A military veteran knows why your employees are leaving

I went into this article with my pitchfork ready to go, but I think it's actually pretty insightful in its own way. We've changed and the world has changed. Work from home has changed what we expect from our work experience, and for those that want to go back to the "before time", the world has also moved on. I see those that are 100% happy working from home as the most well-adjusted folks. The rest of us are catching up.

I'm one of those catching up. I've previously loved my in-office life, and a dynamic office environment was one of the main reasons I took a job in late 2019. The office itself was great, the team was close-knit and we constantly had great random work and non-work related conversations. All of that more than offset the typical job stressors.

With the pandemic, favorite lunch & after work hangouts are closed, only 1/4 to 1/2 of the team was in the office at any time, and any random conversation needed to quickly transition to a video chat or be well-documented so we wouldn't lose the benefit of input from others. In short, the in-office experience left a lot to be desired. It wasn't worth the commute. My company had no problem with full/partial remote, but without the office environment, it was basically a less satisfying, more stressful job than before, so I moved on.

In any case, I know people (I'm in my mid-forties, as are most of my close peers) on all parts of the "happy to be back" to "never going back" going to the office spectrum. For all of them, things are different and uncomfortable, and it's taking time to rebuild routines and expectations of what life could be.

People AND the world have moved on, leaving lots of us looking for the right ingredients for happiness and satisfaction in our work lives.

Afghan Veteran here, military experiences will vary.

Possible some people are having the issues this veteran is describing. Most military folks are taught, trained, and live “adapt and overcome” - even if they are never specifically told that.

I don’t know, anecdotally, any military people who always had the exact supplies, funding, and office space they were told they would have. The missions never go as planned, and sometimes you don’t even have food.

My point is, veterans coming home after a deployment have other mental health issues that perhaps are aggravated by lack of control. The entire military experience is a lack of control.

Perhaps it bothers some more than others, but veterans returning from war aren’t really 75 year old “get off my lawn” Vietnam vets, usually.

77% of Americans don’t have paid family leave.

McKinsey is over complicating this. I guess it’s harder to tell businesses their employees need better benefits.

Whoever at Mckinsey is doing UX for these articles, stop effing auto-scrolling your damn webpage. It makes reading it a complete and total pain in the arse.

TLDR: veteran draws analogies between post-deployment ennui and return to office, completely missing the fact that the reason that many employees are not looking for a return to their office is that they've managed to get their office space figured out, and God forbid, taken some of their life back from the cretins who think that people belong in an office away from their family 40 hours a week, 5 days a week, watching time tick away fruitlessly as the machine of investor enrichment grinds along on their shoulders.

Military coming home doesn't translate well to private industry. The military is actually reciprocal in loyalty to it's own. Do your job well, and if the politics work out, you'll still be looked after. Private indistry operates under no such compunctions. Food for thought.

In summary:

Horn compared her feelings after returning to the US from deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan to the struggles of employees negotiating the ambiguity of adjusting to a new normal of work, such as returning to the office after a long stretch of muddling through the crisis created by a global pandemic....“This Great Resignation is actually a normal response that most people have never gone through,” Adria wrote. “I’ve experienced this kind of thing after every return from deployment.”

Well that's an interesting new metric:

"Employers should start tracking the number of return hires they have. This will be the better long-term gauge of how they’ve treated their employees after a traumatic event."