The Real Reasons Employees Quit — and How to Retain Them
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Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast 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 send the person packing. Problematic corporate culture, limited promotion opportunities, better pay elsewhere.
or changing family circumstances. Even for HRSC 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 a thousand 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 Christian Institute, and lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Together, they wrote the HBR article, Why Employees Quit.
And the book Job Moves, Nine Steps for Making Progress in Your Career. Ethan, Michael, thanks so much for being with me. Thank you, Alison. It's great to be here with you. Likewise, thrilled to be here. When you started this research, were there some stereotypes about why people quit that you were thinking you might prove or disprove? We approached this research much 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.
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