2 Practical Strategies to Stop Turnover Before It Starts

For years, HR headlines have cycled through buzzwords: the Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, and the Great Detachment. Now, an “employer’s market” has returned, and leaders have more leverage. While employees may be less likely to make a dramatic exit, they’re more likely to disengage or quietly check out—impacting team performance, innovation, and your bottom line.

Regardless of the shifting language, the risk of losing top talent never really goes away. It just gets harder to spot. Turnover is caused by daily friction that wears people down over time. So, if you want to stop regrettable turnover, you need a proactive approach that makes retention a daily practice, instead of a crisis reaction.

Retention Isn’t a Program. It’s a Practice.

By the time a troubling trend appears in your attrition data, the opportunity to intervene has usually passed. Leaders getting ahead of turnover aren’t relying on exit interviews or engagement surveys. They’re taking a forward-looking approach, moving beyond check-the-box programs to tackle the friction points that quietly drive people away.

Across hundreds of Employee Voice Sessions (EVS), a clear pattern continues to emerge: employees are uncertain about career growth and managers are overextended. These common drivers of turnover aren’t often addressed until talent walks out the door.

The key to re-engaging employees is creating a work environment where people can see a future, feel valued, and have what they need to thrive. Organizations must:

• Make career growth visible
• Equip managers to lead people, not just projects

Career Growth: Make Opportunity Visible, Not Just Promised

In many of the Employee Voice Sessions (EVSs) Seramount facilitated, only 28% of employees believed there are adequate advancement opportunities available to them .Without hope they can grow, performance and motivation can quickly decline.

Employees across levels and roles consistently expressed confusion about how to grow within the company, frustration with unclear promotion processes, and concern that only specific roles or departments had real mobility. Try these proactive approaches to address career growth concerns before employees start looking elsewhere:

• Invest in skill-building programs that meet employees where they are
• Highlight lateral moves and micro-promotions as meaningful progress
• Make internal mobility stories visible across departments and levels
• Equip managers to hold regular stay conversations that focus on future growth
• Audit promotion and development access across teams and locations

When people can see a path forward (and believe it’s available to them) they’re far more likely to invest their energy where they are.

The Manager Multiplier: Move Beyond Gut Instinct

If career growth is the engine of retention, managers are the drivers. Too often, organizations expect managers to drive engagement and development without giving them the tools or support to do it well. This leaves stretched-thin managers operating in task mode, focused on deliverables, with little visibility into how their team is feeling.

Fewer than 4 in 10 of Seramount’s EVS participants say their manager has facilitated their career development. Only 43% report getting adequate feedback to grow, and even fewer employees feel they have the tools they need to build their skills. Trust gaps make it harder for managers to spot burnout or intervene early.

Leading organizations build manager capability into their retention strategy by:

• Coaching managers on how to hold meaningful growth and feedback conversations
• Making manager effectiveness visible, trackable, and rewardable
• Providing team-level insights that help managers lead proactively instead of reactively

When managers are empowered to lead people, not just projects, employees stay longer and perform better.

Why a One-Size-Fits-All Retention Strategy Doesn’t Work

If there’s one thing our work with HR and talent leaders has made clear, it’s this: no two workforces are struggling with the same things. What drives attrition on one team may be energizing another. External disruptions will continue reshaping how people live, work, and decide where to stay. That’s why one-size-fits-all retention strategies fall short.

The leaders getting ahead of turnover are doing something different:

• They’re tailoring interventions based on employee insights, not assumptions. Exit interviews and surveys may explain what happened, but they rarely reveal why, or how to fix it in time.
• They’re building trust by showing employees exactly how their feedback leads to real change. The result is greater success implementing improvements, fewer missed signals, and a workforce that believes in the power of feedback.

How Assess360 Closes the Retention Gap

These challenges can’t be solved with generic platforms or survey dashboards. That’s why more HR teams are using Seramount’s Employee Voice Platform, Assess360. We combine a unique listening methodology with expert analysis and hands-on change management support. This integrated approach gives HR teams the clarity needed to prioritize and address their most pressing talent challenges.

• Listen: Capture honest, real-time feedback through thoughtfully designed surveys and voice sessions
• Diagnose: Identify the root causes of disengagement and turnover with expert analysis, not just high-level dashboards
• Transform: Translate results into strategic priorities and targeted actions that improve culture and business outcomes

Companies that make retention a consistent, strategic priority will keep their best people and build resilience against whatever comes next.  

Don’t wait for the next resignation wave. See how Assess360 helps HR leaders stay ahead of what’s shifting to retain top talent.

¹Seramount Consulting analyzed 3,362 employee records describing how employee networks, sponsors, and managers can affect a company’s engagement and retention efforts. Participating companies spanned technology, pharmaceutical, legal, and financial services industries. Data was collected using Seramount’s Employee Voice Session (EVS) platform, a virtual tool used to moderate and guide employees through a series of quantitative and qualitative questions. The anonymous nature of the live session allows a deep dive into the anonymous responses and allows employees to share openly with one another.