What’s the secret to getting employees back to the office? Basing your company in Austin! The Texas capital has America’s highest RTO (return to office) rate, thanks in large part to its quick, painless commutes. (Or maybe it’s just thanks to Elon Musk forcing everybody back to their cubicles?)

Keeping your employees: Don’t resign yourself to the Great Resignation.

Father’s Day: Our psychologist weighs in on balancing work and dadhood.

Jurassic Park: Learn some dino-size business lessons for your big launch.

Remember when you had to stay at a company for one year or else it’d look terrible on a resume? Now 80% of young workers feel it’s OK to quit before six months, and that level of turnover can seriously harm your business.

With economic turbulence in recent weeks, which saw layoffs hit tech, the Great Resignation could end. Still, nearly 50 million employees quit their jobs last year — the most in U.S. history — and 4.4 million did the same in February 2022. Aliza Knox, a former Google and Twitter executive and author of Don’t Quit Your Day Job: The 6 Mindshifts You Need to Rise and Thrive at Work, has a few ideas for convincing them to stay.

Why are employees so restless now?

Knox: There are more opportunities available. It’s a tight job market and people are taking the chance to move around. … There’s also quitagion — if half the people at work are quitting, “What’s the matter with me? I should do it, too!” There is definitely an effect of the pandemic and reprioritizing.

The other issue is that Gen Z is becoming a much larger proportion of the workforce — about 25% — and they are coming up with a different attitude.

So, how do companies keep their top talent from leaving?

Knox: Retention is the new black. They are going to have to be more flexible, whether that’s hours at work or commuting or workstyle. … There’s a bunch of McKinsey studies and research that suggest even more important than flexibility is that the company and the boss care about [employees] and are invested in them.

A small company has more opportunity there — you can do a lot personally from thoughtful and useful feedback to help them develop — but if you’re a large company, the CEO can trickle that [attitude] down.

Workloads are a big reason for quitting. How can managers avoid the temptation to reach out after hours?

Knox: If you have a system outage, that’s hard to [avoid]. … But you can compensate for it, and certainly the recognition and thank-yous and “can each of you take this much time off?”

To prevent burnout, you need to model some boundaries. [Be] a leader who says, “I need to exercise every day, so there is an hour and a half in my calendar to go to the gym,” or “I go home at 6 o’clock, don’t send emails” — whatever kind of modeling you can do … Don’t make people feel they have to choose between the job and leaving.

Don’t Quit Your Day Job by Aliza Knox is available now.

Stitcher: “It’s a way of getting all the different podcasts I listen to — news, business, TED Talks …”

MetaMask: “For holding crypto.”

Diligent Boards: “That’s for all the board papers, all our board transactions.”

(Source: Shutterstock)

Dr. Eden King is a Rice University professor of psychology and former president of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

To all the dads out there: Happy Father’s Day! You might receive kid-made crafts and treats on Sunday, and you deserve it. The evidence clearly shows that when dads are involved in their families — when they take paternity leave, share household tasks, and participate fully in pickups, drop-offs, teacher conferences, and after-school activities — everyone wins.

Why Dads Make a Difference

Kids with highly involved dads (and father figures) have better psychological and physical health, better relationships, and higher academic achievement than kids whose dads “mail in” fatherhood. Likewise, co-parents of highly involved dads have better health, job success, and family satisfaction than their counterparts.

How Dads Can Jump In

Long-standing gender expectations have largely placed the burden (and the opportunity) of parenthood on women, who perform as much as twice the household labor in heterosexual couples where both partners work full time: planning and cooking meals, taking kids to doctors and dentists, and coordinating enrichment activities like camps, sports, and tutoring.

This load is both physical and mental, so don’t wait for your co-parent to ask for your help. Pick one (or two or three) of these responsibilities and offer to take it off your partner’s to-do list. Fathers’ engagement is correlated with their own relationship longevity and life satisfaction, so being a good dad is also good for you!

Celebrate fatherhood every day and reap the benefits with your family.

(Source: Universal Pictures)

With Jurassic World: Dominion finally uniting Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard with original Jurassic Park stars Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neill, and Laura Dern, it’s a perfect time to ask: Can the 1993 blockbuster teach us practical business lessons?

Learning from other enterprises’ mistakes is helpful, and no other company has botched its opening as badly as the InGen Corp.

• A delayed launch beats a botched launch. Don’t hold yourself to an arbitrary deadline if your product isn’t ready to go. CEO John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) was in such a rush to open the park that he neglected to correct those little issues that invariably pop up, such as a rampaging T-Rex eating the guests.
• Don’t blow your budget on a party. Starting a business usually requires more capital than the owner projects. A big, flashy grand opening — remember all the gourmet food at the Visitor Center? — can leave you without funds for other necessities, like a dependable electrical system.
• Keep an eye on your tech team. Programmers can be so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they don’t stop to think if they should! Are their elaborate ideas streamlining things or overcomplicating ’em? Hammond let tech guru Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) get so out of control that he stole company assets. Fortunately, one of the dinos alertly stopped the theft.

Written by Marty Beckerman, Dr. Eden King, and Brian Hill. Comic by John McNamee.