What if your best people never wanted to leave?
The $1 Trillion Question: Why Do People Actually Stay?
Ryan Leak spent years chasing one question: why do people actually stay at a job? His team's research—6 studies, 5,300+ people, 680,000 data points—found it isn't perks or unlimited PTO, but seven factors every leader can influence.
Stay Culture shows you how to identify these factors, coach the four types of stayers on your team, and run stay interviews that reveal the truth before someone quits. With U.S. businesses losing $1 trillion a year to voluntary turnover, this research-backed playbook helps you build a workplace people don't want to leave.
The Seven Factors
It comes down to seven factors, and every one of them is within your influence as a leader. In Stay Culture, you will learn how to:
Understand the seven factors that drive staying: the Deal, Peace, Seen, Fit, Growth, Table, and Fun Factors
Recognize the four kinds of stayers on your team right now (Strugglers, Safers, Stuckers, and Stakers) and coach each one differently
Run stay interviews and listening tours that surface why people stay, so you stop learning the truth from exit interviews
Use practical tools like the Deal Check, the Peace Audit, the Fit Conversation, and the Growth Conversation to find your culture's gaps
Handle departures with grace, because how people leave shapes why others stay
The cost of getting this wrong is staggering. U.S. businesses lose an estimated $1 trillion every year to voluntary turnover, and 42 percent of employees who left say their organization could have done something to prevent it.
The good news? None of the seven factors require a bigger budget before you can begin. Most of them just require you to begin.
Whether you lead a team of five or an organization of fifty thousand, Stay Culture gives you a research-backed, field-tested playbook for building a workplace where the right people want to stay, for the right reasons, for a long time.
THE state OF FUN at Work
Understanding what makes the best people stay
Only 1 in 4 long-tenured employees say their workplace is actually fun—yet fun turns out to be one of the most overlooked drivers of retention. In this companion research report to Stay Culture, the Ryan Leak Group surveyed 1,000 U.S. workers who'd stayed with the same organization for five-plus years, gathering over 116,000 data points on what makes work feel enjoyable rather than just tolerable.
The findings challenge the assumption that fun is a perk at odds with performance: employees who experience more workplace fun report higher happiness, stronger emotional attachment to their organization, and no drop in performance, while fun itself tracks closely with leader relationships, team health, autonomy, and clear expectations.
Download the full white paper for thirteen research-backed insights and practical recommendations any leader can use to bring more fun back into the everyday experience of work.
about
Ryan Leak?
Ryan Leak is a best-selling author, esteemed executive coach, and a highly sought-after transformational speaker. With an incredible reach of over 1 million people every year through his keynotes, Ryan's words have the power to transform lives. Each year, he dedicates his expertise and research to the growth of over 100,000 leaders, spanning the spectrum from Fortune 100 corporations to elite professional sports teams. While Ryan wears many hats, the ones he is most proud to wear are husband to Amanda and father to Jaxson and Roman.