Revenge Quitting: The Next Evolution of Employee Disengagement Trends
The tone of quitting trends has significantly progressed over the years. First, we had The Great Resignation, when older workers took slightly earlier retirement, and others either quit jobs in industries affected by the pandemic or stayed home to provide childcare.
More recently, “Quiet Quitting” took hold, and we saw employees doing the bare minimum. Then, when economic times got more challenging, “Quiet Staying” gained steam, which had workers doing enough to avoid getting fired but not more than their job description.
Words like “Quiet” and “Great” have gone out the window, and now we’re in the Revenge Quitting era. Unrecognized and unrewarded employees are quitting as revenge for being overworked and underpaid.
These may or may not be employees who have already gone through the Quiet Staying phase, but they are also likely to be your star performers who are getting burned out from additional requests and responsibilities as team members leave and tasks pile on.
Why Do Employees Want Revenge?
In a survey of just over 1,000 employees, Software Finder found that the top five employee frustrations are, in order:
- Low salary or lack of raises (48%)
- Feeling undervalued (34%)
- Lack of opportunities for advancement (33%)
- Bad management/leadership (27%)
- Lack of recognition (27%)
The number of respondents planning on revenge quitting was small at only 4%, However, 27% of the respondents reported feeling stuck in their current role due to financial considerations and the downward-trending job market. That’s over a quarter of your company, which makes it worth paying attention to.
You generally won’t sway the hearts and minds of revenge quitters. This cohort has been considering leaving for an average of 13 months due to continued mistreatment, so unless you address their core issues, they are still out the door. But there’s undoubtedly an opportunity to re-engage the at-risk group.
How Does a Revenge Quitter Leave a Company?
While the survey didn’t discuss the “how” of leaving as much as the “why,” an article in Fortune presumes these employees could be “Loud Quitting,” which is when a worker very publicly leaves a job and posts their reasoning on social media. If you think you may have revenge quitters on your hands, you may want to offer them the choice of a decent package to diffuse their desire for revenge.
A revenge quitter who leaves can poison office morale and bring down the general tone of the workplace. Even if the revenge quitter’s gripes were confined to only themselves, it might cause others to escalate their own internal complaints to the point where they become disengaged, if not revenge quitters themselves.
If you see more than one loud/revenge quitter in a short period of time, it is a big red flag that you need to reexamine every facet of your office culture and reform what has likely become a toxic workplace.
Coaching Star Performers To Do Less
Asking a racehorse not to race goes against its very nature. However, sometimes, it needs a rest period and light training to yield the best results. Your top performers have similar requirements; an ever-increasing stack of tasks can bring their performance down and annoyance level up, even if everything seems fine.
Reward them by encouraging a vacation or reducing their responsibilities where possible. Other employees tend to offload their work onto these people, so make sure there is no room for that and come down hard on staff who try to shift their workload.
Often, the worst offenders are the managers of top performers, so encourage them to delegate tasks to others, even if they prefer that the top performer perform them. Other employees don’t become rock stars by not being given essential tasks or projects. In fact, they may have been passed over for important projects so much that they could become revenge quitters.
Preventing Revenge Ragequitting
The VIP issue of low salaries or lack of raises is quick to fix if your company has the financial means. If the budget doesn’t exist for this, consider when you can reasonably expect to adjust salaries and then let your employees know it’s coming. The rest of the issues will require more work to address.
Having your human resources department triage working conditions at your firm may be a good idea. And if you don't have an HR department, a consultant can help identify systemic issues and at-risk employees.
Ultimately, your perennially unhappy employees will ragequit unless you address all their concerns, and even then, there will be lingering dissatisfaction for having been mistreated in the first place. It’s best for the company and the person to part ways at that point.
Understanding employee engagement, work habits, internal collaboration trends, and other workforce analytics can be critical in limiting turnover. Prodoscore, our employee productivity monitoring solution, can alert you to employees who may be at risk of quitting.
