By Elena Putilina
In an era of rising turnover and talent shortages, retention demands more than incentives — it requires respect, growth, and trust. Drawing from 30+ years of leadership, including scaling Tupperware CIS to $250M, in this article, Elena Putilina presents a six-factor system with practical tools: personalized recognition, visualization coaching, meaningful work, engagement practices, fair assessments, and open feedback to inspire employees to stay by choice.
In recent years, rising employee turnover has become a global trend that significantly complicates organizational growth. When key people leave, they take with them irreplaceable knowledge and expertise; the costs of recruiting and onboarding their replacements mount; and the momentum of ongoing projects stalls. According to research by PwC, 46% of chief operating officers cite talent shortages and retention challenges as one of the three most significant obstacles to achieving their strategic objectives.
Over more than three decades of leadership practice, I have come to a firm conclusion: retention cannot be secured through formal procedures alone. To improve it meaningfully, organizations must shift their focus — away from holding people at any cost and toward building an environment in which people genuinely want to remain.
This is the central challenge facing leadership advisors today: to offer systemic mechanisms that help organizations build team resilience and to equip leaders with the tools to put them into practice.
When an employee begins considering leaving, the first step is to understand what is driving that impulse. Are they genuinely ready to go, or are external circumstances shaping their decision? Three foundational questions can open a constructive conversation, but they are asked far too rarely.
Ask the employee:
- Why did they choose to join the organization in the first place?
- What is now prompting them to consider other opportunities?
- What would need to change for them to want to stay?
During a recent mentoring engagement with an international company facing significant attrition, we put this approach into practice. The owner and senior leadership team began asking these questions openly and honestly in conversations with employees who had already decided to leave. This helped to drop the emotional temperature considerably and to retain a portion of the team. More importantly, the process surfaced systemic issues that had previously gone unnoticed. Those insights later became the foundation of a broader strategy for building organizational resilience.
Let me examine retention as a manageable system — one composed of six interconnected factors — along with the practical tools that allow leaders to address each of them.
1. Financial and Non-Financial Motivation
Financial motivation has always mattered, and it continues to do so — particularly during periods of economic turbulence. Employees’ personal circumstances evolve: mortgages, children, aging parents. Sometimes the issue genuinely comes down to a specific sum and an immediate need.
In such cases, a proactive incentive payment can be an effective tool — for example, advancing a quarterly bonus against a clearly defined goal. This will not retain an employee indefinitely, but it can provide meaningful support in a specific moment and sharpen their focus on results. For the leader, it preserves strategic thinking while allowing space to plan for succession.
That said, experience consistently shows that non-financial recognition drives engagement more powerfully than monetary bonuses. During my time at Tupperware Brands, we built a systematic culture of recognition: large-scale events that included the families of top performers, public acknowledgement of each individual’s contribution, delivered with genuine specificity. Those who were recognized openly continued to deliver exceptional results.
Even in organizations with limited bonus budgets, personalized recognition remains entirely possible: a letter that articulates precisely what someone contributed, a professional development certificate, a public acknowledgement for exceeding a KPI or delivering a successful project launch. The guiding principles are individuality and specificity. Generic praise does not work.
2. Career Growth and Professional Development
Not long ago, a standard question in performance conversations was, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Today, with roles evolving and disappearing at a pace, we have shifted the framing: “How do you envision your life?” This opens the conversation beyond job titles to the values and direction that actually matter to the person.
Many employees leave not for higher salaries, but because they have stopped seeing a future in their current role — and often cannot articulate why. This is where deep visualization and coaching tools become valuable.
- Mindfulness-VAK practice engages multiple sensory channels to help someone envision a desired outcome: they imagine the achievement and describe what they see, hear, and feel in that moment.
- The “quantum leap” method and quadrant thinking work across mental, emotional, physical, and meaning-based dimensions. It helps a person inhabit the state of having already reached their goal and explore its deeper significance.
The leader’s task here is not simply to diagnose a crisis but to help the employee plan their future with greater clarity. Visualization tools move the conversation from the abstract to the tangible. When someone fully inhabits the image of their desired outcome, they form an internal anchor — something to return to when doubt sets in.
In organizations where vertical progression is limited, alternative pathways matter: expanded scope, involvement in new projects, or cross-functional opportunities. One particularly effective approach is launching an internal mentoring school. Ask employees two questions: what they want to learn, and what they are prepared to teach others. Those willing to share their expertise rediscover the value of their own work. At the same time, this practice strengthens horizontal connections across the organization — building an environment in which professional growth no longer depends solely on the existence of a vacancy above.
3. Meaningful and Inspiring Work
Younger professionals frequently cite routine and a lack of creative outlet as reasons for disengagement. In these situations, creating genuine space for initiative is one of the most effective responses. Invite an employee to step into your role for a few hours, or make a genuine commitment to consider their idea for a new initiative — not a fully developed business case with detailed projections, but a clearly reasoned proposal. You never know what a frontline employee with a fresh perspective might offer. Their unconventional thinking may lead to a breakthrough.
Strategic sessions that include not only senior leadership but also high-potential employees — those with distinctive perspectives and non-linear thinking — can be genuinely generative. What matters critically in this context is the attribution of ideas. If a concept originated with a specific person, they must receive public credit and the opportunity to participate in its realization — not necessarily as the lead, but with meaningful ownership and autonomy.
4. Organizational Engagement
Engagement operates on two distinct levels.
The first is intellectual and emotional investment in the work itself — when employees think not only about completing their tasks, but about contributing to the growth of the business. In my own leadership practice, I regularly held sessions in which teams discussed what more could be done beyond existing processes. These ideas accumulated in what I thought of as an “idea bank,” and many became the seeds of future projects.
The second is the quality of horizontal relationships. In one change management project, employees at a large international company had been sharing an office for over a year — and barely knew one another. Communication happened almost entirely through chat. When we ran a team event and asked a simple question — “Do you know all of your colleagues?”— many said they only knew the people they worked with directly. The answers revealed a profound disconnect: people were messaging each other but had no idea where their colleagues sat or what they looked like.
Beyond unifying events, one practice that consistently proves effective is the introduction of a Tea Hour format — a space for informal professional exchange outside the usual meeting structure. When people engage this way, they begin to experience the organization not as a collection of functions, but as a community. Social initiatives, sports activities, and volunteering also strengthen horizontal bonds; shared participation in something beyond work builds genuine connection.
5. Recognition and Performance Assessment
For a performance system to be experienced as fair and developmental rather than merely evaluative, it must be transparent and structurally coherent.
Most international organizations use formalized assessment frameworks — Development Reviews, Performance Appraisals, Business Development Forms — in which annual objectives are broken down quarterly or monthly, alongside competencies, values, and skills mapped to a clearly defined rating scale.
Regular self-assessment, quarterly, for instance, strengthens this system considerably. When employees analyze their own performance, they develop both reflective capacity and professional maturity. The leader’s role is to complement that self-assessment with feedback grounded in specific, observable behaviors — not general impressions.
Handling discrepancies in ratings requires particular care. If an employee does not understand why they received a three rather than a four, the reasoning must be precise and tied to concrete actions: cross-functional collaboration needs to be more proactive; financial reports are consistently submitted late; deadlines are not reliably met. Specificity reduces defensive reactions and redirects the conversation toward professional development.
Contemporary assessment systems rightly include not only hard skills but soft ones — communication, empathy, the ability to collaborate and work across functions. This reflects a fundamental shift in how leadership itself is understood: results today are created not only through individual expertise, but through the quality of relationships within a team.
In this context, the task of leaders and leadership advisors working with teams is to design performance systems as instruments for developing potential, not as mechanisms of control.
6. Open Dialogue and Feedback
A culture of feedback remains one of the most significant drivers of retention. Research by Gallup and Workhuman shows that employees who receive meaningful feedback are five times more engaged in their work and 57% less likely to experience burnout. Yet feedback must not become a stream of criticism. Its purpose is to improve the situation.
During my studies at the Center for Creative Leadership, I encountered the Plus & Delta+ model. It begins by identifying a concrete result that was genuinely achieved. It then formulates a Delta+ — a development zone framed as an action plan rather than a critique. This approach disarms defensiveness and steers the conversation toward constructive growth.
It is worth noting that not long ago, the word “empathy” was met with skepticism in management circles. Today, it is recognized as a core leadership competency. In an environment of pervasive technological mediation, people have a heightened need to feel seen, valued, and treated with genuine human attention.
In closing, retention today is not a tool for keeping people at any cost. It is an indicator of the quality of a leadership system. When an organization is characterized by respect for individuals, genuine opportunities for growth, transparent performance criteria, and a culture of open dialogue, employees stay not because they have nowhere else to go, but because they are making a conscious choice to be there.
Our task as mentors and leadership advisors is to design such systems — drawing on rigorous research, international practice, and the specific context of each organization. Technology can optimize processes. But a fully realized human being remains the single most important factor in sustainable organizational growth.
Elena Putilina
