Are Leaders Asking the Wrong Questions About Employee Retention?
I was recently invited to give a talk at an association of business owners in Brazil, which was organizing a symposium on a timely topic: workforce challenges in a fast-moving, digital world.
Right in the briefing, the organizer raised one of the first points: the business owners were complaining about two things at once. The people already inside their company weren’t satisfied, and the people outside didn’t want to come in.
I asked what they thought was behind it. The answer, which she relayed on behalf of the owners, came quickly and seemed ready-made: “nobody wants to commit to anything anymore.”
I have a rule of thumb: a quick, surface-level answer always hides a deeper cause. So I went looking. I didn’t find a single cause, and I suspect there isn’t one. I found a hypothesis that seemed more useful than the first: What if part of the problem is time?
Why Flexibility Matters to Employees
While researching, one case caught my attention: Dropbox, which allows employees to design their own workdays, with a few fixed windows for collaboration and the rest left open.
According to the company itself, nine out of ten employees identified this way of working, combining remote work and flexible hours, as one of the main reasons they stay. This comes from an internal survey at a tech company, so it doesn’t prove anything on its own. But it points in an interesting direction.
And you don’t have to look to Silicon Valley for a similar signal. Tens of millions of people in Europe now work through apps and digital platforms, and when asked why, the ability to choose their own working hours ranks among the top reasons.
For many, it’s also simply the job that was available, so it would be unfair to say they all chose it for the flexibility. But it does say something about what traditional employment may no longer be offering.
Can Flexible Working Hours Work Beyond the Office?
For anyone running a factory or a shop, the conversation is different. Not everyone can decide when a shift starts. But on the other hand, having control over your own time doesn’t have to mean complete freedom. Even at Dropbox, flexibility comes with fixed windows for working together.
Still, Dropbox is a company where people primarily work from laptops, while the business owners I was speaking to run factories and shops. So I looked for someone who had tested the same question in a setting closer to theirs, and I found a study conducted at the American retailer Gap.
Researchers ran a controlled experiment across 28 stores. In some of them, employees received their schedules two weeks in advance and were no longer required to be on call.
The results were striking: those stores increased sales by a median of 7%, while labor productivity rose by 5%. Employees also reported sleeping better, something you don’t usually find in a sales report.
Small Changes Can Make a Difference
I don’t have equivalent evidence for the industrial sector, and every operation has its own constraints, whether related to customers, shifts, or regulations. So I would avoid treating this as a universal recipe. What seems reasonable to me is testing the hypothesis before accepting the first explanation.
One possible first step is small and reversible: ask your team which scheduling rule has the greatest impact on their lives. Pick one, test a change for a few weeks, and decide in advance how you’ll measure whether it worked. You could look at absences, employee turnover, or lateness.
If it doesn’t work, you can go back to the previous arrangement. At least you’ve learned that this particular rule wasn’t the problem.
Are We Asking the Right Questions About Workforce Challenges?
Back to the briefing for that symposium.
The business owners weren’t wrong about the symptom: there are people who are unhappy inside their companies and people who are reluctant to join them.
Maybe they’re wrong about the cause. Or maybe they simply stopped at the first answer. Before repeating that nobody wants to commit to anything anymore, it’s worth asking:
When was the last time your team had a say in their own schedule?
Zeca Ruiz
Leadership Trainer and Consultant
Zeca Ruiz is a Leadership Trainer, Facilitator and Consultant in Human and Organizational Development. He works in leadership development across Latin America and Europe, with experience in cultural transformation processes, team dynamics and the integration of systemic methodologies into corporate practice. He is a specialist in complex thinking, a generative coach and an integrative therapist, working at the intersection between human behavior, learning and the evolution of systems. He leads trainings, talks and development programs that combine depth, clarity and practical application to prepare people and organizations for high complexity environments.