How to get people to resign

如何让员工主动辞职

Without torching the organisation or losing your best employees

而不破坏组织或流失优秀人才

Thegut reaction that a manager has when an employee announces their resignation is telling. Sometimes it is genuine dismay: the person leaving is a star. Sometimes disappointment is mixed with irritation at having to recruit and train a replacement. And sometimes it is relief: the HR equivalent of a pebble being removed from your shoe.

当员工提出辞职时，管理者的本能反应往往耐人寻味。有时是真情流露的沮丧：离开者是明星员工。有时在失望中夹杂着恼怒：又要重新招聘和培训替代者。有时则是如释重负：仿佛人力资源部门终于从鞋里取出了一粒石子。

For Elon Musk and his acolytes at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), employees of the federal government in America are pebbles all the way down. On January 28th the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent an email to roughly 2m workers offering them “deferred resignation”, the chance to resign and get paid until the end of September. 

对于埃隆·马斯克及其"政府效率部"（DOGE）的信徒而言，美国联邦政府的雇员就像层层堆积的鞋中砾石。1月28日，美国人事管理局（OPM）向约200万名公务员发送邮件，提供"延迟辞职"机会——即刻辞职仍可领薪至9月底。

The legality of this offer is uncertain (on February 12th a judge allowed it to proceed). So is the end-goal: bosses often use voluntary redundancy as a consensual way to cut headcount but the assumption is usually that they want the organisation itself to survive. Still, the episode raises an interesting question: is there a good way to get workers to resign?

该提议的合法性尚存疑（2月12日，法官允许其推进），最终目标也令人困惑：企业通常用自愿离职补偿作为削减编制的共识方案，但前提是组织本身需要存续。不过此事引出一个有趣问题：是否存在让员工主动辞职的理想方式？

The openness of the OPM’s deferred-resignation offer is in its favour. Bosses have long adopted underhand tactics to encourage individuals to quit rather than have to sack them. Some types of “quiet firing” reduce stimulation and status: managers give their targets menial work to do or stick them in smaller and smaller offices until they end up feeling like a corporate version of Alice. 

人事管理局方案的开放性值得肯定。管理者长期使用暗箱手段迫使员工主动离职以避免解雇纠纷。某些"隐性裁员"通过剥夺激励与地位实现：给目标员工安排打杂工作，或将他们塞进越来越小的办公室，使其产生爱丽丝梦游公司版的压抑感。

Other approaches set people up for failure: deadlines that cannot be met, weekly meetings at 3am to suit one colleague in Australia. Nudging people to resign by making life intolerable will not win you a manager-of-the-year award. Nor is it an efficient way to thin the ranks.

还有些手段则预设失败：设置无法完成的截止期限，为配合澳洲同事召开凌晨三点的周会。通过制造痛苦逼人辞职绝非"年度最佳管理者"的明智之选，也非精简团队的有效途径。

Giving employees an explicit incentive to leave their jobs can be an effective way to separate the committed from the time-servers. Zappos and Amazon, two online retailers, have experimented with pay-to-quit programmes designed to winkle out new hires who are not motivated to stay. 

明确的经济激励能有效筛选出混日子的员工。线上零售商Zappos和亚马逊曾试验"付费离职"计划，剔除缺乏动力的新员工。

When Mr Musk took over Twitter in 2022, he sent an email with the same subject-line as the OPM’s missive, asking people to click on a link if they were ready to embrace his “hardcore” culture. Those that did not click were offered severance pay, though lawsuits continue from those who say they did not receive the money.

马斯克2022年收购推特时发送过类似人事管理局的邮件，要求员工点击链接表明接受"硬核"文化，未点击者被提供遣散费（但诉讼显示部分人声称未收到款项）。

A pay-to-quit scheme makes it more costly for workers to feign enthusiasm for a job. But, as a paper by Robert Dur and Heiner Schmittdiel of Erasmus University Rotterdam points out, it can have unintended consequences if it is a standing offer: people may end up joining a firm in order to resign and get an exit bonus.

付费离职计划增加了员工伪装工作热情的成本。但鹿特丹伊拉斯姆斯大学的罗伯特·杜尔和海纳·施密特迪尔指出，若将其设为长期政策可能适得其反：有人可能专为领取离职奖金而入职。

There may be a subtler and cheaper way to prompt resignations among people who are not a good fit. In a recent study by Nava Ashraf and Oriana Bandiera of the London School of Economics and Virginia Minni and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago, some employees of a consumer-goods firm were asked to reflect on what mattered to them and whether their jobs fulfilled their individual sense of purpose. In the months following these workshops exits from the company increased substantially among participants, compared with employees who did not take part, and did so particularly among lower performers. Productivity rose.

对于人岗不匹配者，存在更巧妙经济的促离职方式。伦敦政经学院纳瓦·阿什拉夫、奥里安娜·班迪耶拉与芝加哥大学维吉尼亚·米尼、路易吉·津加莱斯的联合研究发现：某消费品公司让部分员工反思工作与个人价值目标的契合度后，参与者在随后数月离职率显著高于对照组，且低绩效者尤为明显——而公司整体生产率却得到提升。

The success of a resignation offer depends partly on what kind of future awaits people who stay. The OPM email warns government employees that there is more downsizing and restructuring to come. The people most likely to take the money in these circumstances are often strong performers, who have the best chance of landing a new job.

离职计划的成效部分取决于留任者面临的未来。人事管理局邮件警告公务员后续将有更多精简重组，这种情况下最可能接受补偿的往往是高绩效者——他们本就更容易找到新工作。

There is some indirect evidence for this effect in a recent paper by Yuye Ding of the University of Pittsburgh and her co-authors, which looks at the effect of return-to-office (RTO) mandates on employee churn. 

匹兹堡大学丁雨叶及其合作者近期关于"返岗令"（RTO）对员工流动影响的研究提供了佐证。

Plenty of people suspect that bosses require people to come back into the office partly in order to prompt resignations, and the evidence from the LinkedIn profiles of workers at financial and technology firms in the S&P 500 is that RTO mandates do cause turnover to spike. The authors also find that churn is greatest among women and among more experienced and skilled workers, and that firms subsequently have more trouble filling vacancies.

许多人怀疑企业强制返岗暗含促离职意图，标普500金融科技公司领英数据证实返岗令确实引发离职潮。研究还发现：女性、资深员工和技术人才流失最严重，且企业后续填补空缺难度加大。

Such considerations may not matter much to the DOGE folk, whose primary aim seems to be evisceration. But if you want to encourage resignations and end up with more wheat than chaff, it helps to have a compelling vision of the future.

这些考量对"政府效率部"或许无关紧要——他们的首要目标似乎是器官切除式裁员。但若您既希望员工主动辞职，又希望去芜存菁，关键在于为未来描绘令人信服的图景。

（红色标注词为重难点词汇）

重难点词汇：

irritation [ˌɪrɪˈteɪʃən] n. 恼怒；刺激

acolyte [ˈækəlaɪt] n. 助手；随从；侍僧

menial [ˈmiːniəl] adj. 单调乏味的；卑微的；琐碎的

nudge [nʌdʒ] n. 轻推；暗示 v. 轻推；推动

winkle out 巧妙获取；劝离；挖出

evisceration [ɪˌvɪsəˈreɪʃən] n. 去除内脏；彻底破坏；大幅削减