Why Employees Quit

And Empowering Educators on Smartphones in Schools

In this newsletter, I’ve got:

• more news on my upcoming book, Job Moves;

• a new episode of Future U.;

• a podcast about empowering educators when it comes to smartphones in the classroom;

• and a letter to the editor about the Massachusetts vote on the MCAS graduation requirement.

I’m thrilled to share with you that Ethan Bernstein, Bob Moesta, and I authored the spotlight story in the November-December issue of the Harvard Business Review! Titled “Why Employees Quit: New research points to some surprising answers,” the piece is part of a larger package of stories around “What Companies Get Wrong About the Employee Experience.”

Our piece is based on some of the research and insights in our upcoming book, Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career (it comes out November 19^th!)

“But I thought that book is for individuals,” you might be saying?

It mostly is. But the findings in the book have big implications for employers and managers. And the last part of the book—and the HBR article—shares those. As we wrote in HBR:

The so-called war for talent is still raging. But in that fight employers continue to rely on the same hiring and retention strategies they’ve been using for decades, even though those approaches aren’t working: People may be enticed to stay a bit longer than they otherwise would have, but they still leave. So why do organizations persist with those strategies? Because they’ve been so focused on challenges such as tight labor markets, relentless cost-cutting pressures, and poaching by industry rivals that they haven’t addressed a more fundamental problem: the widespread failure to provide gratifying work experiences. To stick around and keep giving their best, people need meaningful work; managers and colleagues who value, respect, and trust them; and opportunities to grow, excel, and advance in their careers.

The article shares the novel insights from our research and then offers three tangible steps for what employers can do that draw from our research.

If you want the audio version of some of the ideas in the article, Ethan and I also appeared on the HBR Ideacast podcast, which you can listen to at “The Real Reasons Employees Quit—and How to Retain Them.”

Several of you have also been reaching out asking how you can purchase the book itself. First, thank you! As you may know, buying the book before it comes out (pre-publication sales) is a huge help for getting the word out! If you visit https://www.jobmoves.com/#order, you can choose how you’d like to order the book.

And for those of you interested in purchasing more than 10 books—say, for your team—there’s a discounted option there for you as well.

And thank you! The more this is out in the world, the more progress we can all make in our careers—and lives.

Cutting College Costs, Board Tensions, & Consultant-mania

On the latest episode of Future U., Jeff Selingo and I delved into how the succession drama at Disney actually holds some important lessons for boards of trustees at colleges and universities. We also talked about whether and how consultants can play a productive role in higher education and how—despite lots of agreement that costs on college campuses have gotten too high, no constituency is actually in favor of cost cutting.

I also appreciated a question Jeff asked me that connected to our upcoming book, Job Moves. With apologies for the long excerpt:

Jeff: Do we place too much emphasis on networks built in college? Whereas you say in the book [Job Moves], assets could lose value over time. So maybe we should start really thinking about college connections in a different way. Maybe they're less about jobs, which we know is so clearly central now to the college experience. And maybe that's why we keep talking about networking in college and focus less on that kind of transactional aspect of the connections in college and maybe make it more about solving what the US Surgeon General has called the loneliness epidemic, and just making about helping people make friends in college, lifelong friends, and less about the network of the job.

Michael: … [It’s true that] connections aren't just about their utility to us in the job market, but also because of their value to our health and wellness and happiness. That is absolutely true. … And I think it's one of the reasons why that at this point, it's older Gallup research, but you loved to cite it all the time back when we first started this podcast. It's maybe interesting as well. And that research was that one of the biggest predictors of student success was their relationships with faculty, staff, and so forth. Deep relationships, just one or two people. And that's because, you know, perhaps it really just binds someone to a community in a really authentic, genuine, purposeful way. It's nothing utilitarian, as you were saying.

But I also think that what you're saying gets into the notion that there are different kinds of connections or ties in our lives. There are what researchers call strong ties, close connections with people that, frankly, are sources of strength for our interpersonal lives and increase our sense of trust and attachment and so forth. And then there are weak ties. … These are also important, but these are folks that you are less well connected to. They aren't your great friends or family that you talk to all the time. But weak ties are incredibly valuable because they give you access to opportunities that you wouldn't otherwise know about. They are a little bit more utilitarian in that regard. And so, with that entry point, I guess I want to take you up on the geeking out part of your question as it pertains to the framework in the book. The framework is a balance sheet exercise around someone’s career assets. And we took it from Boris Groysberg, a brilliant professor at HBS. And one of the important things to understand is that your balance sheet and that line that you quoted from the book is that assets are not strengths on a financial balance sheet, [nor] on a personal one. Assets are resources that someone has [obtained at a cost] that will confer future benefit. … It could be skills, it can be credentials, it can be connections. You get the idea. It confers future benefit. But here's the thing. Assets have useful lives to them. That is, if they aren't continually cultivated or built or kept intact, they depreciate. … Relationships can frankly depreciate as well if they're not cultivated and ended to, and they have a cost to maintaining them. And that's the liability side of the balance sheet in the case of careers. It's your investment of time and money and so forth to build those assets. … [So] I think it's a both-and thing, right? Networks are things you need to continually cultivate, and of course, because they erode in value over time, but you need to continually cultivate them for their career value. But the strong ties in your networks are things that have personal value as well, and they're important for your health and wellness and happiness, and they are also important to continue to cultivate and tend to.

Empowering Educators: Rethinking Smartphone Policies in the Classroom

Phones in schools is something I’ve written about several times for this newsletter. I was thrilled to join Olivia Wahl’s Schoolutions podcast to talk about it again in more depth.

My big takeaways?

I buy Jon Haidt’s thesis that smartphones—and specifically social media—seem to be having a negative impact on many teens’ mental health (and I think the distinction between the two matters).

I also think that given how they operate today, most schools should be phone free.

But I think blanket policy bans against phones in schools are a HORRIBLE idea.

Wait, what?

My vote is for nuanced, context-specific approaches grounded at the school level that empower educators to make the choices themselves—rather than blanket bans. Yes, that means educators should have the resources to keep phones in Yondr pouches for the whole school day, for example. But potentially criminalizing the actions of educators who find productive educational uses for mobile devices in high school by passing legislation at the state or federal level strikes me as counterproductive.

And there are productive uses for mobile devices in education that we discuss on the podcast. Many of these are active learning uses. Or social uses. Or outdoors in nature. Yes, outdoors in nature.

And the productive use of these devices almost always relies on changing the model of learning. As in, using them in a whole-class model—the one that prevails across most schools today still—tends not to work.

Now I know that some of these top-down policy mandates around phones have exceptions for educational uses—but I don’t think it’s hard to imagine how one person in a community could disagree on that front and create real chaos.

As usual, my preference at the level of policy is to focus on the outcomes we desire—and create far more agency than currently exists for educators to focus on the inputs themselves.

Nuanced, I know. But check out the whole episode here and let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Keep the MCAS graduation requirement

Finally, I took the digital “pages” of the Lexington Observer, our local source of news, with a letter to the editor encouraging voters to reject Referendum 2 in Massachusetts and keep the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System in place as a graduation requirement. Remember my mantra? Outcomes, not inputs.

My letter is here.

As always, thank you for reading, writing, and listening.