Having a job you hate – whether your dislike is due to long hours, bad pay, or frustrating colleagues – can wreak havoc on the rest of your life. It’s bad enough when a work day is filled with irritating events, but when work creates issues that follow you home, it may be time to search for a new job.
During the pandemic, there was a wave of people leaving their positions – a phenomenon that some labeled The Great Resignation. Experts, including Professor Anthony Klotz who coined the term, believed that the phenomenon would come to an end by the start of 2024. A study from LinkedIn (MSFT) and Microsoft, however, revealed that 46% of people wanted to quit their jobs last year, up from 40% in 2021.
There’s a variety of reasons why employees want to leave their positions. Despite efforts made to embrace women in the workplace, for example, nearly half of all women still reported experiencing sexist microaggressions at work in 2024, according to McKinsey & Company’s “Women in the Workplace” report.
“Microaggressions take a heavy toll,” the report read. “Women who experience them are more likely to feel burned out and to consider quitting their jobs and less likely to view their workplaces as equitable.”
And for some employees, a poor working environment can have a very real physical impact on their lives. At least 3.5 million workers experienced some form of illness or injury connected to their employment, in 2022, according to the AFL-CIO’s Death on the Job report. Even more alarmingly, an average of 15 people die every day in the United States, as a result of on-the-job injuries, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“The unnecessary political polarization of critical issues like climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated and introduced new challenges to longstanding problems of heat and infectious diseases exposures in the workplace,” the AFL-CIO report read. “Other real, everyday threats like workplace violence and job fatality rates for workers of color are only getting worse.”
If poor workplace conditions are making you contemplate going back on the job market, it’s worth looking into the companies that have made a name for themselves as pleasant environments for their employees.
Each year, Energage and USA TODAY (GCI) rank the best companies to work for in the U.S. based on employee feedback. Continue reading to learn more about the five companies that topped their rankings, based on survey responses from employees at 2,251 companies.
