The Great Resignation Is a Respect Problem: What the Data Says About Why People Quit and What Makes Them Stay

Two weeks ago, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics published its annual job turnover estimates. American workers quit 47.8 million jobs in 2021, the highest number since the series began in 2001 and 12 million more than in 2020. Quits made up almost 70 percent of all separations. On the same day, the Pew Research Center published a survey of people who had quit a job during the year and asked them why.

The answers did not match the story many executives have been telling themselves:

• 63 percent said low pay was a reason.
• 63 percent said no opportunities for advancement.
• 57 percent said they felt disrespected at work.

In January, a team at MIT Sloan Management Review analysed 34 million online employee profiles and more than a million Glassdoor reviews. They found that a toxic corporate culture was 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting whether a company lost people faster than its industry peers.

The phrase "Great Resignation" has been around since last spring. Most of the commentary treats it as an economic event: a tight labour market, savings built up during the pandemic, competing offers. All of that is real. But the data is also telling us something about human motivation that was true long before 2021. People do not only work for money. They work for respect, for growth and for a sense that what they do matters. When those things are missing and the market gives them options, they leave.

This post looks at what we know about why people quit, why they stay, and what managers can do about it now.

1. What the numbers say, and what they do not

It is worth being precise about what the data shows.

Three cautions apply.

First, quitting is not the same as leaving work. Pew found that most people who quit and found new jobs say they now have better pay, more advancement and more flexibility. Much of the Great Resignation is a great reshuffle: people moving to employers who treat them better.

Second, pay still matters. Low pay tied for the top reason in the Pew survey. A respectful culture is not a substitute for a fair wage. The point is that pay is necessary but rarely sufficient, and that most companies already compete on pay while neglecting the rest.

Third, this is mostly US data. Labour markets in Europe and elsewhere have different rules and different patterns. The underlying research on motivation, though, comes from many countries and holds up remarkably well.

2. "Toxic" is specific, not vague

"Culture" can sound like a soft word. The MIT Sloan research is useful because it names what employees actually complain about. The authors, Donald Sull, Charles Sull and Ben Zweig, identified five elements of a toxic culture:

They also found other strong predictors of attrition: job insecurity and frequent reorganisations, failure to recognise good performance, and a poor response to COVID-19. Interestingly, a high pace of innovation also predicted attrition, probably because constant change is exhausting when it is not managed well.

Notice that none of these are about free snacks, ping-pong tables or office design. They are about how people are treated, mostly by their direct managers and peers.

3. Why respect and growth matter so much: what motivation research tells us

None of this would surprise psychologists who study motivation. The most widely tested framework is self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan since the 1980s. It holds that people have three basic psychological needs, and that motivation and wellbeing depend on whether those needs are met:

Read the Pew list again with this in mind. "No opportunities for advancement" is a competence problem. "Feeling disrespected" is a relatedness problem. "Lack of flexibility", which 45 percent of quitters cited, is an autonomy problem. Pay matters for its own reasons, including fairness and security, but the other top reasons map almost exactly onto the three needs.

The theory also explains why money alone often fails to motivate. Decades of studies show that controlling rewards, ones experienced as pressure or manipulation, can reduce people's intrinsic interest in their work. Fair pay removes a reason to leave. It does not, by itself, create a reason to care.

4. Purpose: a real need, easily abused

The pandemic gave many people time to think about what they want from their lives. Surveys over the past year keep finding that people want their work to feel meaningful, and that many are less willing to sacrifice their health and families for a job.

There is good evidence that a sense of purpose helps. People who see how their work benefits others tend to be more motivated and more persistent. Adam Grant's well-known studies with university fundraisers found that a short meeting with a student who had benefited from a scholarship substantially increased the fundraisers' effort and results in the following weeks.

But purpose is easily abused. Three common mistakes:

1. Purpose as a slogan. A mission statement on a wall means nothing if daily decisions contradict it. People notice the gap, and it feels like hypocrisy, which is worse than having no stated purpose.
2. Purpose as a substitute for pay. "You are doing this for the mission" is not an acceptable answer to a request for fair compensation. Nonprofits and startups are especially prone to this.
3. Purpose as a reason to overwork. Meaningful work can become a trap when people feel they cannot say no. Burnout is common in caring professions precisely because people care.

A better approach is to connect people to the real effects of their work: customer stories, user feedback, data on outcomes, and contact with the people they serve. Let the purpose be visible rather than announced.

5. Hybrid work and the autonomy question

The other big story of early 2022 is the return to offices. Many companies are planning to bring people back as the Omicron wave fades, and the conflict between what leaders want and what employees want is becoming visible.

Microsoft's Work Trend Index, published last week, describes the tension well. Employees have a new set of expectations about flexibility and wellbeing. Many leaders want people back in the office for collaboration and culture. And many managers are caught in the middle, without the authority or resources to make it work.

From a motivation point of view, the issue is not where people work. It is who decides and how. Imposed rules with no explanation feel controlling, and controlling environments reduce motivation. Rules agreed with teams, based on a clear reason ("we come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays because that is when we plan and review together"), are much easier to accept.

Practical rules for return-to-office decisions:

• Give a reason. If you cannot explain why being in the office matters for a particular kind of work, people will assume it is about control.
• Decide at the team level where possible. Teams know their work better than head office.
• Make the office worth the commute. If people come in to sit on video calls all day, the policy will fail.
• Treat remote and in-office people equally in promotions, visibility and access to information.

6. What managers can change this quarter

Most retention problems are not solved in the boardroom. They are solved, or created, by direct managers. Gallup has long estimated that managers account for a large share of the variation in team engagement. The good news is that the most important changes are within a manager's control and do not need a budget.

Respect

• Respond to messages and requests in a reasonable time. Being ignored is one of the most common forms of disrespect.
• Explain decisions, especially ones people will not like.
• Do not criticise people in public. Do praise good work in public, specifically.
• Watch for favouritism. Ask yourself who gets the interesting projects and why.

Growth

• Have a conversation with every team member about where they want to be in two years. Most people have never been asked.
• Give each person one stretch assignment this quarter.
• Make internal moves easy. It is better to lose someone to another team than to another company.

Recognition

• Recognise effort and results promptly and specifically. "Thanks for fixing the billing bug before the release; it saved us a week" beats a generic "great job".
• Make sure recognition reaches the people who do invisible work: maintenance, support, documentation, mentoring.

Fairness

• Review pay for your team against the market. If someone is underpaid, raise it before they get an outside offer.
• Make promotion criteria explicit and apply them consistently.

7. Stay interviews: ask before they leave

Most companies run exit interviews. By then it is too late, and departing employees often soften their answers to avoid burning bridges. A stay interview asks the same questions while the person is still with you.

Five questions that work:

1. What do you look forward to when you start work each week?
2. What would you change about your job if you could?
3. What did you do in the last month that you were proudest of? Did anyone notice?
4. Is there anything that has made you think about leaving?
5. What can I do to make your work better?

The most important part is what happens next. If you ask and then do nothing, you have made things worse. Pick one or two things you can change, change them, and tell the person you did.

8. A checklist for leaders

For senior leaders

• [ ] Look at your attrition data by team, not only by company. A high-turnover team usually has a manager problem.
• [ ] Read your company's Glassdoor reviews and internal survey comments, and look for the five toxic elements.
• [ ] Check whether your values are applied to senior people as strictly as to junior ones.
• [ ] Review pay bands against the current market, not last year's.
• [ ] Explain the reason behind any return-to-office policy and let teams adapt it.

For managers

• [ ] Hold a stay interview with each person on your team this quarter.
• [ ] Agree one growth goal with each person.
• [ ] Recognise specific contributions every week.
• [ ] Ask your team what one thing makes their work harder than it needs to be, and fix it.

Why this matters

• The cost is high. Replacing an employee commonly costs a large fraction of their annual salary, before counting lost knowledge and the strain on the people who stay.
• The causes are mostly fixable. Disrespect, unfairness and lack of growth are management problems, not market forces.
• People will remember how they were treated. The habits companies build during this period will shape their reputations long after the labour market cools.
• Motivation is not mysterious. Decades of research point to the same basic needs: autonomy, competence and connection, plus fair pay.

Final Thoughts

It is tempting to treat the Great Resignation as a temporary labour market shock that will pass when the economy cools. Some of it will. Quit rates will probably fall when jobs become harder to find.

But the reasons people give for leaving will not go away when the market changes. People who felt disrespected will still feel disrespected; they will just have fewer options. That leads to a quieter and arguably worse outcome: people who stay but stop caring.

The lesson of the past year is not new. People want to be treated with respect, to grow, to have some say over their work and to feel that it matters. Leaders who take that seriously will have an advantage whatever the labour market does next. Those who wait for the market to solve the problem for them will find that it never really does.

Sources

• US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover - January 2022 (March 9, 2022): annual estimates showing 47.8 million quits in 2021, a series high.
• Kim Parker and Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Majority of workers who quit a job in 2021 cite low pay, no opportunities for advancement, feeling disrespected, Pew Research Center (March 9, 2022).
• Donald Sull, Charles Sull and Ben Zweig, Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation, MIT Sloan Management Review (January 11, 2022).
• Microsoft, Great Expectations: Making Hybrid Work Work, 2022 Work Trend Index (March 16, 2022).
• Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, "Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being", American Psychologist 55(1) (2000).
• Edward L. Deci, Richard Koestner and Richard M. Ryan, "A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation", Psychological Bulletin 125(6) (1999).
• Adam M. Grant and colleagues, "Impact and the Art of Motivation Maintenance: The Effects of Contact with Beneficiaries on Persistence Behavior", Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 103(1) (2007).