It took contracting Covid-19 to change Kyle Walker’s perspective on work and his career. While hospitalized with ventilator support and potentially in need of a lung transplant, Walker, 25, decided he would leave his job to do something he was actually passionate about if he recovered from the virus.
“For me, coming out of that, back to a job that was stressful, where the money really wasn’t that advantageous for me … I didn’t want to come out of that and then go into another year or two working a job just to pay bills and take trips,” Walker said.
So, when Walker left the hospital, he quit his job running a call center remotely in Raleigh, North Carolina, and went head first into building his startup, Finsoma, an affordable resource for small businesses to post jobs and find talent.
Reasons for Leaving a Job
Walker is one of the millions of Americans quitting their jobs right now. More than 4.5 million people left their jobs in November 2021, the highest quit numbers on record as of January 2022, following months of continuously increasing voluntary departures.
The phenomenon has most commonly been referred to as the Great Resignation, but others know it as the Great Migration, the Great Reprioritization or the Great Reshuffle. Whatever you call it, you might be wondering why are so many people leaving their jobs? And is it time for you to quit your job, too?
TalentLMS, a learning management system backed by Epignosis, released a report in October 2021 revealing that 72 percent of tech employees in the U.S. are thinking of quitting their jobs in the next 12 months. Besides salary and benefits, the other top reasons people want to leave their jobs are limited career progression (41 percent), a lack of flexibility in working hours (40 percent), toxic work environments (39 percent), a lack of learning and development opportunities (32 percent) and remote work options (30 percent).
“It’s a difficult decision for an employee to leave [their company]. It must happen after careful consideration,” said Periklis Venakis, chief technology officer at Epignosis. “Even if you feel that your company is not catering to your needs, make sure that you’ve communicated these needs clearly and express to your manager what will make you more productive. Then judge, by the willingness of your management to listen to your needs, and decide if you’re going to make the big step.”
Built In spoke with business and job search experts, company leaders and employees themselves about leaving a job. Here you’ll learn why employers might struggle with retention and what employees value in a job.
Employees Want Better Compensation and Benefits
Unsurprisingly, a lot of people are looking for better salaries and better benefits.
“There’s some attributes that have always been important and continue to be important. It’s compensation, health benefits, retirement, vacation, recognition and rewards, career development,” said Brett Wells, global head of people analytics at Perceptyx. “If we look back at the last 50 years, those have always been important. That’s what actually attracts someone.”
But today, employees are leaving jobs for more than just better pay. In August 2021 Perceptyx released results from a study that revealed one in five employees would leave their jobs if their employers weren’t meeting their top five most important attributes or employee value propositions. These are company stability, manager quality, team quality, social responsibility and remote-friendliness.
“It’s like the cherry on top, the icing on the cake that are really attracting employees,” Wells said.
More on Company Culture4 Benefits of a Strong Organizational Culture
Direction and Stability Dictate If Employees Will Stay
When companies undergo organizational changes like an acquisition or new business model, employees may take a step back to assess if the organization’s future plans still align with their interests and career goals. If employees feel a company is unstable or their job is in jeopardy, that might prompt them to look for a new job before facing a potential layoff.
Cornerstone OnDemand, a talent management software company, was acquired by Clearlake Capital in October 2021, transitioning from a publicly traded company to a privately held company. This recent change is one of the reasons why some Cornerstone employees have left the company, said Kim Cassady, chief talent officer at Cornerstone OnDemand.
Some employees cited concerns of cost cutting and bringing in a private equity firm as a reason to leave, but Cassady said that’s more of an old school private equity model, and Clearlake Capital just needs time to prove that it is dedicated to a model of investment. Other employees have been swayed with higher compensation from tech giants, and some have indicated a desire to pursue the excitement and innovative environment that can come with joining a new startup, she said. Cornerstone’s turnover rate is between 18 to 20 percent, which is in line with industry averages. On the flip side, Cornerstone is also attracting new talent as other tech employees look for new jobs.
“We are essentially the same as every other organization,” Cassady said. “People are looking for something refreshing and new because they’ve been doing the same thing in the same place.”
Employees who are considering another job should have a conversation with their manager about what they’re looking for and see if there are other open roles at the company that would be a fit, said Cassady. She also advises organizational leaders to remind existing employees how their work fits into the organization’s evolving mission.
“There’s that need to constantly resell your own employees. I think we focus a lot on the people coming [as opposed] to the people that have been here,” Cassady said.
When the company she was running, Zinc, was acquired by ServiceMax in 2019, Stacey Epstein committed to spending two years serving as ServiceMax’s chief marketing and customer experience officer. Like millions of others who are a part of the Great Resignation, in March 2021, Epstein decided to leave her job after reaching her two-year post-acquisition milestone and joined SaaS company Freshworks as its chief marketing officer.
“For me, it was all about wanting change, wanting new challenges and new experiences,” Epstein said. “I really relate to that need for change. I also think [the pandemic] made us all reevaluate our priorities in both work and life. That, in my opinion, has led to a lot of the dynamics around the Great Resignation.”
Having worked with many startups to bring them through growth stages and liquidity events, Epstein said she was looking to join a company at a more advanced stage for her next role. Plus, the timing felt right to leave her team at ServiceMax in the capable hands of a successor she worked with for years.
“I was really debating between going back to a CEO role at a small startup or staying as CMO and taking a role in a company at a different stage,” Epstein said.
Even at Freshworks now, Epstein has felt the effects of the Great Resignation with loss of strong talent at the company. Her attitude is to embrace the change.
“Nobody’s immune. There can’t be anybody in this world that didn’t really have a drastic change in their life,” she said. “We suffer from attrition like everybody else. I don’t think we have it any worse or any better. We’re just right there in the mix.”
A Bad Manager Can Drive Employees Away
Another reason why people leave their jobs doesn’t have anything to do with money, company culture or strategy, said Richard Jolly, a clinical associate professor at the Kellogg School of Management. It’s because of your relationship with your direct supervisor.
“It’s working for somebody that is a toxic boss. That is really what stimulates us to leave the organization. A toxic boss is somebody who could actually undermine your self esteem,” Jolly said. “If you work for a toxic boss, get out, but very often, it’s just working with somebody who’s not a skilled boss.”
Around 60 percent of managers are poor leaders, said Jolly. For companies to retain their employees, managers need to do a better job of facilitating two-way communication with their employees, especially as more companies manage hybrid or remote workforces, he said.
“The role of senior managers is not about being supervisors in the traditional sense,” Jolly said. “It’s about actually creating a context where people really feel highly engaged. They really feel that they understand who we are and where we are going. They really understand what their role is in that process, and they really feel as if they’re growing and developing.”
Toxic Workplace Culture Poisons the Employee Experience
A toxic boss is bad enough, but if your whole company’s culture is toxic, that’s also a good reason to leave a job. Signs of a toxic workplace might include poor communication, constant turnover, lack of enthusiasm from peers and a sense of fear across the organization.
Companies with toxic cultures can face mass departures when employees get fed up with how they’re treated — just look at the food and entertainment brand Bon Appétit where more than a dozen of its on-camera talent quit in response to how the company treats its employees of color. Or see luggage company Away whose revolving door of chief executives started when Slack messages from its CEO and co-founder revealed a practice of public shaming employees and overworking customer service representatives.
“If companies are suddenly surprised by the Great Resignation, they were probably overlooking a problem that existed for some time there,” Venakis said.
Company culture is all about the shared set of values, beliefs and attitudes that guide an organization in how it treats its customers and employees.
“I would argue that, looking forward, the most sustainable form of competitive advantage is not strategy, it’s culture,” said Jolly, who is also a director of the consulting firm, Stokes & Jolly Ltd.
Employees Need Greater Flexibility
Wells said his research at Perceptyx shows that two out of three employees want the flexibility to choose when and where they work, whether that’s in a physical workplace or working remotely. However, analyzing job postings through Emsi showed that of approximately 12 million current postings, only 900,000 are considered remote friendly, so one in 13 jobs, Wells said. For software developers and software quality assurance analysts and testers, remote friendly jobs are more common, up 150 percent from last year. Of 290,000 job postings, around 78,000 are remote-friendly, approximately one in four jobs.
“The best solution is to ask your employees what they want and act on that,” Wells said. Adding that the people team needs to analyze that information, “connect the dots, and make a difference.”
Companies that don’t have flexible hours or work environments stand to lose talent as more employees desire remote-flexible roles. There are plenty of other benefits to allowing employees to work from home, too, like increased productivity and lower office costs.
“The shift in the way work is being done is much more prominent in the technical industry,” said Venakis of remote work. “Now that they see they can do it, they’re not willing to go back to the office — not all of them, at least — and they are open to new proposals.”
Venakis said Epignosis was reluctant to switch to remote work at first but has now opened up remote-only positions, which allows the company to recruit from around the world.
More on Company CultureCompany Culture Matters More Than You Think
Employees Want Career Growth and Recognition
Leaving a job after a year or two indicated unreliability 15 to 20 years ago, but today there is much more acceptance. Job hopping — the idea of moving from job to job after a short period of time — no longer carries the same stigma it once did.
“Job hopping used to be seen negatively,” said Mark Anthony Dyson, a career writer and founder of The Voice of Jobseekers. “Now it is the way that people are going to advance their careers.”
The narrative around switching jobs has changed as employees have realized it’s not guaranteed that companies will recognize and reward their loyalty. Moving to new companies also allows employees to gain new skills and experiences.
“Whether you’re young or old, you can build skills the market desires and needs,” Dyson said. “If there’s demand for that skill, you’re going to be in demand.”
While Baby Boomers and Gen X workers might have spent their entire careers at one or two organizations, Jolly said the younger generations of employees are more willing to leave companies for career growth opportunities.
“I think for young people entering the workplace in their 20s or early 30s today, they have a very clear sense that they’re not just going to work for one organization,” he said. “Basically, young people today assume that they won’t stay with the same company for more than three years at any point in their career.”
Jolly said the reason why Millennials and Gen Z workers are more open to leaving jobs is because work doesn’t define their identities. They also tend to place a high value on balance between work and their personal lives.
“What these people are doing is extracting as much value, mining as much value as they can, out of their organization, then moving on. Rather than just sitting there with diminishing returns in terms of how much they’re really learning and growing and developing, both as people and in terms of their skills,” Jolly said.
Employees Are Ready to Pursue Entrepreneurship
As the founder and CEO of a startup incubator, Jake Hare has started to see more people leave their jobs to launch their own businesses and startups since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Launchpeer works with nontechnical founders to take their very early stage ideas and turn them into funded startups.
“They want freedom. They want control. They want to fulfill their potential,” Hare said. “Those are things that, unless you work in a great place, are very difficult to find when you’re working for someone else because the regular corporate culture is not designed for that. It’s designed to have you fit in with a large group of people to accomplish a goal.”
The corporate layoffs that characterized the beginning of the pandemic also left people feeling insecure. Realizing that the instability of the job market can put any job at risk, more people have been willing to take on the risks of entrepreneurship to become their own bosses, Hare said.
“They’ve realized that it’s insecure working for someone else, and that does burn you out,” Hare said. “One of the things that’s hard for people when they want to start something is being scared of taking the risk — it is a risky thing to start a company — but obviously, during Covid, we saw it’s also risky just working for someone else. You can get let go of any time, a pandemic could hit, all this stuff could happen.”
With the rise of remote work, startup founders are not restricted geographically. Plus, in recent years, access to technology and software templates has become easier than ever, meaning that founders do not need to be skilled developers or build original code to start a company.
“If everything’s remote, that puts everybody on a much more level playing field,” Hare said of his clients. “It’s not really costly anymore. You don’t need to have all the skills, or you don’t need to fly overseas to meet someone or be living in San Francisco. The only excuse that people have now is time. Are you willing to dedicate a few hours a week to just get things off the ground and then transition over into full time?”
Walker worked with Launchpeer to create his startup Finsoma, which was inspired by his struggles to find employees for the call center he was running.
“It was a massive struggle to hire quality talent. I did not feel like the information that I wanted to know before reaching out to somebody was there,” Walker said. “We also did not have the budget to hire a recruiter or multiple recruiters to filter through the thousands of resumes we’re getting amongst various websites, which then made them not useful.”
So far, the company has a couple early investors and hopes to launch the product in spring 2022.
“My passion is sitting right in front of me. I now have a way or means to execute it. There’s no reason not to go full throttle with it,” Walker said. “When you have a reason to wake up in the morning, that you love, it really makes every day exciting. When every day is exciting, that’s contagious.”
Employees Want Jobs That Align With Their Purpose
If your passions aren’t fulfilled by your current job, like it was for Walker, it might be time to consider a change.
For Rayna Stamboliyska, she left her job as vice president for governance and public affairs at YesWeHack in October 2021 to pursue her own consultancy focused on strategic foresight and public affairs for EU-based tech companies.
“A lot of people were like, come on, you’re a VP of a company that just raised a Series B … why are you quitting?” Stamboliyska said.
Her response: It’s not about the money. Stamboliyska felt the time was right to focus on her diverse interests around making tech more responsible and holding tech companies accountable.
“The question is what’s my place in the world? What can I contribute to making cyberspace safer, into helping users?” she said.
With a background as a trained scientist, international consultant, foreign policy expert and researcher, Stamboliyska is working to leverage her various skills as the founder and CEO of her own company, https://www.rs-strategy.consulting/.
“I realized that now or never is the time for me to go out and bring things that only I can bring,” Stamboliyska said. “People were coming to me — for me — to advise them, to help them out. They were not coming to me because of my employer.”
Burnout Takes a Toll on Employees.
From sheltering in place to homeschooling to constant mask wearing and, of course, persistent fearthroughout the Covid-19 pandemic, everyone is exhausted. On top of that, people have been working an average of 48 minutes longer each work day. No wonder some people are feeling burnt out.
“For all of us, the two universal symptoms of the pandemic are fatigue and brain fog. All of us are just tired,” Jolly said. “All of us are just less productive. We’re more foggy and less focused.”
The pandemic has forced people to reconsider many aspects of their lives, including their jobs. Those feeling burnt out are among the people quitting recently. The TalentLMS study revealed that 58 percent of respondents say they suffer from job burnout, and those who suffer from burnout are twice as likely to quit their job than those who don’t.
“People are asking themselves some quite fundamental, you might say existential questions, about why am I doing this?” Jolly said.
Stamboliyska said European companies place an emphasis on evaluating psychosocial risk factors that affect how people deal with stress at work like high workloads and tight deadlines. These stressors can lead to physical and mental health issues and cause employees to quit their jobs. As people continue to deal with trauma from the pandemic, conversations around mental health have needed to become more common in the workplace.
“Those things have really surfaced during Covid and are now acknowledged, so it gives social permission, in terms of social acceptability, to people to just say, look, I want to do something else,” Stamboliyska said.
More on Company CultureHow These 4 Types of Organizational Culture Define Your Company
Employers Need to Offer More Skills Development
TalentLMS’s study revealed that nine in 10 workers would like to get more learning and development opportunities from their company, and 62 percent say more learning and training opportunities would make them more motivated at work.
“The survey concluded that in order to retain your workforce, you need to invest in training … not only are companies threatened by this global competition from remote job opportunities, so that they don’t lose their workforce, but employees themselves can feel threatened by the fact that the company might more easily replace them with someone who will cost less in different parts of the world,” Venakis said.
The antidote to this is upskilling and reskilling, Venakis said. Employees who learned new skills or advanced their skills during the pandemic are in a better position to find new jobs or grow at their current companies. And companies who encourage this learning are more likely to retain their current talent.
“We’re seeing that people are switching industries and getting out of areas that were a little bit more vulnerable during the pandemic,” Wells said. “Many individuals took this time to upskill where they’re currently at and make them more attractive for these roles that you can work anywhere around the world, get paid pretty well, have that remote flexibility, all those things that we’re seeing that matter to employees.”
So Should You Leave Your Job?
If you’re in a toxic situation, yes, you should leave your job as soon as possible. Otherwise, it’s important to do some self-reflection before deciding to quit. Can you find more meaning in your current work through conversations with your manager about ways to tweak your role to better align with your interests? Have you had direct conversations about paths to grow your career at your current company? If you’re still not feeling fulfilled or seeing a future for yourself at the company, it might be time to start looking elsewhere.
As for leaving your job to start your own venture, that certainly depends on your own tolerance for risk, but as Hare said, staying with a company is not always stable either. If you’re looking for more flexibility or salary than your current job can offer, it can be useful to get a sense of what the market can offer you.
“I would always advise everybody to have a sense of what your market value is. You need to get a sense of what is your value in the external marketplace,” Jolly said.
Epstein encourages others to really consider if their needs will be a fit with a new organization before quitting a job where they’re established.
“Just really think long and hard about the reasons that you’re leaving, and are you sure those results are going to be satisfied at a new place because that grass-is-always-greener syndrome is a real thing,” Epstein said. “I know lots of people that are sorry that they left what was a pretty good thing just because they were restless.”
Before leaving a job, Jolly encourages adopting the concept of job crafting, which comes down to how can I do my current role in a way that is more meaningful for me? Trying to shape your role before leaving can spare you from that grass-is-always-greener effect, where you may be joining a new company with the same problems as your last.
“I’m not saying that people shouldn’t leave, but certainly think very clearly about how you can craft your current role in your current organization. Because what you don’t want to do is constantly be in that sort of state where organizations are seducing you with wonderful job offers, and you end up with no better off than where you started, because many large organizations are pretty similar to each other,” Jolly said. “Think deeply about what really matters to you in your career. When you look back over your career, what will success look like? What would have really mattered to you?”
