Executive Education Insights: David Allen, senior associate dean for community engagement and a professor of management and leadership in TCU Neeley Executive Education, outlines methods for keeping employees engaged and retaining talent.
February 03, 2026
By David Allen
Senior Associate Dean for Community Engagement
Luther A. Henderson University Chair in Leadership
You have heard the terms: the great resignation, quiet quitting, lying flat, QuitTok and quiet cracking. What is going on? The reality is that employee turnover is often cyclical. However, good leaders know that retaining their most valued talent is always important.
Is it just about pay? Absolutely not. Although compensation matters, there are a myriad of reasons people leave and (fortunately) a lot that leaders can do about it.
Turnover drivers can be usefully categorized into five groups:
- Push: These are the traditional things people think of: stressful work, bad bosses, lack of growth opportunities, and, yes, sometimes low pay.
- Pull: Sometimes the market speaks by presenting great opportunities to your best people. You may also be faced with turnover contagion. One person leaves, triggering a snowball effect.
- Shocks: Research shows quitting is often initiated by an event that jars people to rethink their job. These shocks can be good or bad, such as being passed over for a promotion or winning the lottery.
- Scripts: Some people have if-then scenarios in place, for example: I will quit when I earn that degree, when I or my partner gets pregnant, when my vesting kicks in.
- Stay: The reasons people stay are not always merely the inverse of why they leave. Employees become embedded in their workplace based on connections with others, fit with the environment and sacrifices that would occur if they left.
What to do?
Conducting a yearly engagement survey or exit interviews once people are already out the door is unlikely to dramatically improve retention.
Identify where to target retention efforts:
- High performers in roles that directly contribute to organizational success
- Individuals in particularly difficult to replace jobs
- People who are central in communication and mentoring networks
- Locations with particularly high turnover
- Jobs with excessive churn
Collect data on why your key employees leave and stay:
- More frequent pulse surveys: Shorter, more frequent surveys are more effective than annual ones. Employee listening systems provide close to real-time data on the employee experience.
- Link systems: Data from other sources can provide important insights. For example, employment data can let you know who is overdue for a change or who has a work anniversary coming. People often make big changes, like leaving, around milestones. Performance data can identify where turnover is related to sales or other performance metrics. Unit-level data can identify whether particular supervisors or locations are driving turnover.
- Leverage passive data: Organizations collect all kinds of data that can inform retention, for example, email or Slack data on who is connected to whom, sentiment analysis of whether someone’s messages are changing in tone, meeting data on who might be getting overloaded, and system usage data that suggests declining engagement.
- Stay interviews: Why wait until your most valued employees have already decided to leave to find out what’s important? Stay interviews can help diagnose issues early and embed people in the organization.
Pilot test and then implement solutions:
- Hire for retention: In addition to focusing on job performance, there are markers such as biographical data, personality characteristics and job fit that can be used to hire those likely to be good performers and stay.
- Actively embed new employees: Helping new employees make connections, quickly master job tasks and understand how their work fits into the organization helps embed newcomers and reduces subsequent turnover.
- Develop flight risk models: Use data to develop models and heat maps that provide leaders forward-looking insights into the roles, locations and individuals most at risk for quitting.
- Hold leaders accountable: There is truth to the adage “people quit bosses.” Incorporating retention into manager performance metrics helps keep retention a priority.
- Prepare leaders: Holding leaders accountable and providing them flight risk data without training them on what to do with the information will not be effective. Provide leaders training and professional development opportunities in leadership, engagement, analytics and company philosophy on retaining talent.
What about AI?
AI is touching every aspect of work and the workplace. How is it affecting employee retention?
On one hand, rapid AI-driven changes can drive employees to exit. They may be insecure about their job prospects, have low trust in how the technology will affect them or be slow to adopt AI into their work. Leaders that integrate the human element into technology adoption will minimize these risks.
On the other hand, savvy leaders can use AI to improve retention efforts. From AI coaches that provide personalized real-time feedback and professional advice to AI-driven employee flight risk models that provide managers up-to-the-minute insights on who is most likely to leave, leaders who leverage AI appropriately will be ahead of the competition.
Read more about Allen’s insights in “Global Talent Retention” or in additional publications.
