Why People Really Quit Their Jobs
Summary.
People don’t quit a job, the saying goes — they quit a boss. But that’s not what Facebook found in a recent engagement survey. When the company wanted to keep people and they left anyway, it was because they didn’t like the work, their strengths were underused, or they weren’t growing in their careers. So people at Facebook do quit a job. But who’s responsible for what that job is like? Managers. If you want to keep your people — especially your stars — customize their experiences in three ways. First, craft roles that they’ll enjoy. This can involve hiring impressive candidates and then writing their job descriptions, for instance, or rotating current employees out of roles where they’re excelling but not feeling motivated. Second, allow them to draw on a wider range of their skills and passions. And third, minimize work-life trade-offs by carving a path for career development that accommodates their personal priorities.
People don’t quit a job, the saying goes — they quit a boss. We’ve heard it so many times that when we started tracking why employees leave Facebook, all bets were on managers. But our engagement survey results told a different story: When we wanted to keep people and they left anyway, it wasn’t because of their manager…at least not in the way we expected.
