The information above might suggest that employers should just focus on key senior people. Unfortunately, Price’s Law applies to people in creative domains: technology, marketing, user experience, and management.
But organisations need many front-line employees, who don’t work creatively, but who often interface with customers and suppliers, or allow an organization to scale its external face. These are cleaners, retail workers, factory workers, administration staff and operations employees. As outlined above, a third of these employees have left work in the last year.
Australia faces a particular challenge for these employees. In March 2020, there were 494,000 international students living in the country. By October 2021 that number was 263,000 (2).
International students working in Australia provided a symbiotic benefit: students could earn money while they studied, helping offset the cost of pursuing a degree in Australia, and businesses had a supply of employees to fill frontline lower skilled roles (which is not to suggest that these students lacked skills – rather, they worked in these types of roles to support attainment of academic objectives).
The reduction of students entering the country has halved this valuable employment lubricant.
The visible effect of this has been obvious: Cafes and restaurants have been forced to reduce hours and childcare centres have closed their services, and retail businesses are constantly short-staffed.
The less visible effect is that managers are forced to complete work usually handled by less senior staff and senior IT people are forced to fix simple technology issues and executives across businesses are burdened by increasing workloads, often filled with chores they’d left years ago, increasing their stress, dissatisfaction, and burnout.
The resignation risk of Price’s precious few increases.