Silence Before the Exit: Why Employees Quit

Anthony Klotz:

There's a key sign that individuals are about to leave, or thinking about leaving, and that sign is silence. People become quieter as they near the exit door, and that can be really hard to pick up on by leaders and managers.

When we're thinking about quitting and we're in a meeting that's about what the business is going to do in three months or a year, we're sitting there in that meeting thinking, "I'm not gonna be here in a year. I'm not gonna contribute because I don't want to suggest things that I'm not gonna have a part in putting into place."

Steve Smith:

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Work Tech Weekly. I'm Steve Smith, Managing Director of Growth at Rep Cap.

My guest today is Anthony Klotz, Professor of Organizational Behavior at University College London (also known as UCL). Anthony studies why people quit their jobs — and if that sounds like a niche topic, consider that he's the person who coined the phrase "the Great Resignation." In his new book, Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters, he makes the case that about half of all departures trace back to triggering events rather than a slow rational calculation. He calls these events jolts, and most organizations have no framework for seeing them coming.

In this conversation, we talk about the six types of jolts that push people toward the exit, why the first year on the job is the most dangerous for retention, and what silence from a usually vocal employee is actually telling you. We also get into AI as the next great workplace jolt… what it's already triggering, and why Anthony thinks the story is more complicated than threat versus opportunity.

If you’re trying to figure out what’s really going on in your workplace and what people are trying to tell you, this one is worth your time. Let's get into it.

Anthony Klotz:

Thanks for having me, Steve.

Steve Smith:

It's great to have you here. You know, I don't often get a chance to talk to an accidental prophet, and so this is a conversation that I'm really looking forward to. And I guess just to loop everyone in on what I'm referring to is, you are the person who coined a phrase that has spent a lot of time bouncing around in the conversation about the workplace in the 2020s, which is the Great Resignation.

Anthony Klotz:

Yeah, it's been almost five years since I, as you point out, inadvertently predicted this wave of resignations and called it the Great Resignation. And we've been on a bit of a roller coaster since then, but yeah, that'll forever be my little claim to fame, I think.

Steve Smith:

Well, I don't know how little it is, but it does seem like, especially knowing where kind of the market is right now, a long time ago and a galaxy far away.

Anthony Klotz:

Yeah. Although the labor market is definitely different than it was back in, you know, late 2021, especially 2022, 2023. Some of these forces that drove the Great Resignation, I think we're seeing bottle up again, but the future is much murkier than it was back then. So no more predictions intentional or unintentional from me, 'cause I'm not quite sure what's coming.

Steve Smith:

I mean, one thing I'm kind of curious about is you've got a new book out and it's all about a topic that we think about a lot as humans who have to go to work, which is quitting. So tell us a little bit about that. Tell us about the book and tell us how this came about.

Anthony Klotz:

Yeah, so the book is called Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters, and it's about jolts, these events that cause us to stop and rethink our relationship with work. And where it came from really was that Great Resignation period. I got a lot of questions back then of why I predicted the Great Resignation.

And really it was during the pandemic time, there were these different events going on, which I now refer to as jolts, that were causing workers to stop and rethink things and think, once this pandemic is over, do I want to keep doing what I'm doing? And so, you know, in the years of the Great Resignation where I was speaking with journalists and podcasters and a lot of leaders about these jolts, I realized that a lot of our academic understanding of why people quit their jobs hadn't quite made it out into the hands of leaders.

People were still tending to think of employee quitting as a very rational decision that employees make sort of slowly over time. But as these jolts reveal, about half the time we can trace quitting back to a single event that happened. And these jolts can be big or small in our personal or professional lives, but when that event happened, all of a sudden I went from being content or sort of being on autopilot in my job to thinking, is there something else out there? Do I need to make a change?

Steve Smith:

Well, you had your own jolt of sorts when you ended up moving from Texas A&M to UCL in London during the Great Resignation. And as a Texan who has spent time in College Station and a knowledge worker who has spent a lot of time in London, I know that the distance between those two places is much farther than just the miles in between them. Tell me about your jolt.

Anthony Klotz:

Yeah. So interestingly, before Texas A&M I was in Oregon at Oregon State University, and it was really, you know, I was there for a long time and every summer when I was teaching there, I would lead a study abroad program to London, so 20 or 30 US students I would bring over here for a month, and really fell in love with London.

And then, I tell this story in the book, it was a series of jolts that really led me to leave Corvallis, Oregon and move to College Station, Texas. I found out on one day that a number of my coworkers who I really liked were looking for other jobs. And it was this turnover contagion. It was this thought I had that if they're looking for other jobs, I should be looking too. And I had great friends, great colleagues who were working at A&M and its reputation is fantastic. And everything about it appealed to me. And so we moved there and thoroughly enjoyed it professionally.

But this idea in my head, and my wife's as well, that we might want to live in London one day kept lingering there. And it was during the pandemic, really seeing, and having these thoughts for a while of like, life is maybe shorter than we think it is. Is this it? If we make it out of here, what do we want to do with our lives? Expatriating became really appealing, and to London in particular, and I was fortunate enough that UCL and a few other places were hiring.

But I don't necessarily, in terms of jolts, I can't trace it back to a single event. I mentioned earlier that about 50% of all job moves can be traced back to a single event. My move, as strange as it is from Aggie land to London town, I can't trace it back to a single moment, to a single jolt. It was just a slow realization during the pandemic that moving to London was something that we wanted to do in life, and life is perhaps shorter. You know, turns out it's not, it's fine, but life is perhaps shorter than we think it is. And so that's really what led to this big move. But I still have lots of colleagues I work closely with in College Station and have fond memories of it.

Steve Smith:

Well, and I guess that's interesting, you know, you framed it in that context because it's just like the conventional wisdom is people quit a job because of a bad event or the straw that breaks the camel's back. And it seems like what you're really saying is that's really only half of the story. I mean, what's the half we're missing?

Anthony Klotz:

There are really two halves here. One is the traditional way that we've thought about quitting, and one is the way that we've increasingly thought about it over the past several decades as organizational psychologists. The way that is fairly common sense to think about why people quit their jobs is that it's a calculation that we do when the bad parts of our job start to build up. Or when the alternatives to our current job start to become more appealing, we do this calculus and we say the pros outweigh the cons of moving, and we move. And that happens about half the time, that people are fairly rational in their decisions to move.

The other half of the time is not necessarily irrational, but if you do the pros and cons calculus, you can't make sense of it. Like the cons outweigh the pros. They didn't have a great alternative. Or if we look at people who are staying in organizations, we say like they're miserable in their jobs and yet they don't leave. And so for many people in many situations, what is required to get them to move is some event that knocks them out of their inertia.

And so 50% of the time we can find these inertia-knocking events. Now, sometimes they do show up. You mentioned the straw that breaks the camel's back. Sometimes these jolts do show up as very small things that do just that. And so these two forces really work in tandem.

Often when we hear the word jolts, we think of these big epiphanies, these big events, negative or positive, that people have. But when we look into it, we find that it may be on a given morning, this has happened before, but for some reason on this morning when your boss makes a rude comment to you in a meeting, it sticks with you. And whatever combination of events that led you to be especially tuned into your boss that morning, or maybe you're in a bad mood and you can't take one more thing going wrong, that all of a sudden opens up to: wait a second, I'm gonna think about my overall job. Why am I in this job? Why don't I look around a little bit? And so again, these can be bigger or small.

But of course the implication for us is understanding when they happen and sort of removing ourselves from the emotion associated with it and saying, what's the right thing to do for my career here? And for leaders, it's being more in tune with when someone experiences a jolt, what are some of the signs that they're thinking through their relationship with work? And how can I intervene to hopefully retain them? Or if they do leave, that they leave in a way that doesn't harm the organization.

Steve Smith:

Well, and I think that you categorize different types of jolts. What are the main ones and what type do leaders consistently fail to recognize?

Anthony Klotz:

Yeah. So there are three types of jolts that happen pretty commonly at work. The first are negative events that happen to us at work. You know, all of us are going to experience failure in our work career, and it's natural for us to think after that failure, is this the right thing for me? And the same goes for negative interpersonal events, whether it's conflict or experiencing some mistreatment or harassment at work, even subtle forms of it, as I discussed. That can lead us to experience a jolt. And I think in general, leaders are pretty tuned in to these direct negative events at work.

What flies under the radar a little bit more are collateral jolts, which I use that term to refer to when negative events or big events, jolts, happen to other people in the workplace, and it reverberates and affects us. And so the most common example of this is having a coworker who you like leave. When that happens, it's a triple whammy in that you have somebody who you like, a friend who makes your workday brighter, leave, and so your workdays are a little bit less bright. At the same time, we often have to pick up the slack without extra pay for our coworkers when they leave. And then of course the third thing, like I mentioned earlier in my case, you know, we wonder where they're going. Like what are they going to do? Maybe I should be looking as well.

And so often when an employee quits, the leader rightfully is stressed about that employee leaving and how do I replace that employee? And probably thinking less about what are the total cumulative effects on the collective of this departure.

And then I would argue that the type of jolts that happen at work that leaders overlook the most, and HR professionals overlook the most, are what I call honeymoon jolts, which happen in the first year on the job. Somewhat counterintuitively, the most common year for quitting is year one, and that's counterintuitive because nobody on either side wants it to happen. Like none of us enjoy getting into a new job and then saying I might have to leave again right away. That causes all sorts of dissonance and unpleasant emotion in us, and companies invest untold amounts of money in recruiting, selecting, and onboarding, and then to just lose all that money out the door so quickly is painful and disruptive.

So the reason that so much quitting goes on in year one is because during the recruitment process, and this is both recruiters and job seekers involved, not just recruiters, we all get an image in our head of what this new job is going to be like. And almost always that image has some inaccuracies in it. It's not a perfect representation of what we're going to experience on the job. But when we get into that job and three months in, we realize, wait, this schedule isn't quite what I understood it to be. Wait a second, this compensation package is a little bit different than I thought. Or wait, I thought I was entering this really stable organization and now they're doing a round of right-sizing or layoffs.

This expectation in our mind gets broken and we feel like perhaps a little bit betrayed, perhaps the organization should have told us this. And it's in those moments where our excitement and our positive energy becomes a little bit more negative. And there's a term for this that a researcher at Texas A&M University, Wendy Boswell, came up with, and it's this honeymoon hangover effect, that in many cases we enter new jobs in this honeymoon space really excited about it, and that quickly turns into more the feeling of a hangover after some of these expectations get broken.

And so again, I'm not placing the blame at the feet of recruiters. I think as job seekers we're often positively thinking about this new job in unrealistic ways. And so there are some solutions to that. But I think those are the jolts and those are the quits that often catch leaders and HR professionals off guard.

And I'll say one more thing on honeymoon jolts: there's this funny handoff that happens between recruiters and managers, like who's responsible when somebody quits at the three-month mark? And there's this blame that goes on in both ways. And so I think it also often reveals an opportunity for managers and recruiters to get more on the same page. So those are the first three types of jolts: direct jolts, collateral jolts, honeymoon jolts. They all are somewhat negative and they all emanate from the workplace.

Steve Smith:

But what's kind of interesting about your research is that you found that there are positive events that can trigger a jolt as much as a negative experience. It seems like that'd be really hard to defend if you're talking to your CHRO about how to jolt-proof your workplace.

Anthony Klotz:

Yeah, so these are really tricky for leaders to deal with. Most of the jolts I talk about, so of the six types I talk about, you know, five of them are negative, and that makes sense why that's the case. As human beings, we've evolved to be more attuned to negative events 'cause it signals something in our environment is wrong, that needs fixing. And so those are what often jolt us.

But when we experience really positive events inside and outside of work, they put us in this mindset sometimes where anything is possible. It's a really positive, open-minded mindset that is ripe for considering other possibilities in life. And so it could be when you get that big promotion at work, we would think that people become much more committed when they get a promotion, which research shows they do. But at the same time, they become a little bit more likely to leave because they're in this really good space and their resume just became better looking than it ever has before.

And so when it comes to positive jolts, all that leaders can really do is be aware of them and recognize when they happen and, you know, keep in close contact with employees about how they're feeling about their relationship with work. If you've been promoted, how do we give you more challenges to continue your career growth here and keep you challenged? If you've had this really positive life event, it could be, I don't know, like having your first child, and checking in with workers to see how they're feeling about work-life balance in the wake of that. And they may want to make some changes. Or I've had workers before who've said, you know, I need to double down and make more money now that I've got more mouths to feed. So whatever it may be, it's really just checking in with employees in the wake of these positive jolts so that you're aware of what's going on.

Again, some of these are going to lead to turnover unavoidably, and as most leaders know, some level of turnover is healthy anyway to keep the business creative and competitive. But it's about predicting when they're going to happen, being prepared for them, and preventing undesirable turnover, when it's a high performer, what can we do to make sure that doesn't happen? 'Cause that's rarely helpful for the business.

Steve Smith:

And did you find anything out in your research for the book about kind of that high performer turnover that opened your eyes to, wow, there are a lot of things that organizations really need to do differently when it comes to retaining high performers?

Anthony Klotz:

So there are a couple of things when it comes to retaining high performers that I found interesting. One is some research led by a researcher up at the University of British Columbia in their business school. Her name's Sima Sajjadiani, and her research shows that high performers, when they leave, are especially likely to spur the turnover of other high performers.

So I mentioned turnover contagion earlier, but her research shows it's not as random as just, I'm leaving, therefore everyone else becomes more likely to leave. When high performers leave, it creates more contagion among high performers than others. The same thing happens when low performers leave. When we see similar individuals, similar performers leave, we become more open to those contagion effects, which means all the more reason for leaders to intervene when a high performer leaves and really say, what do we need to do here? Do we need to increase pay? What do we need to do to retain our remaining high performers? And it could just be chatting with everyone, but when a high performer leaves, it's tough. As a leader, it's not pleasant to deal with, and it's easier just to say nothing to see here, let's move on, we're gonna replace Steve, no problem. But really what's needed is to pause and engage with your current high performers and say, how do we retain them?

And the other element that I'll give you that surprised me when I was researching this book, when it comes to retaining high performers, is: can you tell when a high performer is thinking about leaving? And this goes for all workers, but I think it's especially important for high performers because those are the individuals who are perhaps most important to retain.

And there's been some really great research done, including a little bit of my own, on pre-quitting behaviors. So what do people do when they're starting to think about leaving? There's one research paper that chronicled 54 different things people do as they run up to get ready to quit, and they're sort of silly things that you would expect, like check your retirement balance, like is my 401k vested, update your LinkedIn profile, update your resume. But really when the researchers looked and said, do quitters do this at a far higher rate than non-quitters, they couldn't find much of a difference. So they found these quitting behaviors, but they weren't really predictive of quitting.

And so what they and other researchers ended up finding is there's really one key sign that individuals are about to leave or thinking about leaving, and that sign is silence. So people become quieter as they near the exit door, and that can be really hard to pick up on by leaders and managers. And I sort of thought there may be ways that AI can help with this, can help detect when people's levels of contribution change.

But you can imagine, as we've all quit multiple times, when we're thinking about quitting and we're in a meeting that's about what the business is going to do in three months or a year, we're sitting there in that meeting thinking, I'm not gonna be here in a year. I'm not gonna contribute because I don't want to suggest things that I'm not gonna have a part in putting into place. And so for leaders, it's important that when you see one of your regular high performers who's gotten a little bit quieter, who's withdrawn a little bit, it's easy for us to conclude, look, I'm busy, and that person's just having a bad week, they'll bounce back next week. But what's important is to create the space to say, hey Steve, I just noticed you've been a little bit quieter this week, everything going okay? And check in. And even if the person's totally fine, they're gonna be happy that you're checking in with them and that you noticed that.

I tell this story a little bit in the book, but when I did resign from Texas A&M, I told a couple of people right away, the people my boss and the people who needed to know immediately. And the second person I told is somebody who I work really closely with, and I sent her a text and said, I need to chat. She said, yep, and called me. And I said, hey, I need to tell you something. And she said, let me guess, you're quitting. And I was like, how do you know that I'm quitting? And she said, I've just noticed the last month or two you haven't been as chatty and as probably overly communicative in meetings as you normally are, and I just had this thought, I bet he's thinking, maybe he's on the job market or something like that.

And I was really impressed, like her detection system picked up on that. At the same time, I thought to myself, why didn't she say something? Like we're friends, we're colleagues, and she could have asked me. It would've put me in an awkward position 'cause I wouldn't have been dishonest with her, I would've been honest. But yeah, so that, as I really dug into it and zeroed in on what is that pre-quitting sign, you know, it's getting quiet. And I think that's important. If you are thinking about quitting, realize that you're probably sending subtle signals to people who are paying attention around you that you're edging away.

Steve Smith:

I guess what's really interesting is that quitting, I think sort of the stereotype is something happens, you have a table-flipping moment and you're like, I'm outta here. But the reality is it is an interesting mix of certainly kind of the emotional part of it, okay, I have a feeling that either this job isn't right or there's something else out there that I, you know, some place I want to be, combined with the opportunity and just having that emotional feeling but then getting into kind of the rational, okay, here's what I do and here's how I go about it. Was there anything about your research that kind of surprised you about that blend of the rational and the emotional?

Anthony Klotz:

Yeah, so I study the different ways that people quit their jobs and the table-flipping moment, something happens and we flip the table over, it's called impulsive quitting, and it happens only less than 5% of the time. It does happen, don't get me wrong. A lot of people have seen it because 5% of the entire workforce is still a lot of impulsive quitting going on. But I found that there are six other types of resignations and many of them involve this more calculative process.

And you see it in the most common and baseline form of resigning, which is simply having a meeting face-to-face with your boss, sharing the positive things about the organization, but then sharing that you're leaving and why you're leaving. And then if you have a reason that you're leaving, such as, I'm leaving because you are a terrible boss, in these sorts of interactions people say, I'm leaving because there are better opportunities for career growth at this new place, which is true but maybe not the whole truth. So sparing any bridge burning that goes on.

And so really coming to this conclusion that there are things I don't like about this current job, but there are lots of things I do like about it, this new opportunity seems better, but there's some unknown as well. And so really reflecting that in the way that you resign.

Now, what has surprised me in my research is there are a couple of common resignation styles that people use that, even though they're just slightly different from that baseline case, result in more negative interactions going forward in the transition. And one of them is what I call avoidance resignations. So I'll often ask executives or students this question, and there's always a mixed response. Is it okay to resign via email or text message? Or to resign to someone other than your boss, like your boss's boss or maybe your HR representative? And it's always mixed, regardless of the generation that I ask. There are people who say it's perfectly fine to resign via text message, it's perfectly okay to resign to your skip-level boss, to your boss's boss, or to HR.

But my research shows that your managers respond quite negatively to the text message or to the skip-level resignation, and you can imagine why that is the case. And so if you're looking to resign in the best manner possible, that makes your transition as smooth as possible, that sets you up potentially for boomeranging one day, then not engaging in any type of avoidant style is useful.

And I also studied bridge-burning resignations. So why do people harm the organization or insult everybody on the way out or insult their boss on the way out? Conventional wisdom may be that the people who burn bridges are bad people, they're bad workers, and they're bad till the very end. My research doesn't suggest that at all. I've looked at different personality traits, dark traits, positive traits, and can't find any difference between those who burn bridges and those who resign in more positive ways. What I found is the people who burn bridges, what causes that is a toxic manager, or something unfair happened to them, and this is their chance to get even.

And so what I encourage organizations to do is track the different ways their employees resign. And if you have a spot in your company where people are resigning with pretty much no notice, or you hear some stories where people are resigning in really destructive ways, instead of thinking, boy, we must have had some bad apples in that barrel over there, you probably have a bad manager or an unfair policy that's driving people to do that. And so it's not the person, it's the situation.

And some of my research is qualitative where I'm asking people, like, why did you burn bridges? And there are these few cases as well where people will say, I had a toxic manager and it doesn't matter to me, I was quitting, but I wanted to try to save my coworkers. And so I told everybody I could that the reason I was leaving was because of that person. Not necessarily to harm them, not to make myself feel better, but to hopefully make it so that they don't lose all my coworkers as well, because this person was burning everyone out. So there is this sort of self-sacrifice that happens as well sometimes with burning bridges.

And I don't mean to be all negative. Of course, I was surprised at how many people, so like 10% of the time, people give way more notice than is necessary to really show gratitude to the organization. Another 10 or so percent of the time, before people put in their formal resignation, they let their boss know, hey, I'm looking at going back to school, hey, I'm looking at switching careers. You wouldn't do this if you were going to work for the company's rival. But if you're making a career change, you let your boss in the loop. And so over the course of that research, there were all sorts of little surprises in terms of why people resign in the ways that they do.

Steve Smith:

Well, let's talk about AI as the next great jolt. You called it a potential incoming jolt for a lot of workers. What does that look like and what's the triggering event other than AI?

Anthony Klotz:

So in the book I talk about, we talked about direct jolts that happen to you at work, and then there are remote jolts as well, these events that you hear about elsewhere and think, what does this mean for my life? And I think AI jolts are operating through both of these mechanisms right now.

So it could be that your organization has told you that this part of your job really needs to be done by AI. And it could be that part of the job is your favorite part of the job. So for me, my job is these different research components and these different teaching components. Some of these can be automated, or I can see in the next decade they will be. And some of those are my favorite parts of the job. And I'm sort of thinking, well, why doesn't AI take away this thing I don't want to do? So these can come as jolts when we realize the reason I love this job is going to change.

The other thing is there's this element of uncertainty with AI. And every time corporate leaders blame layoffs on AI, whether it's true or not, it does send a jolt through the workplace of us thinking, what is my relationship with this job? And do I need to switch to a role that's more AI-proof in the future? Should I start doing that now? And that thought process is really natural, but there's so much unknown. And the reality is that round of layoffs may or may not have actually been driven by AI. Even though it's jolting, the validity of that jolt is hard to determine.

And so I think we're seeing it on a couple levels now, but as AI becomes more of a job changer, it's only going to increase. And I don't mean to be all negative either. I think there are probably people who are going to experience it as a positive jolt, and I think that's probably gonna drive a lot of people into entrepreneurship. Where you realize, look, I've always wanted to design this video game idea I've had, but I've never had the resources to do that. But now AI makes that something where you realize, oh, I actually can turn this into a reality and see if I can monetize it. Or even if it's just your side craft hobby that all of a sudden you can market in a much more powerful way.

So this notion of solo entrepreneurship increasing, I think, can be a way that AI jolts wake people up to other life paths that they've maybe said no to earlier in their life and want to revisit. Or taking ideas they've always had and turning them into reality and turning their traditional job, you know, maybe more as a backstop to their side gig.

Steve Smith:

So, you know, you predicted the Great Resignation in part because you picked up on some patterns that other people weren't tracking. Are there any early signals now that maybe suggest that the AI-driven wave of reevaluation is already building?

Anthony Klotz:

Yeah, so I don't have any statistics that I could point to that signal that is happening, so we can just talk theoretically, which is what I was doing when I predicted the Great Resignation, I was just relying on theory. But, you know, I was talking about this a little bit earlier, but the technology of AI does make it easier for one person to accomplish more, and we know that a lot of people harbor desires to do something else.

So at the start of the book, I talk about this lottery question where we ask people essentially, if you struck it rich, would you keep working? Most people say yes, like 70% of Americans. That's pretty consistent around the world as well. Say yes, I would keep working if I struck it rich, which is a bit surprising. That's a higher percentage than I would've guessed to begin with. But if we change the question a little bit and say, okay, of the 70% with hands in the air, how many of you would keep working at your current job if you won the lottery, the hands drop to like 10% or lower, which means people see the value of work and think fairly positively about it in their lives, but not the value of the work that they're currently experiencing.

And so what I think AI could potentially do from a positive standpoint is help some people close that gap, often through side hustles, through solo entrepreneurship, through job sharing, or other forms of interesting work arrangements. Where people say, look, this job I have is not AI-proof. Like I could see AI doing this, so, but probably not for a few years. And so I'm going to continue doing a good job in this job, leveling up on AI, but not leveling up on AI to become a better whatever my current job is, but to drive innovation and creation in some other domain of my life or to help me pivot into a career that I would rather be doing.

We can also ask people about their foregone identities, like earlier in life, what did you dream of becoming? And so I think in some cases the threat of AI is going to allow people to say, you know what, I'm going to train up on becoming a forest ranger, whatever it may be, and make that type of career pivot. And so I think we're gonna see a lot of really interesting career moves and career churn. And that's me putting my optimistic glasses on and saying that hopefully this technology will allow people to close that gap from the work that they want to be doing and the work that they're actually doing right now.

Steve Smith:

Well, Anthony, this has been a fascinating conversation. I appreciate you joining us and making some time, and congratulations on the book. I look forward to reading it.

Anthony Klotz:

Thanks, Steve. I really appreciate it. This has been a great conversation. I've enjoyed it.

Steve Smith:

Most leaders treat quitting as simply a turnover problem. Anthony's research reframes it as a perception problem.

The reason so many departures catch organizations off guard is not that people hide how they feel. It's that by the time someone goes quiet in meetings, stops contributing ideas, and starts mentally checking out, the gap between what they expected from the job and what they're actually experiencing has already been open for a long time. The jolt didn't create the problem. It just made the person stop ignoring it.

That reframe matters for how leaders think about retention. Counteroffers, exit interviews, engagement surveys… these are all responses to a signal that arrived late. The earlier intervention is understanding which events in someone's work life are likely to trigger that moment of reckoning, and creating enough psychological safety that people bring those concerns forward before they start looking for the exit.

Anthony is not completely optimistic that most organizations are doing this well right now. But he is optimistic about what comes next, for individual workers especially.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to Work Tech Weekly on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. And I'll see you next time.