Around the six-week mark of a new job, a specific type of restlessness appears. The initial thrill has subsided. Checklists for onboarding have been completed. And a new hire starts to question whether they made a mistake by accepting the offer at all, somewhere between the third Zoom call of the morning and a Slack channel that never fully answers your questions.
Before the ninety-day mark, that silent doubt turns into a resignation letter for an increasing number of remote workers.
Employees who were onboarded remotely during the pandemic years were significantly more likely to quit within the first three years, even after later returning to the office, according to research tracking employee data at Ericsson that spanned nearly ten years from 2016 to 2025. HR departments have been reluctant to publicly state this finding. Between summer 2021 and summer 2023, the numbers sharply increased, most severely affecting those with fewer than five years of employment. This pattern implies that the harm wasn’t limited to a preference for working remotely. It was about something deeper, the sense of community that a laptop and a video call just cannot create.
People continue to work at jobs they don’t enjoy for a reason. Compared to what companies believe, it usually has less to do with salary. It’s the coworker who approaches and describes a procedure that was not documented. During the third week, you have lunch with the senior engineer, who advises you on which conflicts are worthwhile. Organizational attachment, which researchers refer to as the invisible thread tying an employee to a company’s culture and long-term goals, is developed through those insignificant, unremarkable moments. All of that was mostly overlooked when remote onboarding was conducted at scale and under pandemic pressure.
When companies completely switched to remote hiring, it’s still unclear if they realized what they were giving up. Many were acting out of necessity, and some did it quite successfully. However, the data that is now available presents a more nuanced picture. According to exit surveys from the Ericsson study, remote hires who eventually returned to the office continued to leave at a higher rate than those who were onboarded in person. Already, the detachment had established itself. They were halfway out the door by the time they took a seat at a real desk.
It’s not much more comforting to look at the bigger picture. Voluntary quit rates in the US hit all-time highs during the Great Resignation of 2021 and 2022. According to survey data from that time period, full-time return-to-office requirements caused about 6% of employees to quit completely, and another 36% were actively seeking employment. In a sense, people were re-sorting, looking for employers whose work schedules complemented their lifestyle choices. That makes sense. The opposite issue, which is less talked about, is when new hires join remote-first companies and find, weeks later, that the culture they were sold doesn’t actually exist when you’re working from a spare bedroom in a city where you don’t know your coworkers.
There is a perception that businesses have been viewing remote work as a hiring advantage without fully considering the costs associated with employee retention. Candidates were drawn to flexibility. However, flexibility without integration is merely better branding combined with isolation.
The companies that seem to be getting better—Ericsson’s eventual return to pre-pandemic retention rates is noteworthy here—did so by reconsidering what onboarding actually calls for. It is most important to bring in new employees when their more seasoned coworkers are also present. Mentorship is not mandated by law. It occurs on the periphery of a workday when someone decides to stop and assist a junior coworker after noticing that they appear perplexed.
It is rarely a hasty decision to quit within ninety days. By week three, the majority of those who quit that quickly realized something wasn’t right. They stayed in the hopes that things would get better and that they would be mistaken. It’s a very human instinct to wait it out. However, eventually the effort needed to stay outweighs the expense of leaving, which is when the resignation letters begin to come in.
