Moments That Matter: Executive Summary

When an employee becomes disengaged and ready to leave your organization, it’s easy to feel like it’s too late to turn things around. Perhaps it’s better to part ways and move on to new opportunities, both for your organization and the employee in question. However, research from APQC shows that this commonly held belief does not hold true—at least not for the current workforce. 

In 2024, APQC carried out survey research with more than 600 workers to identify what motivates employees to perform their best work and whether they are currently receiving the things they find most important. In APQC’s Moments That Matter white paper, we compare the survey responses of employees who said it would take a lot for them to leave their current job (a group we call “likely to stay”) to the survey responses of employees who said it would not take a lot for them to leave their current job (“likely to leave”). Comparisons between these two groups point to six important “moments that matter” when it comes to employee retention. This article is an executive summary of the white paper.