The Secret to Retaining the Best Employees: Ask Them These Four Questions

by Ethan Bernstein and Michael B. Horn, Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2025

Today’s playbook for retaining high-performing employees is pretty straightforward: more money, a fancier title, better benefits and a greater sense of “purpose.”

The problem? It isn’t working.

Individuals change jobs more than ever before—every 3.9 years, on average, globally, with younger generations moving even more often.

Our research shows that their reasons for switching are more complex than the ones people consistently check off on surveys—such as better salaries and titles. After 15 years of studying more than 1,000 job changes, we’ve learned that employees leave when moved by a combination of 30 forces that push them away from the present and pull them toward something new.

Throwing more compensation and perks their way might keep them around a little longer, but it isn’t a lasting fix. Sometimes it can even be counterproductive and cause people to leave faster if they feel misunderstood or disrespected. Or it can give them fodder to negotiate better terms for their next job elsewhere.

What should you do instead as a manager? How can you learn which forces are acting on your employees—and which levers to pull to keep them from moving on?

Perhaps you’ve already tried explicitly asking what matters to them, and you’ve been met with awkward silences or abstract replies. That’s probably because people typically don’t know what, exactly, is driving them to switch jobs in their careers.

But our research suggests you can help your employees gain—and share—that insight by asking them smarter, sometimes uncomfortable questions during periodic check-ins. Here are the four that are most effective.

1. When was the last time you almost quit?
One chief financial officer we know asks her employees this question at their performance reviews.

After finishing their evaluation, she leads into the question by saying, “Let’s talk about me. What can I do differently? Is there anything I can do to make your job better or easier?”

Then she asks the question about almost quitting. The purpose behind it is less about pinpointing a specific incident than about getting people to think concretely about the underlying forces that may be pushing or pulling them toward something new.

You might object: I’m their manager! They won’t tell me the truth about that!
You may be right. They probably won’t unless you make it safe for them to voice concerns about their job, which is why the CFO pegs this part of the conversation to things she can improve—not necessarily about herself, but about the organization and the employee’s experience at work.

Two other steps can also help.

First, show that you will take employees’ concerns seriously—and that you won’t punish people for raising them. Taking action quickly to improve is important, even if the changes are minor. So is regularly checking in to see how people are doing.

Second, in our research, we found 14 forces that push people to quit their jobs and 16 forces that pull people toward something new. Presenting the full list to employees helps jog their memory and allows them to focus on a force or two rather than a specific incident or person, while also ensuring that their answer isn’t too vague or generalized.

Focusing on the objective list of forces also frees people up by giving them license to airbrush some of the more personal details in the stories. They can even make events hypothetical if need be. You just want to understand when things are really bad at work—by taking advantage of the fact that humans are wired to notice the negative—so that you can understand how to help this person want to stick around.

At one review, the CFO learned that an employee had actively considered leaving for a competitor because she felt disrespected in her current role. That led the CFO to dig in to how she could show greater respect—among things, giving the employee an opportunity to take the lead on a specific, high-profile project.

2. When was the most recent time that work didn’t feel like work?
People can’t always articulate what they want, but they can recall when they felt unmistakable flow, especially once they have aired at least one negative experience at work in question No. 1. Isolate a scene or two from their professional highlights reel, and you isolate the pulls that keep talent engaged.

If people say, for example, that they liked doing something because they were having a real impact, unpack what “impact” meant in that situation. Was it about having a positive influence on the team? Or improving outcomes for a client?

People might answer that they were energized when working on a specific internal project. It wasn’t a love for the project itself, but how it brought different groups together and eliminated some of the isolation they had previously been feeling. Now they felt like they were part of a real team.

As a manager, this would help you understand that you could get far more out of an employee when he or she is working as part of a team—and you might find a way to replace any siloed or isolated activities being done with more collaboration-based tasks.

3. What trade-offs are you making to stay in this role?
Even in a good job, it’s rare to be energized much more than 50% of the time. All of us make trade-offs at work.

Identifying those trade-offs helps you see more clearly what an employee’s priorities are at any particular moment—and predict future moves. For example, a worker who is taking care of aging parents might be willing to pause career advancement in exchange for workplace flexibility; later on, the balance might tip in the other direction.

Often, employees don’t have the language to ask constructively for what they want. As a result, their requests may come across as big or demanding—even when what they seek isn’t all that hard to deliver through malleable roles and assignments that benefit the organization.

The employee who was struggling with an aging parent might be upset by a blanket work-from-office policy. But perhaps you can offer a couple of days to work from home, which would lessen the trade-off and likely retain the employee for longer. By contrast, giving this person a promotion that requires more facetime in the office could have the opposite effect.

4. If this job disappeared tomorrow, what would you choose to do next?
This question can feel awkward, but it acknowledges a basic truth: Jobs are temporary. None of us will be in a role forever. And we are always passively looking for our next one.

This question also allows you to put a finer point on an employee’s aspirations.

Employers tend to assume that people want to climb the traditional career ladder. But more than 75% of the job switchers we studied weren’t trying to ascend that ladder when they quit. Many times they were looking to move horizontally, switch departments, change industries, free up time, or exert more control over how and when they work.

Inviting people to envision their next move can reveal all that. And it reminds managers that our reports don’t often want our jobs in the future.

Think of the all-star programmer who—to your surprise—doesn’t want your job as the group’s manager but would rather spend more time developing technical skills in a new domain. Understanding that could spare the organization the expense of the executive M.B.A. program and instead give the employee more hours each week to invest in learning something new—a saving of both pricey tuition and time off that would be wasted on someone who didn’t want either.

Too often, bosses discover why employees leave after the fact—in an exit interview, say, or via office gossip. Having these discussions when an employee is still on board, and then following through, gives you far more insight, as well as the time to act. It also shows that you care about employees’ development and satisfaction. And it builds loyalty and trust—which is much more valuable than a quick survey or interview completed on the way out the door.

So stop bribing your people to stay, and start asking smarter questions.