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A new study finds that some workplaces did a better job than others at limiting employee turnover during the COVID pandemic. Specifically, researchers found that units that had fostered a sense of "collective engagement" among employees before the pandemic saw less employee turnover than units that were less successful at creating that sense of engagement.

"Sometimes people leave a job due to changes at the workplace that the employer has control over," says Patrick Flynn, co-author of a paper on the study published in theJournal of Applied Psychology, and an assistant professor of management in North Carolina State University's Poole College of Management.

"That could be due to changes in management, pay, benefits, and so on. A lot of research has been done on the effect that these internal factors have on employee retention and turnover.

"However, there's less work on what employers can do to mitigate employee turnover related to external events, which an employer has no control over," Flynn says. "These external events can be localized changes, such as a competitor offering an employee better pay.

"But these external events can also be national, or even global, in scale—such as the onset of the COVID pandemic. For this study, we used the pandemic as an opportunity to collect data on the impact that a large external event had on employee turnover."

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