What Actually Makes Employees Stay

What Actually Makes Employees Stay

A LinkedIn post recently made the rounds declaring what employees don't need in order to stay at their jobs: fancy offices, forced fun, and free food. What they do need, according to the post, is great leadership, fair pay, and recognition.

It's not a bad list. But it's an incomplete one. And the incompleteness matters because organizations that chase these solutions without addressing what's underneath them will find themselves right back where they started.

Why Companies Offer What They Offer

Before dismissing perks as superficial or misguided, it's worth understanding why organizations reach for them in the first place. The answer is more nuanced than it might appear.

Free food is easy. With a food delivery app and a budget approval, it's done. Team outings like Phillies tickets, a picnic at the park, a happy hour all give people a different context for connecting with each other, and that connection matters. People sometimes spend more waking hours with their coworkers than with their own families. Finding ways to build rapport outside the daily grind isn't cynical. It's genuinely well-intentioned.

A nice office isn't purely superficial either. For some people, it functions as a status symbol, a tangible marker that says I made it here. That may not be the most profound motivator, but it's a real one for a substantial number of people.

And perhaps most importantly, these things are safe. They don't require vulnerability. They don't require a leader to single someone out and risk being misread as playing favorites or having an ulterior motive. They can be applied universally because what's good for one is good for all and this eliminates a whole category of relational risk. They're also easy to justify in a budget conversation because they're concrete, predictable, and familiar. Asking for money to buy lunch for the team is a very different conversation than asking for resources to address psychological safety or environmental conditions.

So when we dismiss these offerings as tone-deaf, we're missing the very real constraints and calculations behind them. They're not the solution, but they're not nothing either.

The Problem With "Great Leadership"

Of the three things the post identified as to what employees actually need is great leadership. This is perhaps the most loaded.

It's broad. It's subjective. One employee's hands-off, trust-based leader is another employee's absent and disengaged one. The same behavior lands completely different depending on what the person receiving it needs, what they've experienced before, and what they've come to expect from the people above them.

It also places an enormous amount of responsibility on individuals who are often just as overwhelmed as the people they're leading. Leaders in mission-driven organizations — schools, hospitals, public safety agencies, nonprofits, are navigating their own version of sustained pressure. They're managing up and managing down simultaneously. They're held accountable for outcomes they don't fully control. And when things go wrong, they're frequently the first ones blamed.

Telling an organization that what it needs is great leadership, without examining what the environment is doing to the people in those leadership roles, is almost a moot point. Leaders can't consistently show up in the ways their teams need if the conditions around them are working against that.

The Fair Pay Myth

Fair pay matters. No one is arguing otherwise. But the idea that it reliably solves retention, especially in mission-driven environments, doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

The Delaware Office of Animal Welfare worked hard to increase officer pay. Yet, turnover remained high. People weren’t leaving the paycheck. It was the stress, the trauma, the emotional weight of the work that they were walking away from. A higher salary didn't change what officers were seeing and carrying on the job.

An assistant principal friend of mine, someone who has been in her district for over twenty years and earns a strong salary recently found herself asking whether her paycheck was worth what the job was costing her. Staff turnover, interpersonal tensions, relentless pressure. The money was good. It still wasn't enough to make the environment feel sustainable.

Case managers at a local hospital have left positions and taken pay cuts, willingly, for jobs that asked less of them. They chose less money in exchange for less depletion. That is not something to be overlooked. That's people showing that fair pay doesn’t always compensate for everything.

Money doesn't buy happiness is a cliché because it's been proven true enough times to become one. In high-pressure, mission-driven work, fair pay is often not even close to enough.

Recognition Done Right and Done Wrong

The post's point about recognition is actually the one I agree with most. But it comes with an important caveat.

The kind of recognition that lands isn't general. It isn't a gift card or a "great job" at the end of a staff meeting that could have been said to anyone. It's a specific acknowledgment that demonstrates someone was actually paying attention. It says: I noticed what you did. I saw how you handled that. That mattered, and I want you to know I saw it.

That kind of recognition is powerful because it meets something fundamental, the need to feel seen, valued, and appreciated. It doesn't require a large budget. It requires presence and intention.

But here's what the post misses: that kind of recognition has to flow in multiple directions. Leaders need it too. They are frequently the people absorbing the blame when things go wrong and receiving very little acknowledgment when things go right. A culture where recognition only moves from the top down leaves leaders quietly depleted in ways that eventually affect everyone underneath them.

Recognition also can't be outsourced entirely to the organization. Adults have a role to play in meeting some of their own needs for connection, for meaning, for a sense of accomplishment. Expecting an employer to consistently provide all of that, in ways that meet each individual employee exactly where they are, is setting everyone up to fail. It places an unrealistic burden on organizations and removes individual agency from the equation entirely.

What All of This Is Missing

Here's the thread running through all of these solutions that keeps them from being enough on their own.

None of them address the environment.

If the conditions people are working in remain unchanged, the sustained pressure, the unrelenting demands, the structural constraints, the emotional weight of mission-driven work and then layering better retention strategies on top of those conditions is like putting a fresh coat of paint on a building with a cracked foundation. It looks better for a while. It doesn't solve anything.

And some of those environmental constraints are real and significant. School districts in New Hampshire are funded through town votes. When I started in my district in 2008, we were among the highest-paid in the state. By the time I left in 2011, we were among the lowest, not because the district didn't value its teachers, but because an aging local population voted down salary increases three years in a row. What I earned on my first day was exactly what I earned on my last. The organization couldn't simply decide to pay people more. The system didn't allow it.

Animal welfare departments advocating for officer pay increases have to navigate state budget approvals. Public safety agencies operate within municipal funding structures. These aren't excuses. They're the reality of the environments these organizations exist within. And retention strategies that don't account for that reality will always come up short.

A Different Way to Think About This

What would actually help isn't a better list of perks or a cleaner definition of great leadership. It's a more honest examination of what the environment is asking of people and what it's set up to support.

Small, low-cost changes can make a meaningful difference when they're targeted at what people actually need. More specific communication, not mass emails, but department-level updates that feel relevant to the people receiving them can reduce the feeling of being blindsided and increase the sense of being included. Handwritten notes or a specific shout-out at a staff meeting can also help. A structure that allows team members to recognize each other, and even to recognize leadership, not just the other way around is another solution.

These things work not because they're elaborate or expensive, but because they signal something: you are seen here. Your work matters here. We are in this together.

That signal, delivered consistently over time, is what builds the kind of environment where people actually want to stay. Not because the perks are good or the pay is fair or the leadership is great, but because the environment itself feels worth staying in.

If any of this resonates with what you're seeing in your organization, I'd love to hear from you. Find me on LinkedIn or Substack at Kim Keane Consulting.