According to the BLS’s latest JOLTS data, the rate of people quitting their jobs has fallen to the lowest level since 2020 — 1.9%. With people changing jobs less than they have in years, economists have deemed it the “Big Stay.”
It’s tempting to read that as loyalty — people finally settling in, sticking with employers they believe in. But the truth is: it isn’t. The Big Stay comes down to three things, and none of them are loyalty.
- Switching jobs to “climb the ladder” isn’t an option anymore
- The storied “golden handcuffs”
- And remote work has erased differentiation
Why switch jobs?
It used to be if you couldn’t get promoted at Company A, you’d simply go get the title and the pay bump at Company B instead. The outside offer was a fast, legible way to prove your worth without waiting for someone internally to notice it.
That move doesn’t pay off the way it used to. A recent analysis of ADP Research Institute data found the pay premium for switching jobs has shrunk to its lowest point on record — roughly half what it was during the Great Resignation. Fewer companies are paying up for outside hires. So the only way to get ahead is to choose to commit to where you are, to put in the effort, get recognized, and be rewarded accordingly. Right?
The tale of the Golden Handcuffs
The thing is, just because the exit strategy no longer exists doesn’t mean the desire to leave isn’t still there. And that’s how you end up with golden handcuffs: people who don’t want to be where they are but who either don’t want to start over somewhere else, or who are afraid to, or who don’t see enough upside to try. It’s not loyalty and it’s not exactly disloyalty. It’s a weird gray area — limbo, purgatory. The problem is, when this happens, it means the incentive to improve and contribute begins to fade. And from an organizational perspective, that gets expensive. Companies end up paying full price for the bare minimum.
Differentiation in a remote world
Loyalty has always been built on differentiation – the sense that this place is worth staying for in a way another place isn’t. Historically, that differentiation was physical: the people, the environment, the commute, the specific way a team argued its way to a decision. You couldn’t screenshot that.
Remote work flattens it. Onscreen, the work at one company largely looks the same as at any other. The same emails, the same Slacks, the same Zoom calls. When the day-to-day experience is interchangeable, the only variable left that’s easy to compare is pay. So that’s what people compare. Not because they’ve stopped caring about culture, but because culture stopped being visible enough to weigh against a bigger number. That’s the real mechanism behind the Big Stay: not more loyalty, but fewer visible reasons to leave and fewer visible reasons to stay – which nets out to nobody moving, for entirely different reasons than it looks like from the outside.
- If pay were equal everywhere, would people still choose to stay here?
- Do your best people know what they’re worth to you, or only what a competing offer would pay them?
- When someone gets an outside offer, is the conversation that follows about counter-offering, or about why they were looking in the first place?
What you can do right now
- Build trust by emphasizing transparency: make growth and compensation conversations regular
- Build culture: train managers to deliver hard feedback directly instead of avoiding it
- Build teams: put real facilitation into practice during meetings and 1:1s
If you don’t know how your people are actually doing, you don’t have trust. If nobody’s saying the hard thing out loud, you don’t have culture. And if there’s no trust and no culture, there’s nothing left to be loyal to.
The illusion was never that people are staying. It’s that staying looks like loyalty. The organizations that actually keep people aren’t the ones with the shiniest handcuffs. They’re the ones people would stay with even without them.
