Research Drop: Understanding Voluntary Turnover Through Employee Sentiment

Research Drop in Brief:

• Voluntary employee turnover has large financial implications and costs organizations desirable talent, which is critical to retain as organizations continue to undergo large-scale transformations heading into 2025.
• While voluntary turnover can be challenging to predict, research shows that directly asking employees about their turnover intentions through surveys does have predictive power (though it shouldn’t be considered as a complete proxy for actual turnover behavior).
• Viva Glint’s Intent to Stay item (“I plan to be working at <COMPANY_NAME> two years from now”) is our single strongest correlate of subsequent turnover across our item taxonomy but is only used by a quarter of our customers.
• There are three key considerations to have top-of-mind when using sentiment to measure turnover intentions: put it in context, make it actionable, and maintain perspective.

When an employee chooses to leave an organization, it impacts both team culture and the business financially. McKinsey found that employee disengagement and attrition could cost a median-size S&P 500 company between $228 million and $355 million a year in lost productivity¹. While voluntary turnover is declining since its peak in 2022, it has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels². Heading into 2025, employees are facing significant changes that may reaccelerate turnover. They are undergoing a workforce transformation driven by rapidly evolving AI technology, as 86% of organizations expect AI and information processing technology to transform their business by 2030³. In response to AI transformation, the top workforce strategy is to reskill and upskill existing employees, ranked top by 77% of organizations in the World Economic Forum’s 2024 Future of Jobs Survey³. However, with AI and big data skills expected to be the fastest-growing skill in the next five years³, it becomes increasingly critical that employers hold on to key talent to support them with their AI adoption process. Employees are also experiencing ongoing whiplash from organizations continuously changing and adjusting their post-pandemic work policies. Strict return-to-office mandates heading into 2025 could drive additional turnover⁴, and organizations who are focused on hiring for talent rather than location may end up winning the skills war.

With potential talent churn, it may be a top priority to shift your focus to forecasting potential attrition rates within your organization. If you’re looking for where to start and retention is a high priority for your organization, why not start by directly asking your employees? Our ‘Intent to Stay’ survey item (“I plan to be working at <COMPANY_NAME> two years from now”) is our single strongest correlate of subsequent turnover across the items in the Viva Glint taxonomy⁵ but only used by a quarter of our customers⁶.

For this month’s research drop, we dive into the history of measuring turnover sentiments, take a closer look into utilization trends of the Viva Glint ‘Intent to Stay’ survey item, and share best practices for leveraging the Intent to Stay item.

When does a turnover intention turn into a turnover behavior?

Employee turnover has been a focal point of organizational psychology and behavior research for decades due to its large cultural and financial impact on organizations. But due to the sensitive nature of voluntary turnover and the difficulty in capturing the signal before the turnover occurs, it can be challenging to directly study, leading researchers to search for an attainable proxy for actual turnover. Thus, researchers turned to turnover intentions to fill in the gaps left by the difficult nature of capturing turnover behavior.

Turnover intentions can take many forms, from withdrawal behaviors to job searching, but can provide an early signal that an employee has considered, in some fashion, working somewhere else. Measuring turnover intentions is also more approachable, as it can be assessed in the same manner as other employee experiences and sentiments (e.g., engagement) by including the topic in a survey. Over time, using turnover intentions as a replacement for turnover behaviors grew in popularity, but also grew in speculation of whether intention really can be used to predict actual turnover⁷. 

To address this, a meta-analysis was conducted to collate and analyze the field of research studies on voluntary turnover⁸ and two key takeaways emerged: 1) turnover intentions are a stronger absolute predictor of turnover behavior than job attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction), but 2) we should not proxy sentiment for behaviors and assume that the exact same conditions that may cause someone to think of leaving are the same that cause them to actually leave.

So where does this leave us? Should we measure turnover intentions if we don’t know with certainty that it can help us prevent turnover? Our answer is yes – capturing early signals of turnover enables organizations to jump into action before it's too late. Just because we can’t draw a perfect line from intention to behavior, it doesn’t overshadow the evidence that turnover intentions are the strongest sentiment predictor of turnover behaviors. Through this, we can connect turnover intentions to other employee experiences and create effective interventions to meet this concern head on, directly addressing poor experiences that may lead an employee to go elsewhere and potentially saving the organization a loss in talent. To learn more about how companies are currently utilizing turnover intention measures, we turned to our extensive customer base.

The state of the Intent to Stay item

In our December Research Drop, we analyzed Glint customer item utilization trends over the past year and discovered that only 24% of our customers include our Intent to Stay item (“I plan to be working at <COMPANY_NAME> two years from now”) on their employee surveys⁶. Our research shows that employees who rate this item unfavorably (Strongly Disagree or Disagree) are 10x as likely to leave their organization within three months as those who rate it favorably (Strongly Agree or Agree)⁵, making this item the single strongest correlate of subsequent turnover across the items in the Viva Glint taxonomy. 

Regardless of its predictive power, use of this item is very dependent on whether retention is a primary focus for the organization. We see this play out when we look at utilization rates across industries and see how usage ranges from 5% to 38% of customers in each industry.

For instance, Technology companies’ use of Intent to Stay grew seven percentage points year-over-year (YoY), making it the second most frequent industry utilizing this item. This change suggests that more Technology organizations are putting retention at the forefront of their employee strategy, potentially driven by the Technology industry grappling with more of those large-scale changes employees are facing, such as the introduction of organization-wide AI tools and technologies or the ongoing return-to-office debate. Tech companies adding this item to their surveys may want to keep a closer eye on potential churn at their organization to provide an early signal of talent loss, which is critical to retain during AI transformation. Half of executives believe that a lack of skills to support adoption is the top barrier to successful AI adoption³. By proactively capturing this signal, tech companies can maintain their competitive advantage during this period of significant change and intervene in time to retain key talent.

In general, we see a slight uptick in the utilization of Intent to Stay across customers, signaling a greater cross-industry focus on predicting voluntary turnover as we kick off 2025. If you are thinking about adding this item to your surveys this year, consider how it fits into your broader organizational goals. We recommend using Intent to Stay on your employee surveys in addition to eSat (our single-item engagement metric: “How happy are you working at <COMPANY_NAME>?”) when your organization’s outcomes or goals include a strong focus on retention.

Get the most from integrating retention into your employee listening strategy

Using the Intent to Stay item effectively can provide valuable insights and an early signal into potential voluntary turnover trends within your organization. Here are some top tips to help you make the most of this item.

Put it in context

Voluntary turnover will never be completely avoidable. When analyzing this metric, you may see encouraging high scores (most employees do see themselves at your organization two years from now) or discouraging low scores (most employees don’t see themselves at your organization two years from now). However, these metrics need to be compared to something to get the full picture, whether that is departmental differences, trend data (e.g., year-over-year changes within your organization), or benchmark data. Comparing your item results against benchmarks like those offered in Viva Glint can help you assess whether your organization is at a greater risk of seeing turnover than peer organizations. If your benchmarks indicate that similar companies have lower rates of reported turnover intention, it could be a signal to investigate further into what gaps may exist in your current employee experience. This comparison also helps you determine what a “healthy” score is for your organization and how much risk you are comfortable with maintaining. Through this, this metric can also help with workforce planning and talent processes.

Make it actionable by connecting the item to other important metrics

Thoughts about working somewhere else don’t occur in a vacuum, so it’s important to take an interconnected approach to your survey results. Start by considering demographic data points such as function, tenure, time since last promotion, and total compa ratio to get a better grasp of the situation. For example, linking Intent to Stay with the frequency of internal promotions can reveal whether growth opportunities are impacting retention.

Take an additional step by analyzing the correlations between other items on your survey with Intent to Stay. For example, we’ve previously found a strong correlation of .78 between Intent to Stay and Fair Evaluation (“My performance is evaluated fairly”)⁹. Knowing what employee experiences at your organization may be driving turnover intentions can enable leaders and managers to create an action plan that directly addresses these concerns.

Maintain perspective

Keep in mind that this sentiment is a snapshot in time, influenced by various factors such as recent events or team-level morale. It's important to note that the predictive power of Intent to Stay relies more on company culture than on employee satisfaction, especially when it comes to trust. For instance, if employees doubt the confidentiality of the survey results, they might hesitate to reveal their true intentions about working elsewhere. This mistrust can be mitigated by ensuring transparency in communication and actions, thereby fostering a culture where employees feel safe sharing their honest feedback.

In conclusion, understanding and effectively measuring turnover intentions is crucial for predicting and mitigating voluntary turnover within your organization. By leveraging the Intent to Stay item alongside other key metrics, you can gain valuable insights into employee retention and take proactive steps to address potential issues. The end goal is to better understand how you can improve the overall employee experience, not only attaining higher retention, but also fostering a more engaged and committed workforce.

Stay tuned for our February Research Drop to keep up with what the Viva People Science team is learning!

¹ McKinsey & Company. (September 11, 2023). Some employees are destroying value. Others are building it. Do you know the difference?

² McLean & Company. (2024). U.S. Turnover Benchmark Report 2018-2024.

³ World Economic Forum. (2025). Future of Jobs Report 2025.

⁴ Forbes. (January 7, 2025). Why Return to Office (RTO) Mandates Will Backfire.

⁵ People Science cross-customer attrition analysis (n = 33 customers) from June 2023 examining the proportional difference of all employees who have voluntarily left their companies whose item scores were unfavorable compared to those whose scores were favorable.

⁶ People Science analysis on LinkedIn Glint customer item utilization between September 2023 to August 2024 (n = 728 customers). Customers who customized this item (e.g., a client in the skiing industry changing the wording from ‘intent to stay’ to ‘intent to come back’) are not included in this analysis.

⁷ Cohen, G., Blake, R. S., & Goodman, D. (2016). Does turnover intention matter? Evaluating the usefulness of turnover intention rate as a predictor of actual turnover rate. Review of Public Personnel Administration, 36(3), 240-263. https://doi.org/10.1177/0734371X15581850

⁸ Rubenstein, A. L., Eberly, M. B., Lee, T. W., & Mitchell, T. R. (2018). Surveying the forest: A meta‐analysis, moderator investigation, and future‐oriented discussion of the antecedents of voluntary employee turnover. Personnel Psychology, 71(1), 23-65. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12226

⁹ People Science cross-customer correlation analysis from July 2023 assessing the relationship between Glint taxonomy outcome items and driver items.