Excerpt January 2022

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/toxic-culture-is-driving-the-great-resignation/

• To better understand the sources of the Great Resignation and help leaders respond effectively, we analyzed 34 million online employee profiles to identify U.S. workers who left their employer for any reason (including quitting, retiring, or being laid off) between April and September 2021. The data, from Revelio Labs, where one of us (Ben) is the CEO, enabled us to estimate company-level attrition rates for the Culture 500, a sample of large, mainly for-profit companies that together employ nearly one-quarter of the private-sector workforce in the United States.
• Top Predictors of Attrition During the Great Resignation
  The authors analyzed the impact of more than 170 cultural topics on employee attrition in Culture 500 companies from April through September 2021. These five topics were the leading predictors of attrition. Each bar indicates the level of importance of each topic for attrition relative to employee compensation. A toxic culture is 10.4 times more likely to contribute to attrition than compensation.

  Toxic corporate culture

  10.4

  Job Security and Reorganization

  3.5

  High level of innovation

  3.2

  Failure to reorganize employee performance

  2.9

  Poor response to COVID-19

  1.8

  Importance relative to compensation

• Toxic corporate culture. A toxic corporate culture is by far the strongest predictor of industry-adjusted attrition and is 10 times more important than compensation in predicting turnover. Our analysis found that the leading elements contributing to toxic cultures Include failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; workers feeling disrespected; and unethical behavior.