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Examples include employees working from home or part-time, returning to school or enrolling in job training programs, or quitting jobs to take gig work. 

“Flexibility is a baseline factor of being competitive for talent,” she explains. “Thinking about this up front will help employers in the long-term.”

As job growth slows and the potential for a recession looms, how much longer will employers care about what workers want and need? My answer: There is no labor market in which being a bad employer is a competitive advantage.

Educators in the report — broadly, people working in education, but not just teachers — were more likely on average to say they had too much to do at work, Addison said. More educators had reported calling in sick due to burnout in the past year. And while educators weren’t leaving the field en masse during the pandemic, Addison said she thought they were more likely to leave this year.

The organization Bethia Burke leads, the Fund for Our Economic Future, recently has surveyed thousands of workers and hundreds of employers. And those surveys make it clear, Burke said, that beyond competitive wages, businesses that want to be an employer of choice need to create workplaces with better communication and more flexibility.

While there are many anecdotal answers, Bethia Burke, president of Fund for Our Economic Future, says her organization went looking for the real reasons here in northeastern Ohio.

Paying attention to what workers say matters. Even with concerns about a coming recession, talent shortages persist.

“What we’re seeing in the results is that there is a sizable number of people who have shifted their perspective about what matters, and it is showing up in the choices they are making,” she said.