Ice cold drinks on a rooftop, highlighted cheekbones, chairs pushed aside for a makeshift dance floor: This is the kind of feeling that Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul” evokes — and how Beyoncé has re-stoked the flames of the Great Resignation.

Within 24 hours of the song’s release, the search query “how to resign” jumped by 350% and “great resignation” skyrocketed by 1,550% in the U.S., according to Workmajig, a project management software company. Bey sets the scene: “Now I just fell in love / And I just quit my job / I’m gonna find new drive / Damn, they work me so damn hard / Work by nine, / Then off past five / And they work my nerves / That’s why I cannot sleep at night.” In this vignette alone, she touches on some phenomena that HR professionals are intimately familiar with.

Quarantining eroded many people’s sense of time and — especially for those who could work remotely — their boundaries between personal and professional life. As early as April 2020, researchers clocked this work-life imbalance, and unconventional, flexible scheduling remains a grappling point for managers in 2022. Beyond longer hours on the clock, the collective trauma of COVID-19 exposure concerns, isolation, child care challenges, family deaths and long COVID-19 did a number on people’s mental health.

A June 2022 report by the Society for Human Resource Management reconfirmed that employee well-being and caregiving are increasingly top of mind for HR professionals amid the pandemic. In 2022, 88% of respondents marked health-related benefits as “very important” or “extremely important.” Compare that to 75% of SHRM survey-takers in 2019. Forty-six percent of respondents marked wellness benefits as being very or extremely important this year, whereas only 36% of respondents said the same in 2019.

Originally published in HR Dive

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