Main Street Macro: The hidden truth about promotions

I really enjoy research that tells me something new, something I wasn’t expecting. And that’s exactly what my team delivered last week in Today at Work, our quarterly research publication.

In this latest issue, we learned that promotions, while rare, entail some flight risk. Employers should be aware that when you promote good people it increases their marketability.

We also found that the lower the job requirements, the greater chance the employee will leave after a promotion. And the higher the rank, the greater the flight risk. Managers will sometimes use a promotion to try to advance to the next level externally.

All of this helps us understand how employees look at promotions, but what should employers do about it? To help answer that question, we created the Employee Motivation and Commitment Index, which tracks how workers feel about their jobs.

For more on these findings, here’s the September issue of Today at Work.