High retention could hide a critical workforce problem, says Salesforce exec. Here’s why low turnover isn’t ‘necessarily ideal’

Here’s a hot take: Low turnover doesn’t signal high employee engagement or satisfaction, says Salesforce’s global customer growth and innovation evangelist Tiffani Bova. 

In her new book, excerpted in CHRO Daily last week, Bova argues that tried-and-true engagement metrics like attrition don’t always tell the whole story about the employee experience. “A high retention rate isn’t necessarily ideal,” writes Bova. “Low turnover indicates good EX, but it can also alert you to a lax performance review process.” 

The issue, she says, is that at many companies, no one person owns the employee experience, leading employers to falsely believe that engagement is higher than it is in reality. In such cases, quiet quitting is widespread, which can fly under the radar in annual performance reviews. 

The solution? Investing in training that teaches managers how to coach rather than simply manage employees’ time, Bova says. This approach leaves room for managers to regularly ask questions that unearth how employees truly feel, like whether workers think they have what’s needed to be successful in their roles, whether they’re happy in their positions, or whether they feel like they need to be reskilled or retrained. 

“That coaching and mentoring time has a huge impact on people’s commitment to a company [and] their trust with their leaders,” says Bova. “The connection from an empathetic human perspective [makes employees] more willing to go that extra mile not only for our customers but for the company.”

A more in-depth turnover analysis is also useful to better understand turnover—or lack thereof. 

“You must strike a balance between keeping top talent and developing promising talent while dismissing those who are underperforming. A good rule of thumb is to benchmark your voluntary and involuntary turnover and retention rates against other companies in your industry,” Bova writes in her book.

Employers should also measure satisfaction because if it’s declining while retention sees an uptick or holds steady, one can reasonably assume employees are disengaged, she tells Fortune.

“It is really like being an anthropologist and detective on this,” says Bova. “Connecting disparate data points and looking more holistically at the totality of an employee’s experience goes a long way.”

Amber Burton
amber.burton@fortune.com
@amberbburton

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Watercooler

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Fooled by WFH. Remote work was effective initially, but it's not anymore, which is why so many tech leaders have performed a 180, says Paul Graham, cofounder of famed startup accelerator Y Combinator. —Steve Mollman

Vacation guilt. Employees feel especially guilty taking a vacation when they see senior leaders working during theirs. —Alexa Mikhail  

Rethinking labor stats. U.S. workforce data doesn’t track the one thing Americans care most about: “whether [their] pay is enough to achieve a good quality of life.” —Rachel Korberg, Jeffrey Weissbourd