In your experience, what has the biggest impact on retention?

There's a book by Daniel Pink called Drive, which says that what motivates people at work is autonomy, mastery, and purpose. We want to give them enough autonomy so that they can work anywhere. We want them to focus on the business outcomes, and the things that they have to deliver—not having their butts in seats so we can observe them and see how they're working. That's a Taylorist or scientific management approach, and we don't want that.

The mastery portion is about enablement and empowerment, to make sure that they learn all the skills. Do they have the tools and the technologies necessary for them to be successful at their role? But the most important thing is purpose. Why are they present? Why are they relevant within the organization? How is the work that they're doing day in and day out actually improving the success of their organization?

And I would add a fourth one, which is recognition. We're all humans. We want to get that sense of pride—that serotonin, if you want to get chemical. You want to feel like someone's appreciating all the hard work that you're doing. You want to get awards to get that dopamine. And those are things that we, as leaders, have to keep thinking of.

Based on everything I've read and experienced, people generally leave their jobs because the relationship with their direct manager is not working out. So one of the things I've focused on a lot is how to maintain that healthy relationship between the direct manager and the employee? I went through this exercise a few times to determine what a retention package looks like for an employee, and it worked out really well. And it is the job of a manager and their employee to sit together and figure that out.

It often resulted in things that were not monetary-based. It was more about what annoys that person. It could be, "I want to pick up my kids from their school bus every day. That's important to me." Or, "Recognition is important to me." If I'm being recognized for the work I'm doing, if I'm getting flexibility, and you trust me, then I'm not going to go look for another job just because they're sending me more money.

When we applied that as a strategy, we had a big shift in our attrition, and we were able to retain talent, even when they were being offered more money elsewhere. So we applied it at the most granular level in terms of how to improve that employee-manager relationship so there's great trust, transparency, and accountability. If you have that, and you treat them like a fully-formed adult, you end up with a much better workforce that is much more engaged, regardless of where they were working from.