The Real Reasons Employees Quit — and How to Retain Them

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard. When you’re a manager and a valuable team member quits, it can sometimes feel like a personal failure. What did you do wrong? What did you miss? There might also be factors beyond your control that sent the person packing, problematic corporate culture, limited promotion opportunities, better pay elsewhere, or changing family circumstances. Even for HR or C-suite leaders with a broad view of the organization, it can be hard to understand patterns of attrition and figure out better ways to retain people, but our guests today have new research that can help.

Over 15 years, they studied more than 1,000 job switchers from a variety of industries and career stages, and they’re here to talk about what drives employees to leave and how employers can get more of them to stay.

I’m joined by Ethan Bernstein, professor at Harvard Business School, and Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute and lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Together, they wrote the HBR article, Why Employees Quit, and the book Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career. Ethan, Michael, thanks so much for being with me.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Thank you, Alison. It’s great to be here with you.

MICHAEL HORN: Likewise, thrilled to be here.

ALISON BEARD: When you started this research, were there some stereotypes about why people quit that you were thinking you might prove or disprove?

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: We approached this research much to the way our mentor, Clay Christensen, approached innovation. So, we actually thought about people like new products and Clay taught us once upon a time that people developing new products had theories in their mind about what it was that people wanted. They’d use segmentation to prove there was a white space and then create a product for that white space only to discover that no one wanted to actually purchase that product. Instead, he said, “We should think about people’s jobs to be done, why people hired a product and try to create new products for that job.”

MICHAEL HORN: Yeah. So, we took those insights and really just blank slate. We didn’t actually have any opinions going in. We just wanted to understand why do people decide, “Hey, today’s the day I’m going to switch my job and choose something else”? So we literally did interviews with these individuals recreating the story of how they made the switch and then coding it to really understand, “What were the pushes and pulls that caused them to make these changes and where were the common patterns in all of these thousands of individuals we followed?”

ALISON BEARD: What are the stakes here? Because obviously, some turnover is natural. When does attrition become a real pain point for teams and organizations?

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: I’ve never thought the goal is to retain every person. No manager approaches it that way. Instead, it’s to understand the path that someone’s on, try to figure out how that path does or doesn’t figure in with what the team, the manager, the organization needs. And when there can be a match, maintain that match because then the individual can get what he or she needs and the organization can get what it needs.

When the path has a dead end, the best thing you can do as a manager is know that and then you can work admirably and equally with the person to figure out how they can go and do something else and maybe even boomerang back. In which case the organization might not be the hero, but the manager can be. In either case, the more you know, the better.

MICHAEL HORN: We do know that organizations, managers are expressing a lot of frustration around finding the right person for the roles that they need to make progress on their side of the equation. We also know equally so that individuals are not particularly satisfied right now in the job market. They’re struggling to find the right fit. They’re quitting at paces we haven’t seen historically, even after the Great Resignation, and often reporting that wherever they land actually didn’t promise them more progress than they had previously. So, there’s a lot of stress on both sides of the equation right now.

ALISON BEARD: And what are managers and organizations getting wrong now when it comes to retention? What strategies are they trying that aren’t working?

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: We are 25 years since McKinsey coined the phrase war for talent. They weren’t the first ones to say it, but they were the first ones to grab executives attention about it all around the world. Their principles for how you retain talent to some extent remain people’s user manual for how to do this well. Unfortunately, we are now in a world as the pandemic showed us in which preferences matter more sometimes than a couple of extra dollars.

Even if dollars are the fungible good that people could conceivably use to solve their own problems, it’s not necessarily working anymore. So, organizations need to understand and managers are trying to understand what it is that these preferences mean for individuals and then for the team and then for the organization. That’s a real challenge.

MICHAEL HORN: A lot of organizations, their response has been what we would call very supply-side oriented. They look at the tools that they have in front of them. We can give you a raise. We can give you a better title. We can march you up the organization’s progression or career ladder. The reality is that’s not necessarily aligning to the fundamental root causes of what’s causing those individuals to leave. Now, to be fair, individuals are often making the same mistakes. They think a few extra dollars, a better title might somehow get them to feel like, “Oh, now I’m in the right place” and it never does. These are symptoms, if you will, as opposed to root causes. I think that’s what managers are struggling with right now.

ALISON BEARD: I know that many organizations use exit interviews to figure out why people are quitting. Why aren’t those working?

MICHAEL HORN: I think part of the reason is that it’s too late at that point, as in we want to see interviews occur on the front end, so that you actually understand, “Why did someone choose to hire this job? Why did they come to you?” And then with that context, when we do the exit interview, we can have a much deeper understanding of what are the actual forces causing you to say, “Now is the time where we want to leave.” But ideally, you’re having these interviews and conversations much more transparently throughout the employment.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Not only is it not the right time, it’s too late. Incentives aren’t aligned. We all want to be nice to people when we’re on the way out because we want to maintain relationships. Then on top of that, the same thing that’s hard about answering a question, “Why are you leaving?” is hard about answering a question, “Why are you joining?” People don’t have the language necessarily to explain why it is that they’re making that decision, and that’s not an organizational problem. It’s not a manager problem. It’s not an individual employee problem. It’s all of our problem. What we’ve tried to do here in our research is provide a list of pushes and pulls that provide some degree of menu from which you can choose which ones of these might be at play.

ALISON BEARD: Okay, so let’s dig into those push and pull patterns. What were some of the biggest ones that stood out in the research?

MICHAEL HORN: There were so many – just to lay the ground. There were 30 total pushes and pulls. But you have things like when the way my manager is treating me is wearing me down, so things that are causing you to create friction. Those are the pushes of the situation. When I can’t see a future for myself in this organization, for example, when the day-to-day grind is just wearing me down as well, or frankly, the way I’m able to do my work, things outside of the current job maybe with my life have gotten to a point a personal milestone, things like that that are causing me to say, “Today’s the day I’ve got to move on.”

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: And then the pulls oftentimes mirror those on an opportunity side, and yet they mirror them in a slightly different way. They mirror them in the way of, “Oh, I can imagine myself being respected or appreciated or having the right capabilities drawn upon or energizing me in a different way in the new role, rather to the old one.” Also, we’re talking about company-based changes. There are also personal-based changes that cause these pushes and pulls to come to play. Could be that I, for whatever reason now, no longer want to spend 25 minutes commuting to work through traffic at 9:00 AM on the highway? That could become a push, also could become a pull if someone’s offered me an opportunity to do what I do virtually.

MICHAEL HORN: And no push or no pull is dominant in and of itself. What actually happens that’s I think more interesting is how the pushes and pulls tend to cluster with each other in certain patterns that allowed us to abstract up one level into what we called quests for progress around why people changed.

ALISON BEARD: Okay, so let’s talk about those four quests. Could you just walk me through each of them?

MICHAEL HORN: Yeah, you bet. So, the first one is what we call the get out quest. So, this is where you’re at a dead end, the way manager’s working with you wearing you down, something like that. It’s just I have to get out of here as soon as possible. We call it the leap before you look often quest.

The second quest we found is what we call regain control. So, I like a lot of what I’m doing in my job, how my capabilities are being used, but the way my time is being used, the way the things that motivate and energize me, it’s just out of whack in some ways. Maybe I need more time in how I do work from home or something like that or work-life balance or frankly, I don’t want to be micromanaged as I’m doing my job. Things of that nature, I’ve got to regain control of how I do my work.

The third one we found is what we call regain alignment. These are people who say, “I have control over the time and things of that nature, but it’s really out of whack in terms of how my capabilities are being used. I’m not being appreciated for what I bring to the table or they’re using things that I don’t want to be known for, for example.

Then the fourth quest we found is what we call the next step. It’s time for me to take this next step in my career because of a personal career milestone or something in my life saying now is the right time. Something like that is causing me to say it’s now time.

This often aligns to what I think organizations think about when they say, “Okay, time to move up the career ladder,” but not always. One person, for example, in our data set, he was an attorney at a big corporate law firm. I think the expectation was, okay, you’re going to go on and become a partner. When he had his third kid and went on paternity leave, he was like, “Okay, now it’s time to practice public interest law and jump to a very, very different career,” because that was his career plan all along in his head. Make some money, have your family, and then do the work that he felt called to do, and that was the next step for him.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: One of the things that we found when we studied this through the Great Resignation or the so-called Great Resignation, the world is designed for take the next steppers. When you suddenly discover you’re not a take the next stepper, the world gets much harder.

ALISON BEARD: So understanding these four quests, is there anything that bosses should be looking for to diagnose whether someone is trying to regain alignment or regain control or take the next step or get out?

MICHAEL HORN: One of the biggest things we say is in the beginning when someone switches jobs and comes in, interview them. We have a protocol in the book for how you interview them about why they just left their current job and why they hired your job. So, we have an assessment. It’s available for free at jobmoves.com and you can literally use that to understand what exactly were the dominant pushes and pulls that caused someone to make this switch. Now, once we have those pushes and pulls, we know what brought you to this job. We can actually start tracking that over time and say, “Are we making a mistake? Are we pushing you back in the very same circumstance that caused you to come here in the first place by accident?”

Because we actually still value the growth and capabilities and potential and energy and fit that you bring to this organization and you can really track that over time.

Ethan taught me many things in writing this book, but one of the biggest things I will say is this importance of asking the question right away when someone starts with you. What do you want to do next after this role? It’s an uncomfortable question to ask at the beginning sometimes, but as Ethan correctly points out, no one stays in any role for eternity. The quicker we can ask that question and then be monitoring together in transparent conversations, I think the better for both sides of the equation.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Progression is an organizational tool. Progress is a managerial one. Now that we’re in a world in which most people are looking for a different progress than progression, these are not the take next steppers. These are the other three quests. It has to be a conversation. The conversation is the tool. The language we’re providing we hope will be the means for a better conversation and that conversation should happen as often as it can. People are going to make progress by moving. The better they can move, the better off they will be. The more we can help them do so, the better off we will be. That’s the managerial dilemma and option going forward.

ALISON BEARD: Okay, so entrance interviews as a part of the onboarding process is one of the potential solutions at manager’s disposal. You also talk about developing shadow job descriptions. What do you mean by that?

MICHAEL HORN: So this is one of my favorites because if you look at your average job description today out on any of the online job boards or LinkedIn or wherever you might peruse job listings, you’ll see that they’re incredibly long lists of all these skills and credentials and pedigree and things that you could possibly imagine someone would want to be able to have for this role. Really, as we studied the history of job descriptions and how they got their start, they’ve really evolved to be legal documents, documents to protect employers on the hiring and firing decisions, but they’re not actually really marketing tools so that someone really understands what they’ll be doing in the role or frankly that the manager really understands what exactly is the day-to-day and week-to-week work that I need a successful employee in this role doing so that we can be successful on our team. So, our advice is to create these shadow job descriptions saying, “Okay, what are the actual things that you will be doing, the experiences that you’ll be having in this job on that day-to-day, week-to-week experience?”, plain English, not critical thinking, which means something to researchers often, but it’s vacuous and vague in the context of jobs. And really get granular about that. So, the employee can understand, “Hey, is this something that I’ve done that I know I can do and is something that energizes me?” And the manager knows for performance evaluation and measuring and helping people grow that this actually is a good fit on both sides.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: We’ve so fallen into two traps that we should have avoided if we learned our lessons from people who develop new products. The first is it’s not about what you’re going to be, it’s what you’re going to do.

The second trap, we’ve fallen into the view that more is better. More is not better. Better fit is better. People who’ve discovered that on the job market discover that by understanding that when they can present their strengths and their capabilities in a way that fits the job, they’re actually one of one or maybe one of five candidates as opposed to one of 200. The organization has discovered that because they discovered that if they actually find the person who’s best for that crazy job description Michael just described, they don’t actually tend to be great in the role or they leave too quickly. It’s not about more. It’s about better. It’s about fit.

ALISON BEARD: How should individual managers involve HR or even higher level, maybe even C-suite corporate leaders in terms of thinking about overall strategy for dealing with retention and then also these individual cases?

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: There’s a dynamic I’ve seen in many organizations, not all, but many organizations in which managers are frustrated that HR doesn’t give them the tools they need in order to retain the people they need to retain. HR is frustrated with managers who don’t spend enough time trying to retain the employees that HR thinks should be retained. And we have two different toolkits that somehow aren’t working across the divide of manager to HR.

We think we’ve developed a new toolkit or maybe it’s a blended toolkit of language and protocols, nine activities, nine steps that both will agree fit their current toolbox and is actually doable within the time that managers are already spending with their people. For us, we see this as a true collaboration between HR and the manager.

ALISON BEARD: What are these nine activities or nine steps?

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: The first step is the interview, understanding what it is that is at work, the forces that are pushing people away and pulling people towards a new thing. The second and third are trying to unpack that, understanding the energy drivers and drains and the capabilities people want to use at their job. So, it’s the how and the what that inform those pushes and pulls. With that information, the fourth then is to try and distill the quest. What is the quest at work and how do we try to understand ourselves? Are we actually taking the next step? Are we trying to get out? Are we just trying to regain control on how things are done?

After we’ve done that, we try to solve the quintessential problem that plagues every person who gets asked the question, “Well, what do you want to do?” It’s really hard to answer that question. So, instead we say, “Don’t answer once. Create three to five prototypes,” different options because contrast creates meaning. After you’ve done that, you can investigate them further. That’s step six. Step seven, use those options and your priorities to start distilling that down into say, learning before doing rather than learning by doing.

MICHAEL HORN: And once we’ve learned before doing so, you haven’t made the mistake of switched and then say, “Oh, my God. This isn’t the right role.” We’ve brought it down to one very tightly defined prototype and we can start now going out into the job market and actually looking for it. Then the last two steps of the process are to say, “Okay, here’s how you tell your story.” It’s clues from Pixar. The best storytellers in the world, they have a process for how you tell a story. We teach that so that you can do it in 30 seconds to a minute, that classic elevator pitch of “Why me?”

And then step nine to wrap it up is, “How do you build what we call your personal cheat sheet?” But it is really just a variation off the personal user guides that have become popular around understanding what makes me tick at work and how to get the most out of me. It’s not something you have to share, but if you’re in a group that is willing to view everyone’s, gosh, it makes a really cool team because everyone understands how best to engage other team members and really create a great dynamic.

ALISON BEARD: So managers should be working to help their employees work through these nine steps?

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: I can hear the surprise in your voice. Wait, you’re saying managers should help people move? Well, there’s two answers to that. The first is perhaps the answer is yes. If we just accept the fact that people really are going to move on average every four years, part of a manager’s job might be to try and help that move be internal rather than external.

But the second is our stories suggest, our interviews suggest that that can solve so many problems that plague us in this organization-individual relationship. So, take another story, Alex.

Alex was informed that he would have to move because through a series of acquisitions and other changes in the organization, they were changing the headquarters’ location and he was senior enough that he would have to go for the job he had. He’d set up a life and he wasn’t going to leave it. In fact, even if he were willing to, his family wasn’t willing to give up the close location they had to the schools that the kids were in, to the parents that were nearby, to all the reasons why they’d set up their life there. He’d been at this organization for 20+ years. He wanted to stay, but he just couldn’t. So, he gave his notice and they gave him a nice path with which to think about what he would do next. He talked to one of us.

MICHAEL HORN: Yeah. From there, once we helped him go through the process, so this is us at this point, not his manager, but what comes out the other side is as he shares his Pixar story for what he wants to do next, understanding this arc of how he sees his career and what progress is for him, his manager calls a timeout and says, “Wait a second. If that’s what you want to do, we’ll create the role here for you. You could stay remote. You don’t actually have to move. Let us move headquarters. We’ve actually wanted someone to do that, but we didn’t know how to create the job description for it, but it’s a real need inside of our company.” So they created the role.

There’s Alex getting the best of all worlds. He doesn’t have to leave the company that he loves. He doesn’t have to leave the town that he loves. And he’s getting to do the work that he wants, but what a win for the manager and for the company. They didn’t even know how to ask the question of getting the right skill sets in the door before he brought it to them on a plate.

ALISON BEARD: But if you’re trying to do this for every employee, doesn’t it get really complicated and doesn’t it leave you with some unmet needs?

MICHAEL HORN: This is where I thought you were going on the first question. Wow. It sounds like a lot of stuff, right?

ALISON BEARD: Yeah.

MICHAEL HORN: I think the way I would think about it is let’s simplify it down a little bit. For the manager, what you’re really trying to do constantly, maybe it’s a quarterly conversation in your one-on-ones is understand where are you on this progress timeframe, right? You came here for this set of reasons, these were the pushes, these were the pulls. How are these playing in your life? You can almost short-circuit a bunch of these steps because you’re constantly asking and checking in on these energy drains and drivers and what are the capabilities you want to be developing?

So we’re basically giving a set of tools that integrates the process in these quarterly conversations, these performance management check-ins and so forth, really to embed them as opposed to make it extra work.

Decades ago, Peter Drucker made the observation that often we hire people because they’re okay on every dimension, but they’re not excellent on the one that we really need. I think part of this is find someone who’s excellent on the thing you want, and if you understand their notions of progress and how they fit in with the team, let’s find the other people who are excellent and build out a great team around them. We can be having much more nuanced conversations around capabilities, energy drivers, and how it all fits together.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: I thought at one point that people were going to complain that it was too much. By and large, the startup costs, they’re significant, but as soon as you have the substrate upon which to build, it’s not that much work and there’s so much more valuable information that comes out of it. Once they get past that initial bump, this tends to actually be no more work and sometimes less work than going out to find a new employee when you really actually could have kept the person who was already in the role.

MICHAEL HORN: You’re doing a lot of these conversations and management and checking in with performance management systems that integrate to human resource information systems and tracking all this stuff anyway. Let’s just actually simplify this and make sure the questions are around the things that are actually driving behavior.

ALISON BEARD: I would say though, one of the funniest quotes in the article was from the manager who said, “I’m just really tired of these young kids coming in and wanting to be massaged like Wagyu beef.” So how do you help managers get over that hump of, “Wow, I’m having to put a lot into making this job work for the person when what I really want is the person to work for me and the organization”?

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: So for the manager who’s asking that question, here is my ask, turn to the employee who’s asking for the dream job and remind them that our book is not about getting them the dream job. It’s about helping them make trade-offs. So that the zigging and zagging that takes you on a path towards what you’re hoping to achieve someday helps you make progress.

The people who are asking for more, when you really understand what they’re asking for, they’re not asking for big things more often than not. They’re asking for small ones, and for us as managers, it feels like death by a thousand cuts, but that is a generational difference. The ability to have more frequent conversations and deliver just a little bit along the way in a more complex world in which careers are more challenging in many respects and in a world in which capabilities depreciate faster; just staying relevant is harder thing today than it was 20 years ago.

The more frequent conversations probably makes sense, and HR agrees with that too. We’ve been talking about touch points rather than annual performance reviews for a long time. Again, we think that much of what we’re saying is integrated from other parts of organizational life today, not something that is brand new. What’s new is the data that we can offer and the language we can offer around how to think about making those conversations more productive.

ALISON BEARD: What advice do you have for managers who might be worrying that one of their employees is on a particular quest and they need to make sure that they don’t quit, that they stay?

MICHAEL HORN: I would say remember that roles are more malleable often than we think that they are. So, understand what’s really driving this person that you’re nervous about to be looking actively perhaps for that next thing and understand, is this really about how their time is used or is this really about the capabilities or is it both? What are your levers within that that really directly respond to the root causes where you can say, “Gee, if that’s what you want to do, how do we give you a little bit more of that, but not give up the things that are important for the organization in the process?”

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Understanding is the first step. The ask is likely not as big as you think it is. It’s probably therefore not as hard to deliver as you think it might be. There’s probably more overlap between what you can do, therefore, and what the person needs than you might fear.

ALISON BEARD: Okay, and then what advice would you give to individuals out there who are thinking about quitting?

MICHAEL HORN: I would say, A, the grass is not always greener, and that starts with understanding what’s really driving you to quit and how do I understand before I make that huge move of switching jobs, tendering my resignation, what’s actually driving me and what “better” would look like. Sometimes people in thinking about the trade-offs that they will have to make to get progress, they realize actually right where they are is where they should be.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: If the progress you’re seeking to make doesn’t meet the progression you’re being offered, then it’s up to you to understand what that progress really is. We provided a social process for getting there. It’s social because you do that with people, other people who know you well. It’s all about generating and testing and prototyping until you find something that makes sense given your particular experiences, your particular pushes and pulls, your particular quest and so on. No bit of advice is good for everyone. So, make it social, make it informed, and take the time.

ALISON BEARD: Well, thank you so much. I hope this stops more people from quitting and helps managers retain more people and everyone find the right fit. Ethan and Michael, thank you so much for being here.

ETHAN BERNSTEIN: Thank you, Alison.

MICHAEL HORN: Thanks so much for having us.

ALISON BEARD: That was Ethan Bernstein, Harvard Business School professor, and Michael Horn, who co-founded Clayton Christensen Institute and is currently a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. They’re also coauthors of the HBR article, Why Employees Quit, and the book, Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career.

We have more episodes and more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at hbr.org/podcasts or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Thanks to our team, Senior Producer Mary Dooe, Associate Producer Hannah Bates, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox, and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhardt. Thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.