What makes people quit—and why it matters now

By Kevin J. Delaney

Featured in today's newsletter:

A shiny new perk for engineers in tech
The six triggers that make people leave their jobs—even in tough markets
The battle between the AI faithful and banking bros

AI and Work Radar

In addition to generous salaries and equity, some engineers in tech are after a new perk: tokens, or how AI usage is measured and priced. Intensive use of AI means a high volume of tokens, which can quickly get expensive for businesses. Meanwhile, some companies that have seen higher AI adoption rates are starting to track how many tokens employees are using, as “tokenmaxxing” workers try to be even more productive with AI.
Nearly three-quarters of businesses buying AI for the first time are picking Anthropic rather than OpenAI, according to new data from Ramp. That’s a reversal from early December, when OpenAI was still in the lead in that category. The momentum for Anthropic comes as The Wall Street Journal reports OpenAI is shifting its strategy to focus more on coding and enterprise customers.
The pay gap between the top 1% of earners among AI researchers in industry and academia grew fivefold between 2001 and 2021, reaching $1.5 million a year by the end of that period, according to new research. In 2001, less than half of AI researchers worked in industry; by 2019, two-thirds did.
New research by Anthropic had Claude, its AI assistant, interview more than 80,000 people in over 150 countries about what they want from AI and what they’re most concerned about. The top thing people said they hoped for: “Professional excellence.” As one lawyer in Argentina put it, “I want the limit of my legal strategy to be my imagination...not mental exhaustion from technical tasks.” Their biggest worries? Unreliability of AI tools, the impact on jobs and the economy, and humans’ ability to maintain autonomy and agency.

Focus on What Makes Employees Quit—and Why it Matters Now

In today’s job market, the concept of the “Great Resignation”—the pandemic-era period when record numbers of employees felt confident enough about the market to voluntarily leave their jobs—may feel like a distant memory. But even as AI anxiety grows and turnover remains low, the forces that drove elevated quit rates aren’t gone, argues Anthony Klotz, an organizational psychologist who coined the “Great Resignation” phrase. People just can’t always act on them now.

Klotz, a professor at the University College London’s business school, is the author of a new book, Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters. We spoke with Klotz about what triggers employees to rethink their careers, why managers should care even when turnover is low, and what leaders can do now to keep their people engaged. Here are excerpts from the conversation, edited for length and clarity:

You coined the phrase ‘Great Resignation,’ and things have shifted dramatically since then. Are you surprised by how much things have changed?

From an economic perspective, I’m not necessarily surprised that we’re back in a cycle of ‘low hire, low fire,’ because these things are cyclical. I suppose I am more surprised at the pendulum swinging so much on things like DEI, return-to-office mandates. Work is still more flexible than it was before the pandemic, but we've lost some ground on flexibility [and DEI] from where we were five years ago.

You define jolts as events that make you stop and rethink your relationship with work. Why are you writing about this now?

When I was speaking to the media or to professional audiences about the Great Resignation, I [realized] that an area of academic literature that's my favorite—the turnover literature—hadn't made it out there into the hands of the general public, leaders, HR professionals, decision makers to the extent that I thought it should.

Leaders are often the source of jolts for their workers, and more importantly, leaders have the power to see when jolts are coming. Once they detect that a worker has been jolted, leaders have the power to step in and say, ‘Let’s do something.‘

But in today’s job market, a lot of managers might think, ‘Why worry about it?’

This came up in the early days of the [pandemic]. Executives would pull me aside and say, ‘Employees aren't going to have all the power forever.’ And I would say, ‘You’re exactly right. This is a cyclical thing. But which [problem] would you rather have? A workforce of employees who aren't happy [and] they're quitting, or a workforce where they're not happy, but they can't quit?’ Most leaders would rather have disengaged employees quit.

The case for investing in employees should have never been [to do so] just so that they don't quit. We invest in employees so that they perform at high levels…Almost any leader would say this is a time of immense disruption. We need every employee engaged. We need them bringing their creative minds to do the work.

You name six types of ‘jolts’ in the book—walk us through them.

The first five are negative events, and the last one is positive.

Direct jolts are negative events that happen to us at work that make us think, ‘I don't know if this is the right job or the right work for me.’ The most common types of this are failure or being outright harassed at work, but some are more subtle.
Collateral jolts are events that happen to those around us at work that sort of spill over and affect us. The biggest example is turnover contagion. When a colleague leaves, we often lose a friend at work, we have to pick up the slack, and we wonder where they're going.
Honeymoon jolts happen in the first year on the job—which, surprisingly, is the most common year for quitting. During the recruitment and job search processes, we get this set of expectations in our mind. Some of it's accurate, some of it's not. We thought we had this psychological contract with this organization, and they've breached it. Research on the ‘honeymoon hangover’ effect shows there’s just a startlingly high percentage of people who start new jobs at a higher level of satisfaction than their prior job and within the first year, they end up at a lower level.
Crossover jolts happen in our personal life and [spill] into work—a health scare, or a comment from your daughter that you don’t go to [her] soccer games.
Remote jolts are relevant right now—they come from events happening somewhere else in the world you hear about that make you think, ‘What am I doing in my current job?’
Finally, positive jolts might come from events that put us in a very positive mental state, making us more open-minded.

What are the most important things managers can do right now to keep people from wanting to quit if or when the labor market shifts again?

Managers have more power and more tools than they may realize to help employees navigate jolts in ways that benefit [their] life and the business. When major changes are being discussed or brought down from leaders, you should really think, ‘Which of my employees are going to struggle with these changes? What can I do to give them a heads-up or just make sure I'm there when this change is rolled out?’

One of the main signs that somebody's been experiencing a jolt is that they withdraw a little bit. They get a little quieter, a little bit more silent in meetings. Pay attention. Leaders can also do a better job of encouraging employees to speak up. Instead of saying, ‘Don't bring me problems, just bring me solutions,’ say ‘Bring me problems and we'll find the solutions together.’ When employees have a complaint, try to think creatively.

Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters is available now on Amazon and Bookshop.

What Else You Need to Know

New employment data show the lowest level of new applications for unemployment benefits since January, an indicator of more limited layoffs. Initial claims for jobless benefits dropped to 205,000 for the week ended March 14, fewer than the 215,000 a Bloomberg survey of economists had predicted.

Yes, but: “Continuing claims,” which show how many people are collecting unemployment benefits, rose to 1.86 million, a sign people are staying on jobless benefits longer.
Voluntary departures keep falling, with February survey data from the New York Federal Reserve showing that the probability people place on choosing to leave their jobs in the next year—the expected quit rate—hit the lowest level since 2013.
Meanwhile, a new report shows how the job market for entry-level workers in New York City has worsened in recent years. The total number of entry-level job postings in New York City fell 37% between 2022 and 2024, according to the Center for an Urban Future at the City University of New York. Internship postings also fell precipitously, from 11,000 in 2019 to under 7,000 in 2024, the report says.

Future of Work Speed Round

Remote work is linked to higher birth rates, according to a new working paper from researchers at Stanford, Princeton, and other universities. Couples where both partners work from home at least one day a week have an estimated 14% higher lifetime fertility than couples where neither does, equivalent to 0.32 more children per woman, the research found.
Middle managers across corporate America are facing the age of the ‘megamanager,’ overseeing significantly larger teams as companies flatten their organizational structures, Business Insider reports. A January Gallup survey found the average number of direct reports per manager rose to 12.1 last year from 10.9 in 2024.
The National Labor Relations Board alleged that Atlassian retaliated against a software engineer who criticized CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes on an internal Slack channel, arguing the engineer had acted in the company’s “Open Company, No Bullshit” philosophy when speaking about workplace issues, Bloomberg reports. A lawyer for Atlassian, which has denied wrongdoing, said the comments were not protected because they were "abusive or gratuitously insulting.”
HR and IT leaders are appearing more frequently among the five highest-paid executives listed in the proxy statements for public companies, driven by the AI boom and competition for executive talent, a new Conference Board report finds. The number of Russell 3000 chief technology officers named among the highest paid executives rose 61% from 2021 to 2025, while the number of chief human resources officers rose 55%.

Here are the best tips and insights for managing yourself and your team:

Conduct “reality audits” to see the gap between how you think your team feels and how they’re actually doing. That gap is a key reason so many transformations fail. After a meeting about a change you’re making, ask yourself how you think it went. Then run a quick anonymous pulse survey and compare.
Open more earnings conversations to everyone. Jacqueline Arthur, the global head of human capital management at Goldman Sachs, said in a recent podcast that until recently, earnings town halls were reserved for managing directors and partners. To make people feel more empowered, “one of the things we did was open up these town halls to our broader employee base,” she said, “because it’s imperative that they understand the firm strategy and [that] they feel aligned to it.”
Hand out “straight talk” tokens to encourage candid feedback. Vice president of global clinical supply at Pfizer Michael Ku needed a way to address the overly polite culture on his team. “[I]f someone wanted to introduce a sensitive topic or offer critique during a meeting, they could place a coin on the table,” write Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards, and Jason Wild about Ku’s approach in their book Genius at Scale.

Coda

A terminal obsession: There’s a battle brewing between AI boosters and banking bros after recent social media posts saying a tool from AI company Perplexity could be an alternative to the popular Bloomberg terminal, the pricey data and information tool widely used in the finance industry. “Laughable,” declared one fan, saying the terminal—which The Wall Street Journal called a “personal and professional security blanket” that “is like oxygen to professional investors”—could not be replaced.

And what does the AI faithful have to say? “There’s a definite naiveté,” one AI startup co-founder said of the finance community’s response. “Everything is disruptable.”