-
Lesley Labarba is one of many millennials who are a part of the "Great Reshuffle."
-
COVID-19 made her realize she wanted fully remote work options, pandemic or no pandemic.
-
In addition to now working from home, she's making $500 more a week than she was in 2020.
Lesley Labarba, 28, had a revelation during the pandemic: She didn't want to go into an office anymore.
"When I was working at the job where I was going to the office every day, I thought it was perfect," she told Insider. "As soon as I started working remotely and I got the two hours commute time back in my life, I suddenly had more time than I knew what to do with."
Labarba, who lives in Texas and is now a human resources director at healthcare company Chopra Global, re-evaluated what she wanted from a job in 2020, and has hopped around workplaces since then. She's had three different jobs since the end of 2020, moving between positions as workplaces with better pay, more benefits, and more flexibility presented themselves. The starting offer of her current job was a net raise of 39% from what she was making in 2020, which Insider verified via pay stubs. And she's since gotten another raise. Overall, Labarba is making 65% more than at the start of the pandemic.
"As all these boomers exit the market and it's filled with Gen Z people, you begin to see time as a commodity," she said, explaining that she thinks young people rising in the workplace value their time more than generations past.
Labarba is one of the roughly 47 million people who have joined the "Great Resignation" in search of a better career, or as LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky called it last year, the "Great Reshuffle." Many people are searching for higher wages, especially women. And many are also searching for remote options due to changing preferences for work, a fear of COVID-19 exposure, or a lack of accessible childcare. On top of all that, people are also quitting to explore their passions outside of work, flexibility that makes a workplace more appealing to people like Labarba.
"Offering people the most time for themselves and their families is all it really takes to get really good people in the door," Labarba said.
Better pay, remote flexibility, and opportunities for advancement
For most of 2020, Labarba worked as a human resources manager at small company that does marketing for larger brands like Frito Lay. She describes their handling of the pandemic as "poor," and said she didn't like that they required her to work in person. Labarba asked that the name of the companies she worked for in 2020 be kept private, though they are known to Insider.