The job market is increasingly more competitive, not only for job seekers, but for companies hoping to hire the best talent. Factors such as competitive wages, benefits, and promotion and development opportunities all contribute to an individual’s choice of where to work. Organizations hoping to hire and keep the best possible job candidates to further their organization’s mission should consider which factors may play a role in an employee’s decision to stay at or leave a company, as well as how certain workplace factors might influence the employee’s opinion of the company and likelihood of recommending the workplace to their network as a good place to work. Even if an employee remains at an organization without quitting, their opinion of the workplace can influence public opinion and organization popularity, affecting the organization’s ability to attract strong potential applicants. Additionally, minimizing employee turnover is essential to keeping costs low; recruiting and training are some of the most costly parts of running an organization.
This analysis will explore potential correlations between variables related to employee attrition and work satisfaction, to help organizations consider potential areas of improvement for retaining the best candidates.
If you would like to download a copy of this data and follow along with the analysis, or check out the data for your own analysis, the data can also be found at this link:
Data set analytics
Commute time, attrition, & work-life balance ratings
Post-COVID, more and more organizations are opting to allow their employees to work remotely. This can help cut their costs by not having to pay for office space, but many managers worry that remote work will lead many employees to become unproductive. Despite these protests, more and more workers are pushing for remote and hybrid work, advocating for the opportunity to avoid long commutes that decrease their work-life balance. Many employers continue to push back, but can longer commutes really affect work-life balance so drastically that it can be a reason for employees to quit a job?
The employees that quit their job had a higher average in commute distance than employees that did not quit their job. Is this related to work-life balance? Are higher commute times not only linked to higher attrition, but overall lower work-life balance for the employee?
For each work-life balance score, the group of employees that quit their job have a higher average commute distance. Additionally, the lowest overall average commute times for both groups of employees are found in the highest work-life balance rating category, indicating a negative correlation between commute distance and work-life balance.
Interestingly, the average commute distance for employees that did not quit their job and rated their work-life balance a 2 is lower than for employees that did quit their job and rated their work life balance a 4. The work-life balance data point of 2 consistently stands out as an outlier throughout the data set performing other analyses.
This may be due to poor survey design; only 4 rating options leaves people taking a survey with a difficult choice when between the ratings of 2 and 3. Although this survey design avoids the risk of central tendency, small, even-numbered rating scales can sometimes produce skewed or misleading results.
While this outlier is notable, the data still follows linear trends.
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This graph reveals that regardless of employee attrition, work life balance ratings are negatively correlated with commute distance. Notably, for employees that do quit their job, this relationship is stronger. Thus, it can be concluded that a shorter commute distance is correlated to employees being less likely to quit their jobs, and also rate their work-life balance higher, and vice versa.
Allowing employees with long commutes to work remotely may help improve their work-life balance, and lead them to be less likely to quit their job, helping minimize turnover.
There are many more variables that may have correlations to, or potential effects on, employee work-life balance ratings, and employee attrition. One is workplace environment.
Job environment satisfaction ratings, attrition & work-life balance
As defined in the data dictionary above, “environment satisfaction” refers to the employee’s self-rated contentment with their workplace environment. This can also be understood as a rating of workplace culture; the environment is not just related to physical traits of the office. Regardless of commute times, if employees are arriving to a workplace with a strong culture, how might this be related to attrition rates or work-life balance ratings?
In general, except for work-life balance ratings of 2, employees rate their satisfaction with their workplace environment lower when they do quit their job than when they do not quit their job. Work-life balance ratings also follow this general trend; attrition is lower for higher work-life balance ratings.
An interesting thing to note in this particular graph is that employees with a work-life balance of 4 that do quit their job have the lowest average rating of their satisfaction with the workplace environment. This could be for a number of possible, hypothetical reasons; perhaps when an employee dislikes their workplace culture, they impose stricter self-made boundaries around their work-life balance, making sure they spend time away from their job. Or, perhaps the employee highly values work-life balance, and finds themselves taking home the stress of a toxic workplace environment, which ends up being a motivation to quit their job.
Examining the linear trend of work-life balance and environment satisfaction ratings along with employee attrition confirms there is a positive linear relationship between the two variables in employees that do not quit their job; as their work life balance increases, so does their environment satisfaction.
On the other hand, for employees that do quit their job, there is a negative linear relationship. As work-life balance increases, environment satisfaction decreases. If environment satisfaction were to increase, work life balance would decrease.
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In relation to each other, as work-life balance increases, environment satisfaction also tends to increase, and attrition is lower.
This general trend indicates that workplace environment satisfaction can contribute to an employee’s decision to leave their role, and that employees are more likely to quit a job when they are not satisfied with the workplace culture.
Overall, it is clear that workplace environment plays a key role in determining employee attrition rates. So, how can an organization ensure their workplace culture is strong?
The role of leadership in determining attrition
Organizational psychology research has shown that leadership is one of the main determining factors of an organization’s workplace environment and culture. Strong management creates a workplace environment where employees enjoy working, and thus, are more likely to stay, as the analysis above has revealed.
With a lower mean number of years, a lower maximum number of years, and lower numbers of years for both upper and lower quartiles, employees that quit their job have generally lower total years spent under a certain manager. As leadership is a major factor in determining workplace culture, and work environment is a key variable predicting employee attrition, this trend makes sense; employees that are not satisfied with the workplace environment are more likely to quit their job, and a manager plays a large part in creating such a culture.
Attrition of employees in different departments
This data set considers 9 different job roles across 3 different departments. In each of these roles and departments, an employee’s responsibilities, expectations, and nature of work are all quite different, which may affect job satisfaction and work-life balance ratings. How do the job satisfaction and work life balance of different jobs in this data set differ? How do these trends differ in attrition rates?
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For employees that did not quit their job, the previously established positive linear relationship between the variables remains consistent across all three departments.
However, for employees that did quit their job, there is an interesting deviation from the trend: employees in the sales department. These employees’ work life balance and environment satisfaction are positively correlated even when the employee decides to quit. Why?
Money is a universal language. Many people seek out specific careers for their monetary incentives. Is a high-paying salary enough to keep an employee at a specific organization considering the role’s demands?
For employees working in HR and R&D that worked overtime, those that quit were paid less on average than those that quit. However, for employees working in Sales that worked overtime, those that quit were paid MORE on average than those that did not quit.
It is hard to know why these data are true for Sales employees. Ratings of work-life balance and environment satisfaction were not significantly different than from other departments (in fact HR had the greatest variations), so other factors are likely at play.
Sales roles are all about numbers; profit, commission, number of sales closed. They can require long working hours, with high monetary incentive, but this environment can be extremely stressful. To make more money, you have to work more overtime.
The fact that work-life balance and environment satisfaction of Sales employees were positively related for both employees did quit and did not quit their job suggests that employees in this department are comfortable with the demands of the job and how they affect workplace dynamics, and their life.
However, to make more money in sales you have to work more hours, and more intensely and without failure in those hours. Such a level of stress means a degradation of mental and physical health, regardless of how much an individual enjoys the environment and how it balances out time-wise with their work life balance. Even though sales employees were making more money, they were likely working more intense and demanding hours, leading them to quit their job due to stress’s effect.
Further research from a larger sample size and considering more factors, such as health effects, could be favorable in further analyzing this data. However, regardless of employee work-life balance ratings, a truly strong work-life balance shouldn’t yield so many employees quitting when succeeding financially.
Additional data consideration
The website Comparably collects employee ratings of their organization’s workplace culture factors and other opinions. Annually, Comparably recognizes the top 100 companies for work-life balance, based on employee responses to questions regarding workplace culture. Comparably’s website provides a list of the top 100 companies for work-life balance, as well as information about employee survey responses that may have played a role in the award.
The source for this data can be found at: https://www.comparably.com/awards/winners/work-life-balance-2024-large.
Citation: (Comparably 2025)
The data can be downloaded for your own exploration at https://myxavier-my.sharepoint.com/:x:/g/personal/fitzgeralde4_xavier_edu/ETJGTiYDXoZHsAc_VPQLTvIBi-RVFpE_MBMKdDL3Xp4yww?download=1.
Culture ratings and work-life balance
“Environment satisfaction” from the previous data set can be compared to Comparably’s “culture rating.” For employees that quit their job versus those that did not, satisfaction with workplace environment was lower on average.
# A tibble: 2 × 2
Attrition EnvironmentSatisfaction
<chr> <dbl>
1 No 2.77
2 Yes 2.46
If considering the top 10 work-life balance companies from Comparably’s 2024 awards, versus the lower side of the 90th-100th best work-life balance rated companies, a similar trend is yielded. Comparably uses a 5-point rating scale, while the previous data set uses a 4-point rating scale. After converting the 5-point ratings to the 4-point scale…
Top 10 Culture Rating Average 4pt scale:
3.864
Top 90-100 Culture Rating Average 4pt scale:
3.760
…results show that companies ranked higher in work life balance received higher average culture rating scores than those ranked lower.
Considering that these are the top 100 large companies in work-life balance overall, it is unsurprising that both culture ratings are higher that the averages from the previous data set; the companies in Comparably’s top 100 are there for a reason, they offer employees high levels of workplace culture that are positively correlated to better work-life balance. According to Comparably’s methodology: “For fairness and statistical significance, additional weight was given to companies with more employee participation. The final data set was compiled from 15 million ratings across 70,000 U.S. companies” (Comparably, 2025). Out of so many companies and so many employee ratings, the top 100 are likely to have significantly higher average ratings than the previous data set’s small sample size of 1,470.
Regardless of the difference in samples, the relationship between work-life balance and workplace culture is clear from both data sets. Consider work-life balance and culture rankings, along with the previous visualization comparing the linear relationships of work-life balance and environment satisfaction for employees based on attrition.
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As work-life balance rank decreased, so did employee ratings of workplace culture, indicating a negative linear relationship.
For employees that did not quit their job, there was a positive linear relationship between work-life balance and environment satisfaction. For those that did, there was a negative linear relationship; as work-life balance increased, environment satisfaction decreased.
This data supports the hypothesis that work-life balance and workplace environment satisfaction go hand in hand in creating companies that employees stay at and rank highly.
Consider some of the other variables affecting employee retention and workplace ratings that were explored previously, using the Comparably data.
CEO ratings and work-life balance rank
As considered in the analysis of employee attrition as it relates to time spent with a manager, strong leadership is essential for creating a workplace environment that employees enjoy. This data echoes this concept, as the general trend in CEO ratings decreases as work life balance rating decreases.
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Positive reviews and work-life balance rank
Comparably calculates the percentage of positive reviews that employees leave for the company they are rating. As work-life balance rank decreases, as does the percentage of employee reviews for their company that are positive, indicating better work-life balance is correlated to a more positive opinion of the company. If an employee quits their job, they aren’t likely to be leaving a positive review of the company.
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