Retention has long been treated in employer research as a straightforwardly positive metric: higher is better. Gartner’s concept of regrettable retention complicates that assumption, distinguishing employees who remain out of genuine commitment from those who remain out of comfort or inertia. Best Practice Institute’s own research frames a related distinction, between organizational citizenship behavior and affective commitment on one hand, and mere presence on the other.
First Watch, a certified Most Loved Workplace® and the first company to rank #1 two years in a row, offers a documented case of an organization built to surface this distinction rather than obscure it. Per Chief People Officer Laura Sorensen, the company’s founding culture selected implicitly for character traits, collaboration, kindness, sound judgment, that made disengaged employees comparatively easy to identify even before the company had formal measurement tools in place.
The company’s central listening mechanism, an annual program of unscripted, 90-minute conversations between senior leadership and roughly two dozen employees per regional area, has produced a cumulative total of more than 150 hours and more than 1,500 employees engaged directly. Based on Best Practice Institute research, validated across 1,800+ Most Loved Workplace® certified companies, organizations that build loved cultures see 48% lower turnover and consistently out-innovate their competitors. What First Watch’s example suggests is that the mechanism producing those outcomes may depend less on the existence of a feedback channel and more on whether leadership visibly acts on what it hears, a distinction the company itself frames as the difference between survey fatigue and inaction fatigue.
For researchers, this raises a further question worth studying directly: whether organizations with documented, recurring listening cadences show measurably lower rates of regrettable retention specifically, as opposed to lower turnover generally. Best Practice Institute intends to examine this distinction in future research.
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