Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation
Research using employee data reveals the top five predictors of attrition and four actions managers can take in the short term to reduce attrition.
More than 40% of all employees were thinking about leaving their jobs at the beginning of 2021, and as the year went on, workers quit in unprecedented numbers.1 Between April and September 2021, more than 24 million American employees left their jobs, an all-time record.2 As the Great Resignation rolls on, business leaders are struggling to make sense of the factors driving the mass exodus. More importantly, they are looking for ways to hold on to valued employees.
To better understand the sources of the Great Resignation and help leaders respond effectively, we analyzed 34 million online employee profiles to identify U.S. workers who left their employer for any reason (including quitting, retiring, or being laid off) between April and September 2021.3 The data, from Revelio Labs, where one of us (Ben) is the CEO, enabled us to estimate company-level attrition rates for the Culture 500, a sample of large, mainly for-profit companies that together employ nearly one-quarter of the private-sector workforce in the United States.4
While resignation rates are high on average, they are not uniform across companies. Attrition rates for the six months we studied ranged from less than 2% to more than 30% across companies. Industry explains part of this variation. The graph below shows the estimated attrition rate for 38 industries from April through September, and the spread across industries is striking. (See “Industry Average Attrition Rate in the Great Resignation.”) Apparel retailers, on average, lost employees at three times the rate of airlines, medical device makers, and health insurers.
