No Progress Conversations? Employees Nearly 3x More Likely to Leave

A small investment with the potential for big returns in employee engagement.

The Christian leaders we serve want their workplaces to flourish and look for the practices that make it possible. Our research points to one practice that costs almost nothing and is within reach of every leader, at every level. It can also tell us a great deal about who is flourishing in their role and who may be quietly disengaging from the organization’s mission.

Our Employee Engagement Survey includes 56 items representing the eight drivers of the FLOURISH model. One item asks participants to rate this: In the last 6 months someone has talked to me about my progress. Across nearly 37,000 employees in 448 Christian-led organizations, four out of five agree or strongly agree, while about one in eight disagree or strongly disagree. We set aside those in the middle, so the comparisons below run between those who clearly had such a conversation and those who clearly did not.

WHAT WE FOUND

Start with the lowest-scoring item in our 2024–25 survey data. Only 49 percent of employees agree that their organization effectively rewards top performers, while more than a quarter disagree. Nothing else we ask scores as poorly.

Now sort those same answers by whether the person had a recent conversation about their progress.

That is a gap of 37 percentage points on the lowest-scoring item in our survey. The pattern holds on every other item we examined, including these two:

Employees on either side of that one item describe organizations that hardly seem like the same workplace. This may help explain why two teams in the same department can experience the organization so differently: one supervisor prioritizes regular progress conversations while the other does not.

The progress item belongs to Uplifting Growth, one of the eight FLOURISH drivers. Uplifting Growth describes how people are developed, encouraged, and supported in their work. The recognition item belongs there too. A missing progress conversation is rarely the only thing missing.

We also ask employees whether they would stay with their organization even if a comparable job at higher pay were available somewhere else. It is a demanding question, and it predicts behavior: in a separate study of 562 organizations, those scoring lowest on it reported about two and a half times the annual voluntary turnover of those scoring highest.

Sorted by the progress conversation, answers regarding retention likelihood look like this:

Nearly three times as many may be inclined to consider leaving. A third of the employees who have gone half a year without that conversation may be open to a comparable job that pays more elsewhere.

WHAT OTHERS HAVE FOUND

One-on-one meetings between supervisors and their direct reports account for close to half of all meetings at work, yet they remain surprisingly understudied. Steven Rogelberg, whose book Glad We Met is among the most extensive research treatments of the practice, describes the one-on-one as foundational to a manager’s role and reports that about half of these meetings are not rated well by the people in them. Our data suggest Christian-led organizations would benefit from a closer look.

WHAT THIS DOES AND DOES NOT MEAN

Organizations where these conversations happen are usually doing many other things well, and we cannot fully separate the conversation from the culture that produced it. We are not promising that adding meetings to a calendar will automatically lift engagement by the margins you see here. We are suggesting that much of what makes a healthy workplace, including recognition, care, listening, and clarity, finds a natural home in that regular conversation.

NEXT STEPS

This is not a heavy lift. It requires no new system, no budget line, and no board approval. It is a recurring conversation.

As a general guide, we suggest something close to 30 minutes every other week, a rhythm researchers find works better than monthly. Still, the interval matters less than four things about the conversation itself:

• It occurs regularly rather than occasionally.

• It is prioritized even when schedules get tight.

• It has a consistent structure, so both employee and supervisor know how the conversation flows.

• The listening is real. Employees feel heard and cared for, and supervisors take notes.

Our own guide for supervisors adds three habits that cost nothing. Let the employee speak first, so the agenda is theirs before it is yours. Send your notes afterward and open the next conversation with what you wrote down. And ask, every time, how you could be more helpful to them. In our experience, that last one is the hardest and the one employees notice most.

Before another month goes by, consider how many of your employees have had a real conversation about their progress in the last 90 days, and think about those who have waited the longest. They are rarely the ones making noise. They are the ones who have quietly stopped offering ideas and whose enthusiasm has thinned in ways that are easy to miss until they surface in a stay interview or, worse, an exit interview.

AN ENCOURAGEMENT

Of everything we measure, few practices are so strongly linked to how employees experience their workplace, while costing so little. Most supervisors may want to have these conversations. What they may lack is a clear signal that leadership counts the time as real work rather than a nice-to-have, the first thing dropped when the week fills up. Add accountability and structure, and your organization may see gains far beyond the conversations themselves.