By now, we are all familiar with the Great Resignation, a term attributed to University College of London management professor Anthony Klotz. But there are four more Rs today, Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley wrote in Fast Company, and they have implications for the future of work.

After the Great Resignation comes the Great Retirement, they wrote. As baby boomers already primed for retirement leave the workforce sooner than expected, perhaps due to the pandemic, resulting labor shortages will continue for at least a decade, according to economists.

The Great Reshuffle is occurring as people obtain new skills and put those skills to work in new fields. The authors cited a Pew Research study that found that, of those who changed jobs in 2021, more than half changed careers entirely.

The Great Refusal is just that: people turning down jobs with low pay. Online chatboards in which people share “workplace travesties” are factors, the authors wrote. The failure of the federal minimum wage to keep pace with inflation may be another one, as it “certainly falls well short of an incentive to make dehumanizing work worth it,” they wrote.

“Some sectors of our economy are seeing higher than average labor shortages as workers reject these underpaying jobs,” they wrote, encouraging employers to engage their workers because “engaged workers are brand ambassadors.”

The Great Relocation is ‘[f]ueled by the shift to remote work,” they wrote. “It is the shift from work-life balance to life-work balance.” The availability of remote work has caused more than 19 million adults to look to relocate, according to Upwork.

“Collectively, these shifts are The Great Reset, with an empowered workforce that has tasted autonomy and flexibility,” they wrote in conclusion.  “Let’s hope that an empowered workforce that puts work in the proper place in their lives is the key to better engagement and greater happiness.”