Peakon, the world’s leading employee retention platform, has released a groundbreaking workplace study titled The 9-Month Warning: Understanding Why People Quit—Before It’s Too Late. Based on more than 33 million employee survey responses across 125 countries, the study offers a detailed, first-of-its-kind glimpse into the exact factors that drive people to quit their jobs.

Key findings in The 9-Month Warning include:

• The first signs that an employee is considering quitting appear clearly in survey response data nine months before they actually depart, with declining loyalty as a key indicator.
• Key factors in driving a person to quit include unchallenging work, the inability to discuss pay and no clear path for career/personal growth.
• In most cases, people quit because of poor managers, not because of colleagues or company culture.

Organizations of all sizes integrate Peakon to conduct regular, employee-facing surveys to better understand their workforce, while empowering them to leverage data and insights to help teams reach their full potential. Today, Peakon analyzes more than 50,000 unique employee surveys each week, and more than 2.5 million data points each month.

Because of these ongoing surveys, many of which date back to 2015, Peakon is in a unique position to understand the full employee journey across geographies, industries, and generations. This report draws upon Peakon’s massive global dataset to illuminate the common factors that determine employees’ decisions to quit.

However, nine months before quitting, that sense of accomplishment starts to drop for employees. Further evidence suggests that they’re at greater risk of quitting when they feel they aren’t being sufficiently challenged.

Interestingly, it’s not the amount of work that’s the problem. At-risk employees find their workload manageable, virtually up until the day they leave.

“We’re at an exciting point in Peakon’s growth where we’ve hit critical mass of customers, which gives us a tremendous sample size and the ability to conduct in-depth research such as this,” said Kasper Hulthin, Chief Growth Officer and Co-Founder, Peakon. “Reducing attrition is a priority for most organizations. Understanding the drivers behind it, and predicting it in advance, is therefore incredibly valuable.”

The 9-Month Warning is the first report available at Heartbeat by Peakon, a new interactive website that provides data-driven insights into the world of work. In addition to dedicated studies on topics like attrition, visitors can use the True Benchmark® tool to compare the expected engagement scores of their own companies to others around the world.

“If you’re an executive, regardless of department, you’re constantly looking for ways to become more data-driven. Human Resources is no exception,” said Hulthin. “We’ve already seen the marketing department go from the gut instinct of ‘Mad Men’ to a much more scientific approach. Sales, operations and finance have all become data-first as well. Now, we’re applying analytics to HR in similar fashion, helping companies grow, adjust and evolve.”