Why People Leave, and Why People Stay: A Practical Guide to Retention Evidence

Turnover is an outcome, and the useful question is what is producing it

A turnover rate records how many people left an organization over a period of time, and it rarely explains why they left. An employer can know that 20 percent of employees left last year without knowing whether they left because of pay, scheduling, supervision, workload, advancement opportunities, workplace culture, communication, job expectations, transportation, childcare, or something else entirely. That's why we treat turnover as an outcome. The useful question is what is producing it, and the answer is usually specific to the organization, the role, and the people involved.

Pay belongs on that list, and it deserves an honest place there. In a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults who left a job by choice in 2021, 63 percent said low pay was a reason they quit. The same share named a lack of opportunities for advancement, and 57 percent said they had felt disrespected at work. Respondents could name more than one reason, and those percentages show that many did. If your pay is below what similar employers offer, that's a real cause and worth addressing directly. If your pay is competitive and good people still leave, the reasons are more likely to be found in the daily experience of the job, which Why do good employees keep leaving when we pay competitively? works through in detail.

The common response to turnover is to choose a fix: a raise, a wellness program, a recognition initiative, or another engagement survey. Each of those can be the right move, and each can miss. A retention program aimed at the wrong cause spends the budget and tells employees that leadership guessed instead of asking. Gallup reports that 52 percent of employees who left voluntarily said their manager or organization could have done something to prevent it. That figure describes what departing employees believed, and it still points to a large share of turnover that an employer may be able to address once it knows which part to address. Before organizations invest in solutions, they need to understand the problem they are actually trying to solve.

Finding out takes more than collecting data. Good workforce assessment runs a whole loop, and the rest of this guide walks through it in order.

• 1
  Find where turnover is happening.

  Separate the overall number by department, shift, facility, role, group, and stage of employment.

• 2
  Ask the right questions, in the right conditions.

  Hear from the people closest to the work, in a way that lets them answer candidly.

• 3
  Learn why people stay.

  Read what the organization does well as carefully as what is getting in the way.

• 4
  Decide what will change, and what can't.

  Give each change a responsible person, and explain the limits honestly.

• 5
  Tell employees what was learned.

  Let the people who answered see what their input led to.

• 6
  Follow up.

  Check whether the changes made a difference, and for whom.

Why people leave is best learned from the people closest to the work, asked in the right conditions

The people closest to the work can explain what turnover records can't, because the records show where and when people left while the reasons sit in their day-to-day experience of the job. Employees understand the realities of their own work. Supervisors see challenges that executives may not. People who stay can tell you what is working, and people who leave can identify friction points. Employees at different levels of an organization often experience the same policy in different ways, which is one reason an explanation that comes from leadership alone tends to be incomplete.

Hearing from them usually takes more than one method. Surveys, interviews, focus groups, existing records, and organizational metrics become much more useful when they are used together: a survey can show how widely an experience is shared, and an interview or focus group can explain what that experience is and why it matters to the people having it. The goal is to identify patterns that leaders can act on, which is a different task from collecting as many opinions as possible. How do I find out what my employees actually need? covers how to choose among those methods and how to tell whether survey questions are any good.

Exit interviews are a familiar starting point, and they have real limits. People on their way out are often polite, guarded, or past caring, so the reason they give may be the safe one rather than the whole one. Gallup found that 51 percent of employees who left said that in the three months before they left, neither their manager nor any other leader had spoken with them about their job satisfaction or their future with the organization. Asking current employees, while there's still time to respond to what they say, adds what an exit interview can't.

Checking whether a retention change helped closes the loop

Checking whether a retention change helped means comparing the outcome the change was meant to improve, for the people it was meant to reach, against where things stood before the change. A more useful question than whether employees liked the change is whether the change improved the outcomes the organization was trying to improve. Employees can appreciate a change that doesn't touch the original problem, and they can be lukewarm about one that does, so their reactions are part of the answer rather than all of it.

Turnover takes time to move, because people need time to stay or leave, so set the follow-up date when you make the change. You may not get a definitive answer, and you rarely need one. An organization can usually learn enough to decide whether to continue the change, adjust it, or try something different, and to tell employees what it found. A change that didn't help is still useful information, especially when it helped one group and not another, because that difference points to needs the organization has not yet understood.

How do we know whether the change we made actually helped? covers this step in detail, and How do I show our leadership team this work is worth continuing? covers reporting the result once you have it.

What retention evidence comes down to for any organization that employs people

Retention evidence comes down to treating turnover as an outcome and finding out what is producing it, group by group, from the records an organization already keeps and from the people closest to the work. It means learning what keeps good employees as carefully as what drives them away, deciding what will change and what can't, telling employees what was learned, and checking afterward whether the change made a difference.

None of those steps requires certainty at the start. They require a willingness to ask honestly, to hear things that may be uncomfortable, and to follow through on what was heard. An organization that does that becomes a better place to work for the people who stay, which is the purpose of retention work in the first place.

Employee feedback is only valuable if organizations are prepared to do something with it.