[miggol]

For this kind of qualitative research I stand by the subjectivity of the questions asked as more informative. Retention is in itself a subjective construct.

Sure, you want "number go up" on average, but staying at a company for two years means something completely different to a restless jobhopper compared to a stability-minded employee with a family. Likert scales are perfect for this because they let respondents be their own judge of how well this job is retaining them.

Same goes for the perception of the value of their stock, but I admit it would be really nice to have the absolute value here in addition to the subjective scale to detect an interaction effect.

I do agree that the "actively looking elsewhere" label on the graph for the retention question is laughable.

[kqr]

> Sure, you want "number go up" on average, but staying at a company for two years means something completely different to a restless jobhopper compared to a stability-minded employee with a family. Likert scales are perfect for this because they let respondents be their own judge of how well this job is retaining them.

But the organisations designing their equity comp structure don't really care about "how well people feel the job is retaining them", even if that could be measured on a valid and reliable subjective scale. Organisations will be optimising for employee churn rate, which is the direct inverse of... you guessed it! Expected length of employment.

If the scale accidentally prioritises stability-minded people over job-hoppers, then (all else equal) that's kind of fine because that is also a way to reduce churn. Now, practically speaking all else will not be equal and that's why we ask more than one question on a questionnaire like this!