Young employees are leaving their jobs not simply because of pay or working conditions, according to a new study. Interpersonal problems such as conflicts with supervisors, lack of communication, and feelings of isolation within the organization emerged as causes of resignation that far outweigh salary.
The Korea Small Business Institute said Monday that it analyzed about 530,000 pieces of text using text-mining techniques from 314 small-business resignation vlogs posted on YouTube between February 2020 and February this year. The results were published in the latest issue of the institute's "Small Business Policy Research."
The most notable finding was that interpersonal relationships were by far the leading cause of resignation. The keyword "connection," referring to relationships with colleagues, supervisors, and senior coworkers, appeared 499 times, accounting for 36.9% of all videos.
The vlogs featured numerous testimonies of people who decided to quit due to workplace harassment, as well as cases of being suddenly pressured to resign without clear reason. The researchers analyzed that these results show the actual causes of resignation at small businesses go beyond salary levels to organizational culture and interpersonal conflicts.
The second most frequently mentioned cause was a lack of growth opportunities. The keyword "job resources," meaning education and job competency development for members, appeared 256 times. This was followed by "sacrifice" (175 times), referring to working conditions such as years of service and leave, and "ease of exit" (165 times), indicating the ease of changing jobs.
By contrast, the keyword "fit," meaning whether a company's values align with one's own, ranked lowest at 81 times. The researchers interpreted this to mean that immediate interpersonal conflicts have a far greater impact on resignation than long-term value alignment.
Particularly serious is the rate of early resignation among new employees. Among the videos in which tenure could be identified, those who resigned within one year of employment exceeded half at 53.6%. This means a significant portion of personnel are leaving companies in the early stages after joining.
The words that repeatedly appeared in the resignation vlogs were "first" and "alone." This suggests that new employees experience emotional exhaustion as they are deployed to the field without going through a systematic adjustment process.
The researchers defined this as a vicious cycle in which failure to adapt to the organization produces emotional exhaustion, and exhaustion in turn makes organizational adaptation more difficult.
Kim Yong-hee, a senior researcher at H&Consulting who conducted the study, said, "Small businesses often lack dedicated human resources management personnel," adding, "There is a need to establish a standard onboarding model tailored to small businesses." Onboarding refers to a systematic support program that helps new employees adapt to an organization.
"There is also a need to consider measures to distribute related platforms at the level of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and to provide incentives to companies that adopt them," Kim said.
The researchers assessed that, unlike conventional surveys, the resignation vlogs are material in which those who quit voluntarily shared their experiences, offering a more vivid picture of workers' actual psychology and the backgrounds behind their resignations. The analysis reveals that job changes, which appear to be individual choices on the surface, are in fact the result of structural problems within organizations.
