- 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.
"It was never going to be fully remote, they made that pretty clear," she said of the smaller agency. "They had a COVID year where they had outstanding sales… but my bonus was significantly less."
When she was recruited to work at a large digital agency at the end of the year as an operations manager, she jumped at the opportunity. They promised her that the work would be mostly remote, and offered her a 30% pay raise.
Labarba wasn't alone. Approximately 31% of women who switched jobs in the past two years received compensation packages, including salaries and bonuses, greater than 30% that of their previous positions, the Conference Board, a private-research group, found last month.
But a pay raise and remote work on their own aren't necessarily a step up, she said.
"I had fewer responsibilities," she said. "I grew a little bit miserable over the seven months I was there, so in July, I decided to switch to something that gave me more to do."
She said that the company was flexible in theory, letting employees shorten their work week, for instance, but that the demands of the workday rarely allowed such in practice.
"If your employees can't actually leave at noon on a Friday because of the amount of work they have, then what's the point of that policy?" she said. "Even the idea of going in just once a week started to make me miserable."
In 2021, she got started working in the human resources department at ChopraGlobal, which she said has been more fulfilling. She secured another pay raise, making $1,343 in net pay a week. A year before, she'd been making nearly $500 less per week.
Labarba says that at Chopra, she feels a company-wide commitment to work-life balance, which is what she had been seeking from an employer since the pandemic started.
"If I say that I'm sick, they're extremely flexible about moving meetings around… and there's no pressure to go into work," she said. "95% of the people I talk to who want to work for Chopra are looking for that model because they don't want to be pushed into an office eventually even if the pandemic completely disappears."