Sep 27th, 2025 – SkillCycle
Employers and employees benefit from workplaces that provide recognition, connection, and a healthy culture. These are key components to retention—people stay with companies where they feel valued. In fact, keeping your employees happy may be the key to keeping them, period.
Why should you pay close attention to how your employees feel about work? Over the past few years, companies have undergone “extraordinary workforce disruption,” according to Harvard Business Review (HBR), driving nearly half the workforce to consider quitting their jobs.
Absorbing the cost of attrition at that level would be a massive blow for most organizations. When we recall that the potential cost of replacing an employee can be one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary, the impact on companies already facing organizational challenges such as talent shortages and supply chain disruption looms large.
How can you ensure your organization creates an environment that will make employees want to stay? It starts with helping them reach a feeling of worklife success and ensuring you offer the tools and opportunities needed to grow this feeling over time.
Worklife success is personal and may look different depending on an individual’s goals. Employees want to feel valued and that their work is purposeful. But worklife success depends greatly on the employer as well and if they’re providing a clear path towards professional growth — a major deciding factor in an employee’s intentions to stay. Support for growth comes in many forms, including culture, learning and development, and goal alignment between their personal ambitions and the ambitions of the company.
People are motivated to choose work opportunities that support their health and happiness. According to the 2022 Work Trend Index Annual Report from Microsoft, 53% of employees are more likely to prioritize their health and well-being over work than before the pandemic.
Most people also want to work for a company that shares their values and helps them feel like their work matters daily. They need to be able to work towards achieving personal objectives both personally and at work.
And, they want to know their managers care about their well-being enough to improve working conditions and remove obstacles that block them from doing their best.
You can offer a safe and welcoming workplace, compensation, and benefit plans that recognize and reward performance, and relevant and continual learning opportunities that help people grow and gain valuable skills.
Meaningful change can’t be a quick or superficial fix. Most of us know that employee well-being matters. Globally, four in five HR leaders report that mental health and well-being are top priorities for their organization, according to McKinsey.
Additionally, companies need to make sure they’re solving the right problems. Unless you bring solutions to the causes of burnout and frustration in the workplace, employees are unlikely to feel genuinely supported.
If you have ever asked “how do you measure success at work,” the answer matters for more than reporting. Clear signals of worklife success help people see progress, feel valued, and choose to stay. Teams with higher engagement see far lower voluntary exits, which is why leaders who track how to measure success in the workplace often protect retention without big new budgets. In high-turnover settings, highly engaged business units have 21% less turnover. In low-turnover settings, they have 51% less turnover.
Understanding how to measure your success at work is also a cost story. Every avoidable exit carries recruiting time, vacancy drag, onboarding, and lost productivity. SHRM provides a practical model to calculate the full cost of turnover so finance and HR can see savings from small improvements in engagement and manager effectiveness.
Learning and growth are the strongest levers. When employees believe the company invests in their development, they are far more likely to stay. In LinkedIn’s research, 94% of employees said they would stay longer if the company invested in their career development. Gallup’s more recent read shows half of workers are watching or actively seeking a new job, which makes skill growth and clear progress even more important to retention.
Onboarding is the first big moment to create worklife success. Strong, structured onboarding has been linked with large lifts in both retention and productivity, which is why many teams treat it as the foundation for how to measure success at work for new hires. If you are redesigning your first 90 days, see how onboarding drives success.
Finally, measuring how to measure success in the workplace is how you close the loop. Use a simple set of indicators that employees can influence, pair them with frequent coaching, and share wins quickly. In a market where many workers say they are open to leaving, visible progress and growth turn into loyalty.
Helping your employees achieve worklife success will mean addressing organizational and systemic issues and helping them connect how their work affects the company’s goals.
You’ll need to find the right combination of tools, culture, and development opportunities to help grow your organization. To better understand where to focus your efforts and investment, here are three areas where you’re likely to see measurable results.
Employees who feel disconnected from their work and underappreciated are likely to be less engaged in the work they do. This disconnection can drive performance down, costing the company time and money.
On the other hand, when you create opportunities for employees to achieve their personal and professional goals, their connection to their work will grow stronger. This engagement, in turn, will drive better performance and profitability.
If your people are leaving, it’s a good sign there’s a disconnect between what you’re offering and what they want on the job. Employees are more likely to stay when they see that their work is connected to the success of the business and the company values their contributions.
It’s helpful to remember that in most cases, employees aren’t leaving because of an unwillingness to work. Instead, they’re more likely to be leaving because of poor leadership or because they feel disconnected from the organization’s purpose and mission.
Employee performance is what ultimately drives company performance. If your organization isn’t meeting its goals, it’s likely there’s untapped potential in your human capital.
The good news is that if you can unlock this potential and improve worklife success for your employees, over time you’re likely to see the company make more progress toward its goals in sales, revenue, or profitability.
While caring for your employees’ happiness on the job and removing systemic causes of frustrations are important, pay close attention to how you’re developing your people.
Learning and development are critical to demonstrate how you value your team members and to keep them from leaving their jobs. How critical? Research shows a lack of opportunities for career development and advancement was the number one reason workers considered quitting their jobs.
It’s imperative to offer employees relevant learning opportunities connected to their work. This means training should increase skills that are valued in their jobs and important to the company’s ability to succeed. This creates a tangible connection between increasing their skills and watching opportunities open up within and outside the company because of the effort they’ve put into growing their capabilities.
It’s also important to create time and space for ongoing learning that doesn’t add to their workload or make their job harder. Learning and development opportunities should be seen as valuable ways to make workdays more efficient or to help employees achieve their goals and those of the company.
Creating worklife success for your employees is vital to your ability to attract and retain talented employees with the skills you need for the company to succeed. If you can’t offer it, you won’t create a culture that draws top talent and rewards your best team members in ways they value.
Ready to begin building improved worklife success in your organization? Learn more about the strategies you’ll need in our whitepaper: Learning & Development is Broken: Ditch the Outdated Approach and Start Tackling the Right Problems.
Interested in speaking with a member of our team to learn more? Request a demo here.
Many teams believe they are doing well because activity is high and dashboards look busy. Then engagement dips, turnover rises, and leaders ask how to measure success at work in a way that reflects how people actually feel. The truth is, there is often a gap between perceived success and the lived employee experience, which is why learning how to measure success in the workplace with both sentiment and outcomes matters. Researchers continue to show that employees leave for reasons leaders often overlook, including not feeling valued and limited growth.
Leaders tend to overindex on visible outputs and compensation while employees care deeply about recognition, growth, and belonging. McKinsey’s research during the Great Attrition found many employers assumed pay and perks were the main drivers, while employees cited not feeling valued and poor balance as primary reasons for leaving. That mismatch fuels a perception gap about how to measure your success at work and what really keeps people.
Recognition shortfalls widen the gap. Only about one in three workers strongly agree they received praise in the last seven days, and those who feel unrecognized are twice as likely to say they will quit within a year. If your culture relies on quarterly awards rather than weekly appreciation, perceived success will look higher than actual success.
Burnout blurs signals. Surveys show high levels of burnout among employees and even higher among managers, which weakens coaching and feedback loops that prove success day to day. When managers are stretched, employees feel unseen, and perceived progress diverges from reality.
Pair sentiment with outcomes. If you are asking how to measure success at work, track a short pulse on progress, recognition, and growth, then compare it with voluntary turnover, customer outcomes, and cycle time. If sentiment is low while outcomes hold steady, you likely have a recognition or communication problem. If sentiment is high while outcomes lag, goals or skills may be unclear. Qualtrics and similar EX research recommend closing the “experience gap” by measuring key journeys, not just annual scores
Look for manager signal strength. If one to ones are rare and recognition is infrequent, expect a perception gap. Right Management reporting also points to a disconnect where leaders overestimate engagement and loyalty, which shows up when pulse data and retention trends do not match leadership narratives.
Validate with learning data. If people rate development highly and you see higher retention in cohorts that complete role-relevant learning, perceived and actual success are aligned. If learners are disengaged and mobility is flat, the gap is real. LinkedIn’s research links investment in career growth with stronger intent to stay, a practical cross-check for how to measure your success at work.
Make goals visible and specific. Replace activity counts with two or three outcomes employees can move this quarter. Teach managers to give timely, specific recognition each week so employees feel seen and can answer how to measure your success at work with concrete wins. Gallup’s findings on praise frequency make this a low cost, high impact habit.
Invest in development that ties to business outcomes. Map skills to live projects, then publish simple adoption metrics. Employees are far more likely to stay when they see real career growth, which turns perceived success into measurable gains in retention and performance.
Monitor journey moments, not just annual scores. Track the first 90 days, role changes, and manager transitions where the experience gap spikes. Use quick pulses and exit-reason codes so you can act before sentiment turns into attrition. Qualtrics’ journey-level approach is a practical model for how to measure success in the workplace without adding noise.
Bring it together in a simple cadence. Monthly: review pulse trends, recognition rates, and outcome KPIs. Quarterly: assess learning adoption and retention by cohort. Share wins quickly. When employees can see and feel progress, perceived success and actual success align.
Worklife success is about impact, growth, and health at work. Work-life balance is about time and energy outside work. Both support each other. You can feel balanced yet stalled, or successful yet stretched. The goal is steady progress without chronic strain.
Use short pulses that ask about progress, recognition, manager support, and growth. Compare results with engagement and turnover trends. Engaged teams tend to show better attendance, productivity, and retention.
Yes. Start with engagement, voluntary turnover, and one or two business outcomes. Add a simple model for the cost of turnover to quantify wins. SHRM’s templates can help.
That is normal. Use team-level goals plus individual development plans. Offer multiple ways to grow skills, from microlearning to projects. L&D programs that align to business goals and mobility tend to raise both performance and retention.
It can, when expectations are clear and learning is accessible. Bite-sized learning and skills-focused development help distributed teams stay aligned and productive.
