What Gets Your Best Employees to Stay
To win the talent wars, companies need a systematic framework for understanding and managing the factors that keep employees from leaving.
Lauren Aydinliyim and Deepak SomayaAugust 18, 2026Reading Time: 14 min
Summary:
The most valuable employees are also the most likely to leave — and companies too often respond with one-off counteroffers or bidding wars ...
Listen to “What Gets Your Best Employees to Stay” (19:55)
A recent battle for AI talent illustrates how difficult it is for companies to retain key employees. In 2025, OpenAI’s stock-based compensation averaged roughly $1.5 million per employee— unprecedented for a pre-IPO company — yet OpenAI still experienced high-profile defections. Rivals such as Meta were reportedly extending offers in the hundreds of millions of dollars for top AI talent, prompting OpenAI to issue multimillion-dollar one-time retention bonuses and to relax equity vesting requirements twice in a single...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to mit.edu. To see the full text click HERE
