Bad Managers Lead Good Workers to Quit Their Jobs, Woman Claims — Research Says She’s Right

A TikToker who's been documenting/commenting on her 9-5 life has recently gone viral for calling out poor management practices as the reason for high employee turnover rates, stating that specifically, devoted workers who do a great job will often run away from a business if they're not being treated kindly by their supervisors.

Jaime (@jaime.goesdigital) covered this topic by asking a rhetorical question a viral TikTok that's amassed over 636,000 views on the popular application, with several folks commenting that they agreed with her assessment of this management attitude.

Jaime begins her TikTok with a question that reads: "Do you want to know the way to get rid of good employees? Is, work them to death, and then in meetings, berate them on how they're not getting their stuff...done and how they could be doing a better job," she says after giving an "okay" sign into the camera with her fingers.

Her sarcastic TikTok message was compounded with a caption that embodies her confusion with such a practice: "I don’t understand this at all," she writes, and it seems like there were a number of other folks who responded to her clip who seemed just as perturbed by she was by overbearing managers.

One commenter shared her own addendum to Jaime's video, penning: "with a sprinkle of keeping toxic team members bc the hiring/ training process is too tough"

Someone else highlighted a personal anecdote that delineates how companies will often spoil relationships they have with otherwise decent employees because they don't know how to treat them better: "My husband walked off the job after 16 years. The most loyal, hardworking person I've ever met, and they destroyed him. Now he's living his best life."

One TikToker wrote that they've stopped giving additional hours of their time to their job after they seemed ungrateful after just one day of giving less extra time than they normally fork over: "I had been staying late 2-3 hours every day. the first time I only stayed 1.5 hours they treated me like I was skipping work, now I go home on time"

There were other sarcastic remarks from fellow app users, like this one person who quipped: "Bonus points if you tell your good staff you’re tired of them asking for more staff/help."

According to the Pew Research Center, a 2021 survey delving into the reasons why people left their jobs it appeared that there were a few recurring incentives shared by folks exiting their positions gave.

There were three main factors Pew said workers cited as the proverbial straws that broke the camel's back when it came to their former companies.

The first, and it won't come as a shocker: is low pay, with a good number of folks listing it as the main reason as to why they jumped ship. This suggests that if these same folks were compensated a little better, it might help them look the other way when it comes to these other two factors: a lack of opportunity for advancement and feeling disrespected.

Now it could be said that the latter reason is indicative of the other two mentioned in the study: not getting paid what you believe you're worth and getting passed up on promotions can start to feel a little disrespectful after a while.

However, it does seem that there are a growing number of folks in the work force who seem to want more than just fat paychecks, but rather "value" and "purpose" attached to their job titles.

This, combined with the information found in this LinkedIn article which states how many workers "want to feel valued" at their companies and who ultimately want a better relationship with their managers, means that businesses don't necessarily have to offer hefty incremental salaries to their workers in order to keep them around.

And when you consider that Harvard Business Review wrote that around half of every single US worker has, at some point in their lives, quit a job because they couldn't stand their boss, Jaime's TikTok about terrible boss behavior and the impact it has on employees starts to look more dire for businesses looking to keep committed employees happy in their roles.

This idea was echoed in a Reddit post uploaded to the site's r/careerguidance sub, where one user on the site said that a poor manager can ultimately make jobs seem worse than they really are, noting that they probably would've stayed longer in their current position than search for greener employment pastures as soon as they did.

However there were some folks who said that even if a manager is great but the job stinks and the company as a whole is abysmal, then there really isn't much that can be done about workers deciding to up and abandon ship.

Depending on which industry one works in, however, it would seem that employers may have the "upper hand" when it comes to hiring: according to Crunchbase more than 188,000 tech layoffs occurred in 2023, resulting in a number of employees clamoring for gigs in a job market that many say, as of this writing, is awful.

You could, however, join the growing movement of Americans who have ultimately decided to become self-employed. With more and more services being created every day and shifting marketplace needs across various business sectors, while launching a new venture certain isn't easy, there are plenty of folks who've been able to make that happen for themselves. So why can't you?