Based on a true story, names changed for confidentiality.
Jane: Hey boss - I’m leaving the organization and have found an excellent opportunity I just can't pass up. I wasn't looking for work, but it kind of fell upon me.
Leader: I’m sorry to hear this – you are one of our top performers. What did they offer you that we didn’t?
Jane: They offered a great comp plan and opportunities for growth.
Leader: Upset about Jane leaving, but also overwhelmed at the amount of work on his desk, he says "I need to get going, but this is important to me, so let me check with HR to see if we can’t beat their offer".
Is Jane actually leaving for more money?
Let’s give some consideration to Jane’s employee experience…
Jane has been with the company 10 years and was actually quite happy with her income and really loved her job.
Until…
The newest hire, John, came in a few months back and was paid 20% more than Jane, and clearly had less experience.
John's salary was common knowledge on the team – everyone talks about what they make. Hired during Covid, it was hard to find good people, so the organization had no choice but to pay more to get John to come on board. Inspired by John’s income, Jane spoke to her leader to see if she could get a raise. The leader noted it wasn’t the time of year to ask for an increase and that they’d try to take care of Jane come the annual performance review. Jane knew that the organization caps increases at 5%, certainly nowhere near where John was at.
Little did Jane know that the organization was in the process of adapting their pay ranges to remedy these types of problems - specifically with those identified as high performers.
Jane begins applying for more senior roles within the organization (that she is well qualified for) in hopes of advancing her career and her salary but is overlooked and she is certain it is because her boss is holding her back since she is instrumental to the team. Without feedback from her interviews, this seemed to be the most likely reason.
Feeling particularly dejected, Jane sees an email from a recruiter asking if she is interested in a position they have available. She thinks “what do I have to lose?”. The recruiter does an excellent job making Jane feel valued and wanted – offering her even more than what John is making and digging into what she wants for her future. Jane feels seen, valued and excited for the first time in months. She feels sad to leave her organization and her friends, but it’s a no brainer. Her leader will not be successful in retaining Jane, even by offering her slightly more than the new organization. The Leader is scratching their head and is perplexed as to why Jane isn't staying. Hint: It’s not about the money.
Notice there are an extraordinary number of nuances to this story; and after doing hundreds of employee interviews and observing how cultures operate, I can say this is more common than not. You could say this was just a bad leader. Had the leader been doing a good job with their 1:1 meetings and seeking regular feedback from Jane and not just getting project updates from her, this wouldn’t have come as a surprise, and they may have been able to come up with tactics and strategies to make Jane feel valued, and keep her motivated. Had the leader understood the ‘real’ problem, how it surfaced, and how it made Jane feel, they could have prevented this loss. While this is true, most leaders don't have this depth of ability, nor do they have ninja-like interviewing skills. Especially because this leader was a technical leader - teaching them all these EQ-based skills will take time, and even with that it may not come naturally to them. Coaching this leader will be important as Jane is the 3rd employee to leave this team in the last year. But based on the exit interviews being done by HR, the organization thinks everyone is leaving because they are underpaying their staff and they are very focused on a very expensive comp policy figuring it is going to fix the issue and this leader will get no coaching. Also, worth noting that Jane has nothing against John and in fact, over the last few months has realized that he is great at his job and really fun to talk to. She now considers him a close friend and plans to keep him in mind when a new opportunity arises at her new organization. She tells him this over one of their weekly zoom calls which she intends to keep doing even when she leaves. John feels valued and hopes to work with Jane again in the future. He thinks it’d be cool to meet her some day. In the Exit interview, the HR generalist (who is running late for this 30-minute call due to a mountain of work on his plate), wasn't able to get all these details from Jane. He himself is slightly disengaged. One of his colleagues is on stress leave and he has had to pick up the slack in their absence and is feeling burned out. His leader knows this, so recently put a shout out on their Teams Channel to thank him for the extra effort.
The generalist finally starts the call with Jane, and after another 5 minutes fighting with the technology to get it to work, he asks Jane his routine set of structured questions and upon completing the interview lists the reason for Jane leaving as compensation, further validating HR is on the right track by improving compensation practices. The devil, my friends, is in the details, in the nuances.
There’s a LOT happening here. Isn’t that true of most organizations? How often is it that an organization scrambles to keep a high performing employee who has turned in their notice? It is imperative to understand that at this stage, the employee most likely made the decision to leave weeks, if not months ago, likely dropping their level of effort – it is the worst time to try to entice them to stay, and truthfully, at this point – you don’t want them to.
Mentally, the employee has already left the organization and they are actively disengaged, possibly impacting their colleagues. Bringing them back to a motivated state isn’t impossible, but based on the culture observed in this organization, it is highly unlikely. One of the best tools an organization can use to care for its people is the Stay interview - done by an experienced 3rd party with a track record for putting people at ease, and asking just the right questions - can be the difference it takes to address problems like Jane's effectively.
If the organization had all the details listed in the background above, do you think they could have figured out a way to retain Jane and keep her motivated? What about John - would him leaving even be a consideration? With all this collective information, would they have perhaps identified a wide number of other organizational challenges? A good Stay interview proactively provides employees with an opportunity to provide open and honest feedback about what they like, and don’t like, about their job and/or the organization, and provide examples and anecdotal stories to reflect why they believe what they do. Done well, they provide organizations with valuable nuggets of information and the nuances they need to inform programs, culture, processes or to address other very specific issues before the employee starts thinking it may be time to leave.
Done well, they can unravel all kinds of clues to bigger organizational issues. When you have the right qualitative and quantitative data, you have what you need to make strong decisions that have big impact on ROI.
The cost to lose your people – either in motivation or attrition, can be addressed. Let Stay Services help you stop the bleeding.
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