Managers think employees want promotions. Employees want something else.

ISSUE #41 • MONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2026 • 5 MIN READ

Good morning. Thanks for starting another week with Still Monday. Forward this to the manager who has carefully designed a retention plan for employees they have not actually asked.

Managers are not completely wrong about what people want from work. That may be what makes today's data useful. They get the obvious part right, then become strangely confident about the rest.

Apparently employees have opinions of their own.

WorldatWork's 2026 State of Rewards research found employees and managers broadly agree that competitive pay matters. The disagreement starts after that. Employees rank pay, flexibility, benefits and meaningful work among their top reasons to stay, while managers systematically overestimate the importance of career advancement and underestimate several of those everyday rewards. WorldatWork

When employees were forced to choose their top three factors for staying long term, 70% selected pay, 60% flexibility, 40% benefits and 36% meaningful work.

Managers overestimated career advancement by 15 percentage points. They underestimated flexibility by 14 points, benefits by 8 and paid time off by 6.

The best part is the confidence. Almost seven in ten managers said they were extremely or very confident they understood what employees value.

This is a familiar management failure: being directionally correct and specifically wrong.

A manager knows an employee wants a good career, so the company builds a promotion path. The employee may appreciate it. The employee may also be trying to pick up a child at 4:30, afford health coverage and take five consecutive days off without receiving a Slack message labeled 'quick question.'

Rewards become less effective when companies treat everyone as an average employee. Two people with the same salary can value the next dollar very differently. One wants a bigger bonus. One wants a flexible Friday. One wants a title that makes the next job easier to get. One would trade all three for a manager who stops moving deadlines on Thursday afternoon.

The report contains another useful tension. Satisfaction with foundational rewards is reasonably strong: benefits 77%, well-being 73% and compensation 69%. Yet only 44% of employees say they are extremely likely to stay with their employer over the next year.

Among employees considering leaving, three quarters have searched externally, about half have applied and 38% have interviewed. A decent benefits package can coexist with an active job search.

The retention strategy is not to guess harder. Ask people what they value before spending money on something they do not.

Competitive base pay remains important across attraction, engagement and retention. It is table stakes. That does not mean it explains why two similarly paid employees make different stay-or-leave decisions.

WorldatWork found flexibility grows in importance across the employee lifecycle, rising from 68% for attraction to 85% for engagement and 88% for retention.

Managers reported the lowest employee Net Promoter Score of any role level in the research and weaker satisfaction across career development, recognition and compensation. The people delivering the employee experience may need one too.

Instead of asking, “What would make you happier here?”, give an employee four realistic options and ask them to rank them: more pay, more flexibility, faster growth or more time off. Then ask what would have to change for their first choice to matter.

Forced tradeoffs produce better information than a generic engagement question because nobody gets to select “all of the above.”

Companies often compare the cost of rewards without comparing the employee value created. A benefit can be competitively priced and strategically useless for the person you are trying to retain.

The cheapest retention dollar is sometimes the one spent on the thing the employee actually asked for.

MANAGER: We see leadership potential in you.

EMPLOYEE: Great. Can I work from home Friday?

MANAGER: We were thinking Senior Associate.

EMPLOYEE: Does Senior Associate get Friday?

MANAGER: Let's focus on your career.

Retention programs are built at company level. Decisions to stay are made by individual people.

Vote below and tell us which would matter most to you right now: pay, flexibility, benefits, time off or a promotion.

Technically Monday. Emotionally reviewing the benefits portal.

— The Still Monday Desk