Of Note: The Four Quests of Job Jumpers

Why Employees Quit by Ethan Bernstein, Michael Horn, and Bob Moesta
Harvard Business Review, November 1, 2024

People decide to leave their jobs for myriad reasons – a partner or spouse gets a new job in a different place; an employee reaches retirement age; a person, seeking growth or facing burn-out, leaves for greener or more peaceful pastures. Despite the near constant “war for talent,” Harvard professor Ethan Bernstein, Clayton Christensen Institute co-founder Michael Horn, and CFO of the Re-Wired Group Bob Moesta find that organizations stubbornly “continue to rely on the same hiring and retention strategies they’ve been using for decades, even though those approaches aren’t working.” Instead, these authors insist, organizations including schools should be seeking to better understand, through frequent and structured interviewing, the reasons why people leave them, and what would help them to stay. Through their own qualitative research on employee attrition, Bernstein, Horn, and Moesta share a salient framework describing four quests that employees embark on when they jump from one job to another: the quest for satisfaction, the quest for control, the quest for alignment, and the quest for growth. Along these quests are a number of factors that can pull (feeling balanced, valued, recognized, appropriately challenged, and supported) or push (feeling disrespected, over-managed, bored, or overtaxed) employees to stay or go. This research into why employees leave their jobs is particularly useful for schools to consider in the wake of COVID-19 and significant shifts in the makeup of the nation's teacher workforce.