648 left their job to start a business.

During the pandemic, human resources advisor Gerald Walsh said this was called “The Great Resignation.”

“It was a term coined by a professor from the University of Texas,” said Walsh. “Individuals were fed up with the workplace, and all of the restrictions and challenges that they were facing getting to work.”

So they quit, in some cases in large numbers, although Walsh has seen employee retention improve over the last year.

Walsh said a recent Gallup study also showed workers were willing to stay on the job longer-term if they could work from home some of the time.

“It is kind of settling out, that the hybrid model of two or three days a week, seems to be the one that satisfies employers and employees the best,” said Walsh.

According to digital anthropologist Giles Crouch, employees leaving their job is symptomatic of a broader change in professional culture.

“The relationship between employee and employer has changed over the past several years. It was a shift of employers going towards shareholder values instead of customer values,” said Crouch, who added this caused a ripple effect at workplaces across North America. “Employers are saying to their employees, ‘You need to work more hours but I’m not going to compensate you for the additional time that you’re spending at work. I’m not going to give you more money.’”

Based on Crouch’s observations, that caused a lot of workers to look for new jobs, especially in recent years.