The tone of many of these posts varies from comforting other employees to a simmering hostility. It’s true that a lot of workers in this day and age are growing more and more fed up with workplace conditions and poor management. Employee turnover is growing as people have started to just quit when conditions are no longer suitable.
Another growing and supplementary trend is that workers are also getting better at sniffing out if a workplace is ultimately for them or not. In 2021, nearly half of all resignations were from people who had worked at a position for less than one year. Workers are no longer content to spend half a decade suffering with no promotions, now a company has to prove itself in a number of months.
Combine these two statistics and it becomes clear that a large proportion of workplaces are just hostile to life. Even the name of the aforementioned Instagram account is just a reflection of what people tend to feel about work and workplace conditions. The risk of it taking forever to find a new job has also diminished, as more than a third of workers surveyed in one study indicated that they were ready to quit before finding a backup plan.
Research into why workers quit has found all sorts of reasons, but the number one culprit is pretty predictable: bad bosses. Management was cited by almost 60% of US workers who voluntarily left their jobs, indicating issues like harassment, bullying, or just plain old incompetence. A bad boss has a palpable, almost measurable effect on a workplace and tends to drag down everything.
Turnover isn’t cheap. Companies need to factor in the cost of finding a new worker, training them, and the subsequent drop in productivity while the post remains open and while a new hire comes up to speed. Some bosses attempt to justify their tyranny by stating that it ultimately benefits the company. But research shows that this mentality drives away the workforce and the vast majority of resignations could have been prevented had the right steps been taken.
Similarly, empirical evidence suggests that job satisfaction is actually pretty closely related to productivity. A motivated worker has fewer reasons to slack off and doesn’t have to constantly manage workplace-induced depression or stress. Similarly and less directly, job satisfaction leads to better worker retention, and experienced workers tend to be more effective, and efficient and bring other complimentary benefits to their team.
But, as we have seen here, job satisfaction has been plummeting lately. This silver lining is that workers can get a little boost of dopamine when they finally get up and quit. Some studies suggest that quitting actually has a positive effect on reducing the symptoms of depression. This, of course, also means that workplaces can be and often are the direct cause of these symptoms, but that, unfortunately, goes without saying these days.
