With decades of experience helping organizations navigate change, HRTech expert Ling-Yi Tsai specializes in modernizing the systems that define an employee’s journey. Today, we’re exploring why the old metrics for retention are failing and what a more resilient, progress-oriented future looks like. We’ll discuss the shift from measuring past engagement to tracking forward momentum, how to create a sense of growth in flat organizations, and the practical steps to replace the dreaded annual review. This conversation will also delve into how to build transparent systems that link effort to opportunity and how technology can either erode or rebuild trust in that process.
Leaders often turn to engagement scores when retention drops. If engagement is just a signal of past events, what forward-looking metrics should they track instead to measure employee progress, and how can they operationalize this data?
That’s the core of the problem, isn’t it? We’ve become addicted to engagement as a comfort metric, but it’s like trying to drive by only looking in the rearview mirror. It tells you about the crash after it’s already happened. The future isn’t about finding a new magic number to replace the engagement score. It’s about shifting our focus from feelings to evidence. Instead of a metric, we should be building a continuous, living record of an employee’s capability. This means observing concrete behaviors in the flow of actual work. Operationalizing this involves managers documenting small, tangible achievements and skills demonstrated in real-time, creating a trajectory of growth you can see. It’s not another survey; it’s a dynamic profile of what a person is ready for next, built from traceable signals rather than subjective yearly narratives.
With traditional career ladders becoming obsolete in flat, fast-moving organizations, how can a manager create a visible sense of progress when promotions are infrequent? Please share a tangible, step-by-step approach for recognizing growth.
This is where managers can make the biggest difference, by making progress feel real even when a new title is months or years away. The key is to stop thinking of growth as just climbing a ladder and start seeing it as building a portfolio of capabilities. A practical approach is to implement a regular cadence of small, job-realistic challenges. First, the manager identifies a small test of judgment or skill that fits within a normal work week—it’s not a massive side project. Second, the employee completes it. Third, and this is crucial, the manager provides specific, written feedback that is stored. Over a few months, these records accumulate. You’re no longer relying on a vague memory of someone’s performance; you have a documented, visible trajectory. This collection of proven skills becomes its own reward. It shows the employee, “Look how far you’ve come,” and gives them tangible proof that their effort is compounding into real expertise.
Since annual reviews can feel slow and retrospective, some are exploring a cadence of small, job-realistic challenges. Can you describe what this looks like in practice for a technical role versus a creative one, and how that evidence is used?
Absolutely. The beauty of this approach is its adaptability. For a software developer, a challenge might be to refactor a specific function for better performance or to resolve a tricky bug within a set timeframe. The feedback would focus on the elegance of the solution, code cleanliness, and efficiency. That evidence is stored, and over time it proves they’re ready to lead a technical design for a new feature. For a creative role, like a copywriter, a challenge could be to draft three different headlines for an A/B test on a new ad campaign. The feedback would analyze tone, clarity, and brand voice. This record of successful creative choices becomes the evidence that they are ready to own the messaging for an entire product launch. In both cases, the accumulated evidence is no longer a story—it’s a dataset. It’s used to de-politicize opportunity, allowing managers to decide what someone is ready for next based on a proven track record, not just on who is most visible.
Retention is often framed as a navigation problem where people leave if they can’t see what good work buys them. What is the most critical first step an organization can take to make its system of consequences and opportunities more transparent?
The most critical first step is to stop trying to fix the problem with communication and start by fixing the system’s legibility. You can’t just publish a slogan about growth; you have to build the mechanism that makes it visible. So, the first move is to introduce a simple, consistent way to observe and record progress. It doesn’t have to be a massive, company-wide system overhaul overnight. Start with a single team. The manager must commit to replacing vague check-ins with this cadence of small challenges and documented feedback. This begins to forge the first link in that broken chain between effort and opportunity. When an employee sees their good work on a small task result in a specific, written acknowledgment of their growing skill, the system starts to feel less like a black box. That single, tangible piece of evidence is more powerful than any all-hands meeting about career paths because it’s real and it’s personal.
When companies automate performance evaluation, it can erode trust if the logic feels like a black box. How can technology be designed to make decision logic explainable in plain language, thereby rebuilding trust in the system?
This is such a critical point because technology can easily become a faster way to make the same old mistakes. To build trust, the technology cannot be an automated judge; it must be a transparent record-keeper. Instead of a tool that ingests data and spits out a performance score, it should be designed as a platform that visualizes the journey. It should clearly display the series of challenges an employee has completed, the specific written feedback from their manager on each one, and the skills demonstrated. The logic becomes explainable because it’s not a hidden algorithm; it’s a simple aggregation of evidence that both the employee and manager have co-created. Trust is rebuilt when the system can answer the question “Why?” not with a score, but by showing the series of observable moments and tangible achievements that led to the conclusion. It’s about using technology for clarity, not for opaque judgment.
What is your forecast for the future of performance management and its link to employee retention over the next five years?
Over the next five years, I believe the line between performance management and retention strategy will completely dissolve. Companies will finally accept that retention isn’t a benefits problem or a wellness problem; it is a progress problem. The annual review will be widely seen as an outdated ritual, and the focus will shift entirely to creating systems of continuous navigation and opportunity. The most successful organizations will be those that make progress visible and reward it in real-time, whether through new projects, specialized training, or increased autonomy—not just promotions. Consequently, employee engagement will cease to be a metric we chase. Instead, it will become what it always should have been: the natural, effortless side effect of a fair and legible system where people know that their best work truly matters and moves them forward.