Member-only story
This graphic is from MIT. If you go back through the COVID pandemic and into “The Great Resignation” — a deeply flawed narrative, but a narrative nonetheless — you will see 18,000 charts like this, all purporting that “toxic cultures” are creating the churn in employees, even relative to compensation. Most of these charts are presented as some form of breaking news. I am unclear who the audience is, really. Executives don’t care about this stuff; they’re chasing money and bonuses, writ large. Rank-and-file employees care about this stuff if a place is a hellhole, but they have no high-level power to change it. They can leave — A-HA, THE GREAT RESIGNATION! — but that’s about it. Maybe these articles are designed for HR? That’s comical, because HR has absolutely no power in any organization, and is usually just dismissed as a necessary evil.
So, I don’t understand why we keep publishing this shit. It’s absolutely obvious. Yes, people leave jobs because the culture is bad. Or, conversely, the bad culture empowers asshole managers, and those people get put on Performance Improvement Plans for one mistake, and are forced out. That’s another form of “leaving” too — not reflected in this chart per se, but totally commonplace as well. Who, in 2022, doesn’t know that many organizations are comprised of assholes in “leadership” roles, and those assholes beget further assholes, and that tanks the culture, and no one really knows what “culture” is so it’s easy to ignore or kick it to HR for a deck, and in reality nothing will change? Who doesn’t know this? It’s the essence of working at a mid-size to big place.
We can stop publishing all this “content” around The Great Resignation and just simply say this: the working world is largely full of assholes, and largely full of assholes who don’t want to pay people fairly and assume people are “lucky to have a job,” and the world is also full of asshole customers, and when you combine all that, people hop around to see if someplace, somewhere is a bit less soul-sucking than the last place.
It’s not that complicated and we don’t need lots of graphs and charts.
