Your exit interviews are asking the wrong questions

“She didn’t quit because she didn’t love the job. She quit because her son’s school kept calling her out of meetings, because the after-school program in her neighborhood closed, because by the time she got home on two buses she had nothing left. None of that appeared on the exit survey.”

Her manager told me this story when I asked what he wished the company’s people team understood. He’d lost four high performers in 18 months—all for reasons that never made it into a data field, because no exit survey asks about broken sidewalks, shuttered childcare centers, or neighborhoods without a grocery store within a mile.

This is the central blind spot in contemporary workforce strategy: the assumption that employees’ lives begin and end at the employer’s front door. Everything we know about human health, human cognition, and human performance says otherwise. The conditions in which people live—stability, safety, access to nutrition, the quality of their children’s schools, the reliability of their transportation—determine how much of themselves they can bring to work. Not occasionally. Every single day.

The business cost of ignoring this is concrete. Built to Thrive: A Blueprint for Healthier Communities, Stronger Workforces, and Economic Vitality, a new analysis by the Leadership Council for Healthier Communities, documents that businesses absorb more than $575 billion a year in costs tied to poor community health. This surfaces as higher emergency room utilization, absenteeism, and presenteeism that standard wellness programs never reach. And it shows as turnover that costs 50% to 200% of a person’s annual salary to replace. These aren’t soft costs. They are in your operating budget right now.

INVEST IN COMMUNITIES

The companies getting ahead of this are asking different questions than just how to improve benefits packages. Instead, they are asking: What are the health conditions in the communities where our employees live? What is the state of childcare access, food security, and transportation reliability in the ZIP codes where our workforce lives? Where are the leverage points upstream of us that would reduce the pressure our people carry through the door each morning?

This isn’t altruism. Built to Thrive draws on decades of published research showing that upstream investment in public health returns $14 for every dollar spent, and that closing community health gaps could add $5 trillion to GDP over five years. The companies that invest in the communities where their talent lives are building a workforce advantage that cannot be replicated with a hiring bonus or wellness app.

THE ISSUE IS GROWING

Federal safety net rollbacks now taking effect are going to make this more urgent. As Medicaid coverage contracts and food assistance tightens, the pressure on working families grows. That pressure arrives at work, sits in meetings, misses deadlines, and eventually walks out the door, to an exit interview that never identifies the real reason.

The manager who lost four people in 18 months has started asking different questions. He’s mapping where his team lives. He’s asking what their neighborhoods actually have. He’s beginning to understand that his retention problem is a community problem. And that community problems have community solutions, if leaders are willing to invest in them.

Jean Accius, PhD, is president and CEO of CHC: Creating Healthier Communities and founder of the Leadership Council for Healthier Communities.