2022 Data: Toxic Company Culture Is Fueling the Great Resignation
realestatewitch.com
realestatewitch.com
In the past we even work more, BUT such hard work was compensated by significant economical results hyperinflation and modern neoliberal economy have erased today. Or to apply the Occam razor: in the past you can get rich working hard, now the "global" target is owning nothing and being happy (with an smiling "stupid" [1] face) witch is far from being an interesting target.
Understanding that resources are limited and big growth is not sustainable the only answer is trying to reach stability, owning enough to be happy in their own homes, with the maximum possible autonomy, fighting people who do their best to avoid leaving peoples autonomy. As a result peoples tend to looks around, who can try to follow "agro-dreams in modern age" while others simply "sleep" as much as they can, having no stimulus, feeling no possibility for a better future so "better live today, tomorrow I'll be dead anyway" and also others try entrepreneurship but struggle in the present time where there is no room for real innovation and small businesses.
The toxic culture is not much "inside" companies but in the neoliberal society, to erase it we need to erase neoliberal thinking witch is actually responsible for the biggest world wars, suffering and deaths respect of all others regimes of the past...
[1] I do not know a "correct" term in English, "stupid" here is in the sense of the ancient Greek's concept of the "useful idiot".
I quit my job in March 2021. It wasn't to do with any Great Resignation. I'd planned to do so a year earlier and then lockdowns started so I decided to stay put to see how things worked out. A year later it was clear the whole thing was massively overblown, so, time to pull the plug.
If I was asked on a survey though, I'd probably tick a bunch of these boxes. Discrimination and sexism in the workplace? Sure. Against men. A good reason to leave and be my own boss.
> Great Resignation Statistics
The most common reason workers quit during the Great Resignation was toxic company culture (31%).
80% of respondents said the pandemic influenced their decision to resign.
Of employees who quit because of the pandemic, 41% did so because their employer didn’t enforce enough health and safety protocols, while 28% didn’t want to follow their organization’s protocols.
Nearly 1 in 4 people resigned after considering it for just one week or less.
About half (49%) of respondents gave one-week notice or less when they resigned, while 1 in 4 gave no notice at all.
1 in 8 employees ghosted their company completely. However, being ghosted by companies is the second-most frustrating situation when workers look for jobs (30%).
80% of people received a counteroffer from their employer when they resigned but still decided to leave.
55% of employees had a job lined up before they resigned. Of those, a surprising 53% reported a salary decrease, compared to 42% who reported an increase.
Respondents reported an average pay cut of $8,000 in their new role, but many would accept a greater pay reduction. Employees who quit but are still looking for jobs would accept an average pay cut of $23,000.
Workers who changed jobs during the Great Resignation were 47% more likely to be very satisfied in their new job compared to their old one.
56% of respondents expressed some regret about resigning, but if given the option, 58% wouldn’t return to their old jobs or wouldn’t return without major improvements.
A majority (56%) of workers who quit without a job lined up didn’t regret it.
Among workers who resigned during the Great Resignation, 35% still do not have jobs, and 50% of those have been unemployed for six months or more.
44% of people who changed jobs in the past year have considered resigning again in the next six months.> 80% of people received a counteroffer from their employer when they resigned but still decided to leave.
I feel like these stats are from disparate studies and are pretty questionable when taken as a whole.
I have a hard time believing anyone from the 25% who quit with zero notice received a counteroffer to stay.
resignation with immediate effect is quitting without notice.
Whether this is from the whole pool or from those who gave notice, that's pretty staggering. 80% of employees were paid less than they were worth, even considering the businesses who don't give counter offers by principle.
If you lean back in you armchair, get out of your feelings for a moment and think about all the great leaders, inspirers and creators, every single one of them would be considered by today's standards to be "toxic".
No wonder company culture is generally "toxic".
Toxic is wanting results.
Toxic is requiring structure.
Toxic is firing someone who is not performing.
Toxic is requiring sales.
Toxic is requiring profit.
Toxic is requiring your employees to be replaceable because guess, what -- they can resign (Example in the great resignations happening now) at any time.
Toxic is requiring evidence over feelings.
You know what's funny. All the people resigning from their jobs and starting their companies are going to be ending up "toxic" eventually.
Welcome to the club.
Toxic behavior is screaming at people in meetings. It is belittling coworkers work. It is allowing the louder people to dominate the conversation even when their ideas are worse. It is making decisions through intimidation and politics rather than merit.
A toxic work environment is somewhere where toxic behavior is rewarded instead of stopped.
Toxic people like to believe they get their way because their ideas are better, but they aren’t.
It takes a certain personality to do the things that start up a big enterprise that actually supports the families and lives of "normal" non-toxic people. That's what we have to get.
We may not like it. And I certainly don't. But history has proven that is that it usually takes.
Very much untrue. Perhaps to build a cult of personality one needs to have eccentric tendencies. But to build a successful business toxicity is not required.
I would be curious to know why you feel history, versus your general stereotype of founders, justifies your point.
Now, I agree that some of the toxic behavior I mentioned is over-represented in people who are very driven. However, the toxic people who successfully create a business do so in spite of their toxic behavior, not because of it.
> Nearly 1 in 3 people who quit their jobs in 2021 did so to escape a toxic company culture, characterized by discrimination, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and poor work-life boundaries.
Well at least for me it isn’t. I know for that 1/3rd it’s unbearable oppression that they are expected to work when paid ridiculous salaries.
Devs have practically the best jobs ever invented. There’s insanely great pay, reasonable hours, stock options, work tools are paid for by the company, zero risk of death at the workplace, zero chance of injury besides maybe carparal tunnel syndrome. Etc.
One of the things I’m most appreciative about is starting off my career in a warehouse. I’ve never really understood the litany of issues and everyday is kind of like, what I’m getting paid how much? To sit at a keyboard and type… Even doctors and lawyers get paid less and work far longer hours.
Let's play SAT. Which one of these doesn't belong with the others?
Ding! Expecting someone to work after hours isn't anywhere in the ballpark of discrimination, sexual harassment or verbal abuse. This is a common manipulation tactic. It's like saying most drug arrests today are for heroin, crack, meth and pot. (Pot being about 80%). It's trying to make something look worse than it is. The more you know.
I should note that Bioware is not unique in destroying its employees with crunchtime, they're just the ones that stand out most in my mind specifically because they coined that term. It's quite common in the industry, sadly. I also know that Rockstar [2] and CDPR [3] are also very much guilty of this practice.
Edit: It's so common in the video game industry (and also somewhat unique to it) that there's a wikipedia article dedicated to the practice [4]. Insane.
[0]: https://www.careercontessa.com/advice/toxic-work-environment...
[1]: https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964
[2]: https://kotaku.com/inside-rockstar-games-culture-of-crunch-1...
[3]: https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-re...
I don't think when people say their workplace has poor work-life balance, it's not typically to the extreme you mentioned, it's more mild, like boss calling on weekend, after hours work, etc. I don't think you can have mild discrimination, sexual harassment or verbal abuse. Perhaps verbal abuse.
Sometimes though, you get real winners like Blizzard with all of the above recently. I know enough to never work in the video game industry.
Some companies also require your work-life balance be broken down in order to advance. This is usually an unwritten requirement, and failure to participate makes you "not a team player," "a poor fit for the company," etc. I remember my father left a job because him going to see his father in the hospital after work instead of grabbing a beer (or a golf club) and shmoozing with the higher ups all but guaranteed he would never make partner at the firm. "Yeah, you might have kids to raise and your dad might be dying and all, but maybe join us instead so we can get to know you better and discuss your career ambitions" is one of the most disgusting attitudes I've ever heard, and yet many law firms still act like old boys' clubs, and a failure to suck up early on will impose a hard cap on your career. I would consider this to be a toxic workplace, both because of the "we're all family here (which means your family comes second)" attitude, and the implicit "if you bring in tons of business but don't fit in with our culture, you might as well start polishing your resume unless you're happy staying an associate."
Those conversations have had very little to do with the list you have put forward.
If anything, a lack of accountability gives cover to toxic people.
You have about 15 and counting different people's opinions on what toxic means. It's pretty subjective, therefore not really meaningful outside an emotional way.
For example, a toxic workplace could be one that just wants people to return to the office despite great productivity while working from home (or vice versa, this is just an example). Something like this would be irrational because maintaining the current state doesn’t hurt the business, while the new required state (returning to the office) only exists to subordinate employees and ICs. It’s completely toxic behavior by management for do something like this.
In an ideal workplace, the only thing that matters is results (within the confines of civil society and the law). So demanding anything other than that is toxic behavior.
I don’t think anything you listed is inherently toxic, or even seen that way by Gen Z. However, any of the things you listed could be used to demand irrational behavior from employees. Behavior that intentionally keeps those employees from delivering results. This happens when a manger is more worried about his or her own status in the company than actually doing anything good for the company.
There's a lot of artificial and unnecessary stress produced by managers, produced by clients. When a deadline slips because estimates were wrong, managers can violate everyone's work life balance. Or they can scrum it and figure out what they can ship, or what new information came to light, and re-prioritize what to work on.
The Agile Manifesto is clear that there are to be no managers. Developers are expected to work directly with the business people (and each other) to understand the business needs of the project. As Scrum exists to detail how to carry out the values of the Agile Manifesto in a practical way, you can't both have managers and Scrum. They are at odds with each other.
I expect that is why it always seems to fall apart in the real world. A lot of developers don't want to be involved with the business. They just want to focus on the tech and let someone else do the bridgework between the two. Likewise, the managers doing the bridgework don't want to give up their job. It takes a really special team who are all interested in the business aspects as much as the tech, along with being free of existing managerial structure in the organization, to make it work.
So, if you have managers, "scrumming it" isn't going to happen.
- bad organizational skills
- bad tooling
- fuzzy objectives
- mediocre hierarchy
- insisting in micro managing and having "stats" instead of fixing the obvious problems
now the rest is more subjective:
- antiquated silo-ed work, people become moron knowing only their boring chore, they also don't understand what is happening outside their cubicle, can become paranoid, jealous, resentful (because grass is always greener). this leads to a subpar, if not sad, nash equilibrium of low motivation and mediocre human bond
Without a copy of the survey, it's hard to know what respondents saw, but the way they present the data suggests that "toxic" was left wide open to interpretation.
> Nearly 1 in 3 people who quit their jobs in 2021 did so to escape a toxic company culture, characterized by discrimination, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and poor work-life boundaries.
If they provided the full text of the questions and answers in the charts (which is good form when reporting survey results), they didn't provide that definition to respondents. If they didn't provide the full text in the charts, then there's not a lot that we can do with this data because we don't know what questions they were asking.
This is self fulfilling. The more you work to make them replaceable, the more they realize
1) They themselves are not needed, as anyone else can do their job
2) They are not obligated to stay, just as you are not obligated to keep them
I’ll concede some of the things you listed could simultaneously be considered both toxic and “good business,” but you got out over your skis here
At least they'll be doing it on their terms.
I've been in the software development industry for over 25 years now, and things that were acceptable, even encouraged, 20 years ago would get you written up with HR today, maybe even fired.
Is that better or worse? I'm sure there would be opinions on both sides, but it is what it is. Cultural norms change all the time.
I personally think that we are now leaning towards being nicer to each other, and trying to provide opportunities to more people, and perhaps that comes at the cost of "sales" and "innovation" and "hustle", but as I get older I realize that I am 100% ok with that.
If a minority of people make less millions or billions and more people get to work in an environment that doesn't stress them out or make them feel uncomfortable, that's a great trade.