3 Reasons Employees Are 'Quitting Your Leadership' and Becoming Less Productive, According to a Senior People Scientist Heather Walker, senior people scientist at employee experience platform Culture Amp, breaks down the current workplace reality.
By Amanda Breen Edited by Jessica Thomas
Key Takeaways
- The idea that "people quit bosses, not jobs" isn't new — but it's not that simple.
- Several developments contribute to increased mistrust in leadership, research reveals.
More than 80% of American employees said they would potentially quit their job because of a bad manager, according to a survey from software company GoodHire. The idea that "people quit bosses, not jobs" isn't new, but as it turns out, direct managers might not be the biggest culprits when it comes to low retention and other workplace issues.
According to Heather Walker, senior people scientist at employee experience platform Culture Amp, "collective trauma from the pandemic" — which fueled a new distance between employees and leaders that has the former feeling out of "harmony" and uncared for — and increasing return-to-office mandates are contributing to a major lack of trust in leadership.
Related: 8 Common Mistakes You Might Be Making as a Leader (and How to Fix Them)
Additionally, there's a third factor that's really driving a wedge between employees and their upper leadership: layoffs. New research from Culture Amp suggests that employees are losing faith in high-level leadership in the current climate.
Culture Amp's people scientists identified customers who went through layoffs between March 1, 2020, and November 30, 2022. Of these customers, 146 had conducted surveys before (Survey 1) and after (Survey 2) the layoff, and a comparison of the two results revealed some key findings about how layoffs impact employee engagement.
Perhaps not surprisingly, perceptions of leadership can take a significant hit when people are laid off. The research found that at companies where layoffs occurred, there was a 10.5% decrease in confidence in leadership compared to a 1.3% increase in confidence in leadership at companies where layoffs didn't occur.
"[Employees are] losing trust that leaders will make decisions that benefit them," Walker says. "They're leaving companies where they perceive their leaders to lack [the] capacity to make those decisions or follow through on promises. Employees at companies who have had layoffs no longer see a future career path at that organization. The mistrust they have of leaders combined with a loss of seeing a future likely leads to more turnover."
Related: Who Is to Blame for Quiet Quitting? We Are. Here's Why (and What to Do About It)
Employee engagement is another concern. Gallup's decades of employment engagement research reveal that engaged workers "produce better business outcomes than other employees — across industry, company size and nationality, and in good economic times and bad."
"We know that engaged employees do more good deeds, work in a state of flow and are more resilient," Walker says. "And we know that employees' level of engagement is influenced by their appraisal of leadership (or lack thereof). Therefore, we can assume that employee performance is linked with their personal perceptions of leadership at their organization."
