Great Resignation
The wave of voluntary job quits across the United States and other Western economies between roughly spring 2021 and the end of 2022, when workers reassessed their priorities after the COVID-19 lockdowns and left their employers in record numbers.
Definitions
The wave of voluntary job quits across the United States and other Western economies between roughly spring 2021 and the end of 2022, when workers reassessed their priorities after the COVID-19 lockdowns and left their employers in record numbers. The term was coined in May 2021 by Anthony Klotz, then an organisational psychologist at Texas A&M, who predicted the surge. US Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed monthly quit rates hitting all-time highs in late 2021, driven especially by hospitality, retail and frontline healthcare workers. The Great Resignation is widely credited with normalising remote work, accelerating wage growth and seeding the broader "anti-hustle" vocabulary that followed.
My whole hospitality team turned over twice during the Great Resignation — we never really recovered the institutional knowledge.
Comments
Used in
Have a better definition?
Add your own interpretation of "Great Resignation".
Related vocabulary
💼About Corporate & Work slang
Office-speak decoded — the corporate euphemisms, Agile rituals, and HR buzzwords you'll hear in every standup, retro, and performance review.
See all Corporate & Work slang on Slangora.
Other words near "Great Resignation" (G)
Browse all slang words starting with G.
Related terms
Semantically related
- Ghost Quitting60%
Resigning by simply disappearing — slowly fading out of meetings, stopping replies to email and Slack, eventually not showing up at all — without ever submitting a formal resignation. Borrowed from the dating term "ghosting", ghost quitting became more visible in the post-2020 remote-work era, when employees could be physically absent for days before anyone in management noticed. It is most common in low-engagement hourly or contract roles, but has also been reported among salaried remote workers. HR teams generally treat it as job abandonment and process the exit unilaterally, often with consequences for references.
- Quiet Thriving59%
The deliberately positive flip of quiet quitting, coined in a 2022 Washington Post piece by psychotherapist Lesley Alderman: instead of mentally checking out of a job you can't or won't leave, you make small, intentional adjustments — building a friendship with a colleague, taking real breaks, picking up a more interesting side project, redecorating your desk — that quietly improve your day-to-day experience of work. Quiet thriving is framed as an individual coping strategy rather than a structural fix, and is often promoted by HR and wellbeing teams precisely because it asks the employee, not the employer, to do the work of feeling better.
- quiet quitting57%
An act or instance of the ceasing of overachieving at one's workplace.
- quiet quitting57%
Doing only the work explicitly required by your job description — no unpaid overtime, no extra projects. Technically still employed, mentally checked out. The 2022 Gen Z labor mantra that gave HR departments a quiet panic. Productive in moderation; corrosive in extremes.
- loud quitting55%
Resigning with a dramatic, public flourish — LinkedIn post, group-email farewell, a TikTok explaining why. Opposite of quiet quitting. "He loud quit with a five-slide deck critiquing the company. Bold." Most loud-quitters regret the deck within 12 months; the screenshots live forever.