Paying employees to leave the company may actually pay off, according to a study published in the Journal of Management Accounting Research.
“Most of what we hear about incentives is how to get people to stay, work harder or perform better, so the idea of offering money for someone to leave immediately raised a really interesting question: under what circumstances could that genuinely be a smart organizational strategy?” said Kelsey Matthews, a professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Accounting and Finance and a co-author of the study.
The researchers found that pay-to-quit programs both encouraged less committed workers to leave and led to stronger performance by those who remained.
The pay-to-quit incentives could help employers deal with quiet quitting, in which employees only complete necessary tasks but aren’t committed to the organization, researchers said. The incentives could also help companies identify new hires they’re investing in training for who would easily leave the organization for a better offer.
“Pay-to-quit incentives are generally used by organizations that are protective of their strong corporate culture. These incentives encourage employees to take the money and leave the organization if they are not genuinely committed to their roles and the organization’s vision,” per the study.
Some companies have already put these programs in place. For example, Amazon has offered hourly workers at its customer-service centers and warehouses up to $5,000 once a year to leave, an incentive called “The Offer.”
Likewise, software company Trainual has given new workers an option at the two-week mark to stay or quit for $5,000, a program modeled after a similar one at Zappos (now owned by Amazon).
