What 1000 Exit Interviews Can Teach Young Companies About Retention

Organizational development (OD) is a vital concept that shapes how companies grow, adapt, and succeed. For startup and scale-up founders, understanding OD can unlock new ways to build strong teams and create lasting change. This post explains what organizational development means, why it matters today, and how it differs from traditional human resources (HR) practices. It also explores where OD and HR overlap and how they work together to support business goals.

If you've ever lost a great employee and thought, "I wish I'd seen that coming," you're not alone. Foresight is always better than hindsight, and new research helps companies bulletproof their retention strategy.

Ethan Bernstein, Michael Horn and Bob Moesta co-wrote Job Moves, a research-driven book on career development summarising interviews with over 1,000 job switchers. While the book targets employees seeking more fulfilling careers, the authors also published an accompanying Harvard Business Review article that presents their findings from a business perspective.

As HR professionals, we think we understand why employees leave. Exit interviews typically yield familiar answers: bad managers, lack of flexibility, missed promotions, or better pay elsewhere. Bernstein and colleagues don't dismiss these common factors but instead offer a fresh framework for categorising turnover reasons. They suggest that we all follow individual paths to achieve what we want from life and work. Their research identified four quests for progress—patterns that explain why we move from one job to another.

The Four Patterns Behind Employee Turnover

Get Out

Sometimes, people simply need to escape. Bad management, a toxic culture, a role mismatch — whatever the trigger, they’re not leaving for something new; they’re leaving from something old. Once someone hits this stage, it’s nearly impossible to win them back. Prevention through healthy management habits and early feedback loops is the only remedy.

Regain Control

Control takers don't hate their jobs, but they're tired of the trade-offs. Long commutes, inflexible schedules, constant pressure, or compensation that doesn't keep up with life changes all signal a loss of control. Start-ups and scale-ups are particularly vulnerable to employees pushing for more control. As these companies grow, long hours become the expectation, pressure intensifies, processes become more rigid, and flexibility diminishes.

Regain Alignment

Here, the issue isn't time or workload — it's meaning. People feel underpaid, underutilised, or disconnected from what the company stands for. Maybe they've outgrown their role or the company's values no longer resonate with their personal ethos, or they feel their talents and capabilities are being overlooked. Looking for a new job becomes a conscious effort to bring back more alignment, respect and fulfilment into their professional life. It’s normal for growing companies to undergo a series of changes — some that transform the entire organization, and others that reshape individual roles. Naturally, not every employee will embrace these shifts wholeheartedly. Some may feel uncertain, disconnected, or even resistant as the company evolves in new directions.

Take the Next Step

Finally, there are those who simply want to grow. They're not unhappy, they're ambitious. They seek greater scope, impact and ownership, along with increasing rewards for their contributions. Failing to show these employees their potential path forward is the quickest way to lose them.

How to Turn These Insights Into Action

Use These Four Themes in Exit Interviews

Exit interviews often produce a pile of anecdotes with too much data and too little insight. Only over time, and with plenty of qualitative analysis, a clear picture emerges. Thanks to the research of Bernstein and his colleagues, companies can now predict the reasons their employees are leaving and can structure the exit interviews around the four themes. This way you don’t need to wait until you interviewed several people but you have the correct language from day one onwards.

Using these four themes as a simple qualitative framework helps you categorise feedback and spot patterns over time. Are most leavers “getting out” because of management? Or “regaining alignment” because your mission no longer connects? The trends will guide where to focus.

Build Stay Conversations Around the Same Framework

Exit interviews are great but by the time you conduct the exit conversation the employee is already with one foot outside the door. Stay Interviews are a more actionable conversation, for example after the first year, that reveal how things are going. If you don’t want additional conversations in your cycle, you can also train your managers to cover specific talking points in their 1:1 meetings:

• Do you feel in control of your work-life balance?

• Do you feel your role reflects your skills and values?

• Do you see what your next step could look like here?

  
  

Either way, don’t wait until people are leaving to have these valuable discussions. The answers tell you far more than a satisfaction score ever could.

Focus On Job Design And Internal Mobility

When employees talk about “regaining alignment” or “taking the next step”, job design and internal mobility are usually at the heart of it. Encourage co-creation of roles, involvement in internal projects, and opportunities for cross-team exposure. While it’s common in start-ups for everyone to wear many hats, people still want to know where they’re headed. They’re not only investing in the future of the company — they also want to see a clear sense of direction for their own careers. This is especially true for those on the “Take the Next Step” quest.

You can balance the fluidity of job descriptions with regular development conversations that show employees they are seen and that their growth matters. Even in the early stages, when career paths may not yet be formally defined, you can still make meaningful agreements, design personal development plans, and offer incentives where appropriate.

Growing companies are uniquely positioned to be creative and typically attract employees who are eager to contribute and co-design. Use that energy as an asset rather than allowing it to become a source of frustration.

Maintain Flexibility As You Scale

As your company scales, flexibility often begins to shrink. Designing flexibility by default, rather than treating it as a perk, can help prevent this drift. This doesn’t mean every organisation should be remote-first, but meeting employees where they are and accommodating their needs still goes a long way, even if the role isn’t fully home-based. Integrity plays an important part here. Don’t advertise hybrid roles only to offer minimal flexibility once the new starter is in-house. Also bear in mind that sudden changes to company policies can easily throw employees out of alignment. Flexibility also ties closely to internal mobility. Some roles may be inherently less flexible, yet have a natural progression path towards positions that offer more autonomy. For example, a junior sales consultant may need to be in the office regularly to gain exposure and mentorship from senior colleagues, whereas a senior consultant who consistently exceeds their targets might justifiably have greater freedom to work remotely. If flexibility emerges as a point of tension in 1:1 conversations, explore whether you can offer a future outlook — perhaps a clear roadmap towards a role or arrangement that better suits the employee’s needs.

Accept That Not Everyone Can Be Retained

“Get out” employees are often beyond repair. The goal isn’t to rescue them and move them around the company, it’s to keep their proportion as small as possible by investing in prevention: healthy managers, fair pay, and a culture that listens. But despite all these efforts not everyone will feel at home in their new role and there is always the occasional mismatch, the one that clashes, and ultimately leaves. Accept that this is okay.

The same applies to employees who are seeking greater control, alignment, or growth. At times, we can accommodate their needs or provide a clear path forward but sometimes it simply isn’t possible. As HR professionals and managers, it is our responsibility to acknowledge this truth early. There is no shame in being transparent about what can and cannot be offered. Being honest in setting expectations and, if necessary, accepting a mutually respectful resignation, is far preferable to keeping an employee on with false hopes.

For young organisations, employee turnover often feels chaotic and unpredictable. Using these four categories brings clarity. It turns “people are leaving” into “people are leaving because they need to escape, rebalance, realign, or grow.” Once you know which it is, you can act — and that’s where good HR begins. Because in the end, retention isn’t about keeping everyone. It’s about creating an environment where people want to stay — and where even those who leave do so with respect, not resentment.