It’s not just pay: 363 reasons your people want to quit

Truist Leadership Institute surveyed more than 24,000 workers. We found that pay was the number one reason for quitting, but the real eye-opener was that more than 10,000 respondents did not cite pay as a top reason they might quit.

Workers were asked to choose the top three reasons they would consider leaving their current job from a list of 14 possible reasons. Respondents chose 363 different combinations of reasons. Pay was the most frequently chosen reason, which might prompt an HR leader to start an organization-wide initiative to increase pay or otherwise address compensation concerns. But 43% of workers did not choose pay as a reason to quit at all. 

Nearly half of workers chose reasons other than pay as a top reason for leaving their jobs.

The COVID-19 pandemic affected the way we work and encouraged us to rethink the “how” and “why” of our jobs. Research highlights four of the factors that affected workers’ experiences at work during the pandemic:

• Personality traits
• Emotional responses to the pandemic
• Work style preferences
• Supervisors’ behaviors

Everyone experienced the pandemic differently—which means decisions to quit are complex, varied, and essentially unique to the individual. In fact, Truist Leadership Institute found individuals’ reasons for taking or quitting a job vary according to their unique job responsibilities.

For leaders, appreciating this variability and implementing a multifaceted strategy is key for better employee engagement and retention.

Broad-stroke policy changes and interventions that focus on only a few factors might return only limited results that do not justify their costs. In other words, leaders probably won’t get much bang for their buck.

What should leaders do instead? Traditional employee engagement and retention approaches tend to follow a one-size-fits-all philosophy, but adopting a one-size-fits-some outlook would likely prove more effective.

Instead of taking a blanket approach to address the most popular factors influencing quitting, organizations should consider personalized interventions for high-value positions, and segment larger teammate groups. 

For top talent and high-value positions:

• Leaders can show how much they value top talent by putting in personalized, proactive efforts to meet the job terms of each individual.
• They can help managers accomplish this task by freeing up more of their time to coach and connect with their direct reports. Another way to help is offering manager training on skills like emotional intelligence.

For higher-turnover or less specialized positions:  

• Map out workers’ decisions to quit, just as marketers map customers’ decisions to buy. 
• Identify key points where a worker forms strong positive and negative impressions of their job and organization. Identify work conditions that predict job attitudes, and then target those moments in which workers feel their pain points most.

• Use several methods to identify reasons why workers quit. The reasons that workers actually report to their managers or in HR exit interviews might not tell the whole story. People are often not aware of all the reasons they do things. 

For all positions:

• Practice empathy: Truly listen before reacting. What’s at the bottom of a person’s desire to move on?
• Make connection a priority: Be proactive about asking people how their work and lives are going.
• Trust your team: When leaders trust their teams, members feel empowered to deliver stronger results.
• Cultivate resilience: By maintaining thoughtful boundaries, leaders can better support themselves and their teams’ career satisfaction.

One way to retain great talent involves a simple tweak to leaders’ retention approach. Responding to the most popular reasons for considering quitting might not touch on everyone’s top reason. Instead, consider identifying the top reason, then the top reason among all those who did not cite the top reason, and so on. This way, leaders are more likely to address most or all teammates’ top reasons for considering quitting.

Leaders must know how to communicate genuinely with individual teammates, no matter their level. When conversations start from a place of empathy and respect, leaders are better able to understand each person’s unique concerns and attitudes.