Regrettable Retention: Why Keeping Everyone Is a Risk

What you need to know: retention is not automatically a win. Gartner calls the failure mode “regrettable retention,” keeping employees who are comfortable but not committed. First Watch, the #1 Most Loved Workplace® two years running, builds its culture around telling the difference.

1. Committed employees show what researchers call organizational citizenship behavior and affective commitment. Comfortable employees do not.

2. First Watch scores highest on the SPARK dimensions of Respect and Killer Outcomes, both tied directly to this distinction.

3. The company’s core habit is not a policy. It is 150 hours a year spent listening to more than 1,500 employees directly.

4. A second, smaller habit shows up at the manager level: a genuine daily “good morning” and a real question about how someone is doing.

5. The company’s own framing: there is no such thing as survey fatigue, only inaction fatigue.

The goal is not maximum retention. It is retaining the people who are actually committed, and building a culture specific enough that the people who are not tend to select themselves out.

Most companies treat retention as an unqualified win. Keep the number high, declare success. First Watch, along with researchers at Gartner, would push back on that.

The concept is called regrettable retention: keeping employees who are comfortable in a role but not genuinely committed to it. Best Practice Institute’s own research draws a related distinction between organizational citizenship behavior and affective commitment on one hand, what the research calls voluntary discretionary effort, and simple comfort on the other. The employees who show up, do the minimum, and never leave are not actually a retention success. They can be a quiet drag on the people around them.

First Watch, the first company to rank #1 Most Loved Workplace® two years in a row, was built to make this distinction visible rather than invisible. The company’s founder set a standard from day one that was less about process and more about character: smart instincts, genuinely collaborative, and above all, kind. That standard became a filter. People who were not a fit for it tended to stand out quickly, long before First Watch had any of the formal tools it uses today.

As the company scaled into new states and further from its original core, it had to do something it had not needed to do before: write the culture down. What had been an intuitive, felt thing, “you first,” became a documented mission, vision, and set of values, specifically so new employees entering unfamiliar markets could understand it without having to feel their way into it the way earlier employees had.

The company’s primary mechanism for staying accurate about its own culture is gatherings of roughly two dozen employees from every regional area across the country; unscripted, 90-minute conversations about what is working and what is not. Cumulatively, that has meant more than 150 hours logged and more than 1,500 employees heard from directly.

What First Watch has learned from those conversations is not what most companies expect. The most common answers are not about big-ticket perks. They are small: a manager who says good morning every day, and means it. A manager who asks how someone is doing, and actually listens to the answer. In an hourly, frontline-heavy workforce of roughly 18,000 people, that single daily interaction is frequently the difference employees point to when asked why they stay.

There is a specific line the company uses internally that captures the logic: there is no such thing as survey fatigue, only inaction fatigue. Asking a question and doing nothing with the answer is what erodes trust, not the asking itself.

Meanwhile, the company’s growth has not slowed. “For the past few years, First Watch has been on a growth tear,” according to Restaurant Dive. 

For HR and culture leaders, the practical distinction is this: a high retention number is not automatically good news. The question worth asking is whether the people staying are staying because they are genuinely connected to the work, or simply because leaving feels harder than staying. First Watch’s answer has been to keep asking, out loud, every year, and to act on what it hears.