New data on the Great Resignation
SurveyMonkey's research newsletter
Hello from SurveyMonkey!
Have you recently considered quitting your job? If so, you’re not alone—not by a long shot. In this installment of our research newsletter, we’ll share some of our latest data on what’s making workers quit—or stay!
Half of all workers (50%) say their company is currently understaffed, according to the latest CNBC|Momentive Workforce Survey, just published on Friday.
Workers who describe their offices as understaffed are a huge threat to attrition: they are nearly twice as likely as workers with adequate staffing to say they’ve considered quitting their jobs in the last three months (43% vs. 23%). CNBC describes this as a “vicious feedback loop” that threatens to make the “Great Resignation” even worse.
Overall, one in three workers (33%) say they’ve seriously considered quitting in recent months.
Lower-wage workers are most at risk of walking away: 37% of those making under $50,000 say they’ve considered quitting in the last three months, vs. 25% of those making more than $150,000.
Among parents of children under 18, mothers are more likely than fathers to say they’ve considered quitting (37% vs. 32%)
Aside from that, there is some good news: things are getting better at work! Four in ten workers (42%) say they are “thriving” at work these days.
“More than half of thrivers (54%) say they feel more loyal to their company now than they did before the pandemic; that’s more than twice the rate among coasters (24%) and three times that of strugglers (17%). Thrivers are also more likely to feel more connected with colleagues now than before than pandemic (47%), while just 21% of coasters and 18% of strugglers feel the same.”
Twice as many people now as a year ago (34% vs. 18%) say it has gotten easier to do their job in the past six months. Just 28% say it has gotten harder to do their jobs in the past six months, down from 48% in Q4 2020.
The biggest year-over-year jumps were among in-person and hybrid workers:
In Q4 2020, 15% of in-person workers said their job had gotten easier in past six months; now that has jumped to 35%
In Q4 2020, 27% of remote workers said their job had gotten easier in past six months; now that has jumped to 36%
In Q4 2020, 16% of hybrid workers said their job had gotten easier in past six months; now that has jumped to 33%
Just 16% of workers say they are now working fully from home, down from 21% in April of this year and from 22% in November of last year. Looking ahead six months, only 9% of workers expect to be working fully from home; 60% expect to be working fully from their office or workplace and 17% expect to be working mostly from their office or workplace, while 12% expect to be working mostly from home.
As I note in an article for CNBC, remote, in-person, and hybrid workers are all about equally likely to self-identify as thrivers, coasters, and strugglers; about four in 10 of each group identify as thriving and coasting while significantly fewer say they are struggling.
The Great Resignation isn’t just a U.S. story. In September, we surveyed more than 1,200 workers in the U.K. and found the shift back from remote to in-person was spurring workers to quit.
More than half of hybrid workers in the U.K. said they would not stay at their job if their employer required them to go back into the office full-time; 41% would start looking for a new job and 11% would quit right away.
44% of workers in the U.K. say their employers are offering hybrid work as an option, and of those workers who have that option, 67% are working on a hybrid basis.
Among those workers that do not have hybrid work as a benefit currently, one quarter (29%) want to see it offered in the future.
Have you seen other interesting data on the Great Resignation? Have you quit your job, or are you thinking of quitting? We’re continuing to poll thousands of Americans every day, including on this topic. Check in with all our data here, and keep checking your inbox for more updates from us. Thanks for reading!
In the meantime, here’s some other polling data you might be interested in:
From Gallup: The Great Resignation is really the Great Discontent
-Laura Wronski