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We gained some insight into why an employee stays with a company when he is dissatisfied with his job, supervisor, benefits, pay, and so on. These employees are excellent examples of personnel who have not affected the turnover statistics but who may have left the company, psychologically, long ago.

This finding illustrates the fact that the reasons people stay are not necessarily the opposite of the reasons why people leave.

One often hears negative statements about supervisors and jobs in exit interviews; yet, of the employees we studied, many who made such statements are still with the companies about which they complain. These are the turn-offs. Moreover, it suggests that these employees do not have as much job mobility as many companies assume. The reinforcement that environmental factors give to the inertia of these alienated employees must be quite powerful, and it will probably take a strong force to break their inertia—in extreme cases, discharge.

It might be concluded at this point that level in the organization, race, tenure, education, and degree of job satisfaction determine why people stay.

However, we found a factor more potent than any of these—namely, the work ethic of the people involved in the study. Human beings exist at different levels of psychological development, and these levels are expressed in the values they hold respecting their work. This level of psychological development is restricted primarily to infants, people with serious brain deterioration, and certain psychopathic conditions.

For practical purposes, employees are not ordinarily found at Level 1. These employees are best suited to jobs that offer easy work, friendly people, fair play, and, above all, a good boss. An employee at this level believes that he may not have the best job in the world, but he does as well as others with jobs like his.

He likes a boss who tells him exactly what to do and how to do it, and who encourages him by doing it with him. The two major requirements of a job for this employee are that it pay well and keep people off his back. He does not care for any kind of work that ties him down, but he will do it if he must in order to get some money.

Because of the raw, rugged value system of this employee, he needs a boss who is tough, but allows him to be tough too. This employee likes a job which is secure, where the rules are followed, and no favoritism is shown. He feels that he has worked hard for what he has and thinks he deserves some good breaks. Others, he believes, should realize that it is their duty to work. The ideal job for this employee is one which is full of variety, allows some free wheeling and dealing, and offers pay and bonus on the basis of results.

He feels he is responsible for his own success and is constantly on the lookout for new opportunities. A good boss for this employee understands the politics of getting the job done, knows how to bargain, and is firm but fair.

A job which allows for the development of friendly relationships with supervisors and others in the work group appeals to this employee. Working with people toward a common goal is more important than getting caught up in a materialistic rat race. He likes a boss who gets people working in close harmony by being more a friendly person than a boss. This employee likes a job where the goals and problems are more important than the money, prestige, or how it should be done.

He prefers work of his own choosing that offers continuing challenge and requires imagination and initiative. To him, a good boss is one who gives him access to the information he needs and lets him do the job in his own way. Exhibit IV tabulates the top ten reasons employees stay, based on their psychological level.

It shows a startling dichotomy. Employees possessing relatively high tribalistic or egocentric values stay mainly because of environmental reasons, whereas employees with relatively high manipulative or existential values stay primarily for inside-the-company reasons, many of which are motivational.

We also found that the tribalistic or egocentric employees are located primarily in the low-skill manufacturing functions and that manipulative or existential employees are located primarily in management, research, or professional positions.

Exhibit IV. Although not all the implications are clear at this point, it seems apparent that corporate managers, in deciding on policies and philosophy, in reality have been talking to themselves about themselves. That is, they tend to adopt policies and theories of human motivation that appeal to their own individual value systems, under the assumption that all employees have similar values.

For example, many a manipulative manager presumes that money and large, status-laden offices motivate other people in the same way they drove him to his present level of success. He may have climbed the corporate ladder, but as our results clearly show, for many employees the ladder does not even exist. This is not meant as a criticism of managerial value systems, but as a description of reality. One can expect leaders, whatever their values, to adopt policies which most appeal to their own value system.

An individual makes a decision based on what he thinks is right. What is right depends on his values. However, since values of people are not the same, what is right to the manager is often wrong for the employee. We further explored job retention and values by linking data on values and reasons for staying. This enabled us to determine the values of those people who stay because they like their jobs and those who said that their jobs were not reasons for staying. We found that employees who stay because they like their jobs tend to be relatively manipulative and existential; and those who continue for reasons not directly associated with their jobs tend to be tribalistic and egocentric.

We also found that the tribalistic and especially egocentric workers were relatively more dissatisfied with motivation factors than were employees with other value systems. The least dissatisfied employees had existential values, followed by the manipulative and conformist employees.

This is not too surprising, considering the fact that the free enterprise system tends to reward conformist and manipulative values, and existential people stay only as long as they are happy. Exhibit V demonstrates again the hidden power of environmental factors.

It presents the percentage responses of employees scoring the highest ninetieth percentile or greater in each value system—that is, the employees who fit most clearly into each value system. The data show a dichotomy between employees with relatively high manipulative or existential values Levels 5 and 7 and other employees, especially those with relatively high tribalistic or egocentric values Levels 2 and 3.

Almost without exception, people of Levels 5 and 7 place less emphasis on external environmental reasons for staying than do people with other values. Thus whereas age, length of service, type of work and skill level, race, and education describe who stays, and for what reason, the underlying value system explains why. But can we, as managers, really use these facts to improve employee retention? Parkinson argues that this administrative apparatus, in the absence of strict directives about what work it should accomplish, became an independent, self-regulating system that began to grow for the sake of growing, unrelated to the actual organizational demands it served.

To emphasize his point about rampant bureaucratic growth, Parkinson provides a series of equations, of the type an ecologist might use to model the replication of a bacteria colony.

But embedded in this satire is an important truth: work systems, if left sufficiently autonomous, can evolve in ways independent of any rational plan. Once we accept this idea, our busyness problem becomes easier to grasp. The defining property of our contemporary professional settings, where everyone is working twenty per cent too much, is the autonomy given to individuals to decide what work to take on and what work to defer or decline.

How do you decide when to say no? In the modern office context, stress has become a default heuristic. The Parkinson-inspired explanation for overwork suggests an obvious general remedy: reduce the degree to which workloads are purely self-regulated. Repenning argue that office work should follow the lead of advanced industrial manufacturing and move the assignment of tasks from a push to a pull model.

Most knowledge-work settings deploy a push paradigm: when you need something done, you push it onto someone else to accomplish—with an e-mail, or a request made during a meeting. As the authors note, this leaves overloaded individuals to make complicated prioritization decisions on their own, which in turn breeds disorganization.

The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. Prior to March , how many days a week were you personally in the office? How many teams did you directly interface with? What teams did you spend the most time with? Do you have an office? What is office culture? Has your business actually suffered because of remote work?

If so, how? Be specific. You need to have a business plan and depending on the sort of business you are trying to set up, enough money to pay for premises, electricity, power and even smaller things like stationery and supplies. It can all add up. There are a number of organisations that can help you if you want to become self-employed or start your own business. If you're working, it doesn't mean that you stop learning.

There will be lots of opportunities for you to learn new things, so make the most of any chances you get. Remember that even skills that do not seem relevant now may come in useful later on. Some employers may pay for the costs of training courses that you may want to take if they feel it would benefit you in your current role.

When you apply for a job, ask what training or opportunities are available. You will need to find out whether it is run by the company you work for, or an external training provider like a college. If you're in a job that doesn't offer any training opportunities, you may be entitled to time off if you want to study for certain qualifications. Careers webchat is available from 9.

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