What is the stickiness index, and why does it matter?
Stickiness Index is a single number that reflects how tightly an employee is attached to the organization. It doesn’t rely on annual surveys or emotional mood boards. Instead, it’s grounded in observable patterns: Consistency, contribution, learning pace, and internal movement. It measures the overall success of your Employee Value Proposition (EVP), the combined value you offer to an employee that makes external market options genuinely unappealing.
A high Stickiness Index indicates that you have not only reduced churn but have successfully designed an organizational experience optimized for deep engagement, continuous development, and transparent, equitable opportunity. Stickiness Index gives you an employee loyalty score. To truly know if you've improved employee stickiness, meaning people are choosing to stay and grow, you need metrics that reflect deep retention, not just a low quarterly exit count. This requires tracking specific KPIs and real behavioral signals.
Measuring stickiness: Key performance indicators (KPIs)
These core metrics move beyond simple turnover rates to track the health, engagement, and internal growth opportunities within your workforce.
- Retention rate: This is the inverse of turnover and provides the essential macro snapshot of overall workforce stability.
- Voluntary turnover: Focus specifically on the rate of people choosing to leave, particularly within high-potential groups and talent-critical roles. Losing these key players is the most damaging signal of poor stickiness.
- Internal mobility rate: Track the percentage of employees who successfully move into new roles internally. A healthy rate signals that growth opportunities are tangible and that your talent pipeline is robust.
- Skills growth rate: Measure the number of employees acquiring new skills that are explicitly tied to your company's progression tracks. This shows that people are investing in their future at your organization.
- Progression-readiness time: Calculate the average time it takes for an employee to hit all the criteria necessary to be ready for their next role. A shorter time indicates efficient development and motivation.
- Engagement vs. progression correlation: Analyze whether your high engagement scores actually correspond with career progression. If engaged employees are still stuck or quietly leaving, a deeper form of disengagement might be lurking beneath the surface.
- Invisible contribution index: Develop a custom metric to track non-headline contributions (like mentorship, knowledge sharing, or system improvements) and measure their movement into formally recognized outcomes. This ensures "quiet contributors" feel valued.
By measuring these carefully, HR leaders shift from “Wow they left” to “We saw the risk and intervened.” This is how the stickiness index becomes operational.
How do you build a stickiness index that works in real life?
All efforts should focus on one goal: increasing the value users get from the product and making that value available more frequently.
- Nail the onboarding to achieve the 'Aha!' moment
The first few hours or days are critical. If a user doesn't quickly understand the core value of your product, they will leave and never return. Design an ultra-simple onboarding process that guides the user directly to the 'Aha! Moment'- the point where they first realize the product's main benefit.
- Focus on core value and solve a daily problem
The stickiest products are those that become indispensable tools, solving a genuine problem or fulfilling a daily need better than any alternative. Regularly audit your features. Are users coming back for a specific feature? Double down on it and make it flawless. Don't waste effort on features no one uses.
- Personalize the user experience
A generic experience is forgettable. A personalized one feels tailor-made and essential. Use customer data to tailor the product. This includes personalized recommendations, custom dashboards, location-based features, or content suggestions based on past behavior.
- Close the feedback loop and show progress
Users stick around when they feel heard and when they see their investment of time is paying off. Implement easy ways for users to give feedback (in-app surveys, simple ratings). More importantly, actively communicate when you release updates or fix bugs based on that feedback. Use elements like progress bars, streaks, or badges (gamification) to show the user's progress and investment in the product.
- Create 'switching costs' Through data and integration
Switching costs are the difficulties a user faces when trying to move to a competitor. These are non-monetary barriers that anchor the user to your product. Encourage users to build up valuable content or data within your product (e.g., playlists, personalized settings, contact lists, financial history). Integrate with other tools they use daily. By constantly measuring, analyzing, and improving your product based on the Stickiness Index, you can move from simply having users to building a loyal, highly-engaged community that powers long-term growth.
Wrapping it up:
If your culture doesn’t believe in growth, root talent then it’s just another HR initiative that will fade. Stickiness lives in the intersection of systems and culture. Treat the stickiness index not as a metric to track but as a condition to cultivate. Make your skills-based ladders and invisible contribution systems visible, valuable and aligned. Use platform intelligence like peopleHum to operationalise the logic.
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