Toxic Corporate Culture is Driving the Great Resignation
While other factors predict attrition too, culture can make or break things
As a record number of Americans resigned their jobs in 2021, we are proud to present our research in MIT Sloan Review’s Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation, co-written with MIT adjunct faculty and co-founders of Culture X, Donald Sull and Charles Sull, and Revelio Labs CEO Ben Zweig. The article investigates the main drivers of workforce attrition and actual strategies managers can employ to retain talent.
The authors use Revelio Labs attrition data, in conjunction with topics in the free text of more than 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews, as well as the Natural Employee Language Understanding platform developed by CultureX to examine key drivers of workforce attrition at companies.
The paper finds that toxic corporate culture is by far the best predictor of employee attrition, over 10 times as important as compensation, and far ahead even of job security, or failure to recognize performance.
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Since these factors are hard to correct, the article investigates actionable steps managers can take in the short-term to reduce attrition.
Key Takeaways:
- Toxic work-culture is a major driver of workforce attrition, along with job insecurity, excess innovation, and a bad COVID response.
- Lateral career opportunities, remote work, social events, and predictable schedules are actionable steps managers can make to reduce attrition
- Read the full paper here! Also, feel free to check out Revelio Labs' year-end recap here and another collaboration of ours on attrition here.
