Why 80% of Quitters Regret Quitting

March 21, 2023
Richard Finnegan
Articles

A recent study by Paychex tells us a full 80% of those who changed jobs during “The Great Resignation” have regrets…and wish they hadn’t walked out on their original jobs.[i] That’s a BIG number. Let’s assume that the study was done in a professional way and extrapolate that over the more than 97 million quitters from 2021-2022. That’s 77.6 million people who regret quitting their job. Let that sink in.

Why Did People Quit During “The Great Resignation”?

So why did they leave? Higher pay and better working conditions were the primary answers given. What do they miss most? Their co-workers.

As today’ trendy news reporters say, there’s much to unpack here. Let’s start with why they left.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever decided to leave a job you loved for more pay – just more pay. I’ll bet a month of my pay that 90% of those leavers who reported they left for more pay originally went looking for a job because they wanted to escape from their current job AND got more money as a result of their search.
“Better working conditions” is the second-named reason why those who leave went looking. What the heck does that actually mean? Do they all work in places like beef packing plants and can no longer handle the raunchy smell?

Each year at the SHRM annual conference I poll my audience like this:

Raise your arm if your company does exit surveys…and nearly everyone raises their arms.
Now raise your arm if you’ve made your company better by doing exit surveys…and never have more than 5% of the audience raised their arms.
Now shout out-loud to the audience why you cannot improve your company with exit surveys…and immediately many shout together “because employees don’t tell the truth”.

The lesson from my poll and this study…and any other survey on “why employees left”…is that all the data is self-reported. The leaving employees are the only source of information for the reasons they left. Why can’t you trust that data? Come on and shout it out with me, “because employees don’t tell the truth.”

Now let’s go deeper on that second reason why employees say they left which was “better working conditions”. I once googled for the number one reason employees quit and found about ten different #1 reasons with the most frequent being “better opportunity”…which I’ll consider to be a cousin to “better working conditions”. The main reason “better opportunity” appears so often is because it is a standard potential reason on every exit interview checklist. Whether HR interviews the leaver or the leaver self-reports, “better opportunity” is a wonderful generic trash basket in which to toss a broad range of real responses. And it tells us nothing…though it is often interpreted to mean more pay.

And before we leave “more pay”, the self-reported data tells us more money was a main reason for leaving. So what is the real value of for example a $5,000 annual raise:

An estimated 25% goes to the federal government
Another estimated 10% goes to local government
Most companies do payroll 26 times in a year

So a $5,000 raise equates to $125 per paycheck. This is such a small amount of money that one wonders if most raises are more about recognition than about cash.

And What Was It These Employees Missed the Most After They Quit?

Co-workers. Most said they miss their co-workers so much they wish they hadn’t left. And at about the same time the Paychex study was released, so was a related article in a report titled 85-year Harvard Study Found That People With This Type of Job Tend to Be the Unhappiest.[ii] Here’s that finding:

Jobs that require little human interaction and don’t offer opportunities to build meaningful relationships with co-workers tend to have the most miserable employees.

Which makes one wonder what matters more to employees when choosing from great co-workers or a $5,000 raise. I think the winning play would include good co-workers along with great recognition.

The Root Cause of Why Employees Quit Seems to be Missing

So we have millions of employees who are supposedly leaving for more pay but their regret is missing their co-workers. But there is no word on whether they miss their previous supervisors. Could it be…just maybe…that those supervisors are the real reason those millions of employees left?

Gallup tells us that a full 50% of employees who seek other jobs do so because of their managers.[iii] So let’s say at least half of these millions of quitters did so not because of pay nor because of better working conditions, but because of their boss.

The Q5 Tell Us Why Stay Interviews Work to Combat Quitting

Our company consistently helps client companies cut turnover by 20% and more, and our solution details how it would have greatly reduced the number of employees who left. That solution includes costing turnover, establishing retention goals, training first-line managers to conduct Stay Interviews and forecast how long each employee will stay…and then holding them accountable for retention outcomes. The hidden solution, though, is the scripting and training related to the five specific Stay Interview questions:

When you travel to work each day, what things do you look forward to? To begin with a positive question that brings the employee’s thinking into the present hour here and now.
What are you learning here? Helping employees learn is an easy gift to give, whereas career talk should be reserved for those employees who might actually have a career with your company.
Why do you stay here? My favorite, in part because many employees don’t immediately know the answer and therefore must discover it and announce it to themselves. And knowing this answer along with the answer to Q1 tells us how to make employees happy.
When was the last time you thought about leaving our team? And what prompted it? “When” signifies that everyone thinks about leaving so it’s OK to say you think about it, too. And responding to Q3 above means you have now presented a balanced position of why you stay and could leave.
What can I do as your manager to make working here better for you? We close by addressing the relationship between us.

By applying skills like listening, probing, and taking notes, about 90% of employees tell the truth. And when managers acknowledge, respond, and even make a few changes to day-to-day work, magic happens and employees stay longer.

Would Stay Interviews have reduced the millions of employees who left and later regretted doing so? For many millions of them, I believe the answer is, “yes.”