High-performing employees are leaving companies
We’re seeing consistent signals across industries, your top talent is walking out the door. Not because they want to leave, but because they don’t see a path up. The Workday Global Workforce Report shows that promotions dropped in 10 of 11 industries. Internal hiring is also down by 8%. These stats reflect systems that are not evolving fast enough for ambitious people. If you’re leading a company that’s scaled or scaling quickly, this is a core business risk.
When high performers can’t move up internally, they look externally. That’s a failure of internal opportunity design. People don’t disengage overnight; it happens slowly when they can’t see how to grow, contribute, or lead. If you’ve got someone outperforming their peers and you’re not giving them a next step, you’ve already started losing them. For executives, the problem becomes amplified, these are the people who drive revenue, keep projects on time, and ship solutions. You’re not replacing them easily.
The market can’t be relied on to refill these roles. Global hiring pipelines are struggling. While we innovate across technologies, talent systems have remained largely reactive. Instead of optimizing workloads, upskilling, or realigning titles to actual impact, companies have created bureaucracies that slow down mobility. Look at the numbers. Last year, 75% of industries were dealing with increased attrition among top performers. This year, it’s 100%. That’s saturation.
If you’re focused on long-term performance and value creation, this is the moment to reevaluate how you design career progressions inside your company. Invest in the people already generating value. Make the career path obvious. Don’t let high performers guess what’s next. Show them. Build with their future in mind.
Hiring external talent to replace high performers is increasingly time-consuming and challenging
Filling talent gaps is taking longer, more than 50% of open roles sit empty for 30 days or more. And 25% are unfilled for over 60 days. That kind of lag hurts operations no matter how good your planning is. When high performers leave, you’re not just filling a job. You’re looking for someone who can match experience, execution speed, and cultural alignment, fast. That’s rarely available on short notice.
The hiring market today isn’t built to move quickly at quality. Even companies using deep tech stacks for recruiting are falling short. You’re not just seeing delay because of poor sourcing. You’re also competing with multiple companies for fewer candidates at the top end. In technical and operational roles in particular, candidates aren’t just evaluating salary, they’re looking for growth, a sense of ownership, and strategic clarity. If you’re not offering that, top-tier candidates move on.
This makes a strong case for improving retention. Relying on external hires to replace critical roles every quarter isn’t sustainable. The cost of vacancy is one thing, but the cost of onboarding, resetting internal collaboration, and realigning decision-making, those are real productivity losses.
Here’s the actual fix: treat internal talent as the starting point, not the fallback. Build systems that make it easier for people already at your company to step into growth roles, not harder. Internal mobility keeps experience in-house while reducing your dependency on a slow, competitive hiring environment. It’s faster, cheaper, and usually way more effective. Most companies know this. Few execute on it well. This is where the opportunity is.
Employee distrust and concerns over ambiguous AI strategies
You can’t lead in tech, or anywhere else, if you lose the trust of your team. Right now, a large portion of the workforce is uneasy about how artificial intelligence is being rolled out inside companies. That’s a major problem. According to Workday’s data, 44% of employee comments about AI and strategy in internal surveys were negative. This isn’t subtle feedback. It’s a clear indicator that employees are disconnected from leadership’s intentions and aren’t seeing the long-term role they’re meant to play in an AI-driven workplace.
AI adoption is meant to enhance capabilities and drive efficiency. But when strategy isn’t clearly communicated, or when AI feels imposed rather than integrated, people start to disengage. If employees believe AI is here to replace rather than support them, they instinctively pull back. That kind of distrust shuts down innovation. People stop collaborating, they stop offering ideas, and growth stalls. The result is friction, not just around AI adoption, but across projects that require initiative and creativity.
This resistance isn’t coming from a place of laziness or fear of new tools. It comes from a legitimate lack of clarity. Leadership teams often talk about AI in general terms, cost savings, automation, market scalability. Employees, though, are asking a different set of questions: “How does this affect my work?” “Will I still be essential in a year?” “Is there a strategy, and do I have a place in it?”
If you’re leading at the executive level, and this disconnect exists in your organization, it’s on you to close it. That means transparency, not in buzzwords or optional town halls, but in real positioning over how AI changes workflows, impacts roles, and opens up new opportunities. Every successful transformation requires buy-in. You only get that when people understand where you’re going and why they matter in getting there.
Transparent communication, clear career paths, and human-centered AI integration
If you’re serious about building a company that performs through volatility, you can’t separate operational strategy from talent strategy. The report from Workday makes it clear. Companies that retain their high performers are the ones investing in three things: real communication, structured career growth, and smart integration of AI that supports the strengths of their people, not sidelines them.
These aren’t HR checklists. They’re foundational pillars for scale. Strong communication prevents misalignment. It gives your team context and direction. Structured growth keeps your best people focused on progress, not job-hunting. And AI, when applied with intention, can elevate your team’s output by removing routine tasks and surfacing insights they can act on quickly. But none of this works unless leadership shows up and makes the structure visible.
This is where many organizations fall short. They roll out initiatives without context, or delay promotions without explanation. They implement AI tools without clarifying how tasks, roles, and responsibilities will evolve. That creates friction. And friction leads to attrition. When high performers feel unnecessary or ignored, they leave. Always.
You don’t need hundreds of programs to fix this. What you need is alignment. Be direct about what AI will and won’t change. Design career paths that reflect your company’s actual future rather than outdated job ladders. And communicate often, especially when things are moving fast. According to Ashley Goldsmith, Chief People Officer at Workday, “AI may be rewriting the rules of work, but it cannot replace the value of engaged, motivated people.” She’s right. That value compounds when you combine clarity, opportunity, and tools that actually help.
Allyson Skene, Vice President and Global Vision & Experience Evangelist at Workday, also pointed out that companies are losing their top talent not because of competition, but because internal growth has stopped and AI strategies don’t translate into real gains for employees. That should be a wake-up call. If your high performers can’t connect their future to your strategy, they’re not staying. And the market won’t slow down just because you’re figuring it out.
Companies that fail to align talent development with evolving workforce dynamics risk long-term performance loss
The rules are shifting, fast. AI is expanding what’s possible, and workforce expectations are changing at the same time. Companies that treat talent development as a background function, instead of a strategic priority, are going to fall short. That’s not speculation. It’s what the data is already showing.
Executives should look at what this really means: if your top talent doesn’t see growth, or doesn’t trust the direction of your organization, you lose people who drive performance. What follows is lower productivity, slower innovation, and stalled execution across key areas of the business. You can’t build sustained momentum if your internal engine keeps breaking down.
That’s why aligning talent development with how your organization is evolving is not optional, it’s essential. That includes building out reskilling programs, creating faster paths to advancement, and involving employees in strategic conversations around AI integration and role evolution. It’s not about hand-holding, it’s about showing where they fit in the picture now and five years from now.
Most executive teams have access to good data, they just don’t use it well. You’ve got tools like Workday Recruiting, Peakon Employee Voice, and People Analytics pulling insights across employee behavior, sentiment, and performance. Combined with global survey data from Hanover Research, capturing input from business leaders and job seekers across North America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, you’re looking at some of the clearest pattern recognition on the market. When the signals point to disengagement and attrition, the trend doesn’t reverse without deliberate effort.
When leadership ties employee development to business outcomes, not as a benefit, but as a design principle, engagement returns. Innovation speeds up. AI works harder because people know how to apply it in their daily execution. That’s the play. Because retaining top talent through every shift, especially this one, is how you protect your performance. That’s what scales.
Key takeaways for decision-makers
- Stalled internal mobility is triggering top talent exits: Leaders should prioritize clear career progression and internal promotion paths to retain high performers and avoid weakening their leadership pipeline.
- Replacing talent is getting slower and more expensive: Executives must invest in internal development to reduce reliance on slow and costly external hiring cycles that can disrupt operations and delay strategic initiatives.
- Unclear AI strategy is eroding employee trust: Leadership should communicate a focused, people-centered AI roadmap to reduce skepticism, maintain engagement, and accelerate adoption of new tools.
- Retention depends on clarity, opportunity, and relevance: Companies must align communication, career growth, and AI implementation with employee needs to unlock performance and reduce attrition risk.
- Misaligned talent development threatens long-term performance: To stay competitive, decision-makers must make talent growth a strategic lever, backed by data, reskilling, and evolving workforce dynamics.
