Practice Managment
Summer 2025

by Liz Hillman
Editorial Co-Director

ASOA Annual Meeting keynote speaker provides strategies to attract and keep talent

Everyone’s quitting. No one wants to work anymore. COVID caused it. 

These are all myths, according to workforce engagement expert and leadership trainer Joe Mull, who served as the keynote speaker at the 2025 ASOA Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, California. 

It’s not that people don’t want to work, it’s that people don’t want to work for you, Mr. Mull said. His keynote address focused on “Employalty^TM,” which is not a mashup of the words “employee” and “loyalty.” Rather, it’s “employer,” “loyalty,” and “humanity.” Mr. Mull shared the conditions for becoming what he called a “destination workplace,” a place where the jobs within your organization are an employee’s “dream job.” 

“If you want people to commit to you, you have to commit to them,” Mr. Mull said. “You have to create for them a life they can’t get anywhere else.” 

The myths

Before you can get to the conditions to create a destination workplace, Mr. Mull first wanted to dispel the myths. 

Myth 1:Everyone’s been quitting.Mr. Mull provided data that showed while 134 people voluntarily left their jobs since 2022, there has also been 44% more hiring in the U.S. in every industry category. There’s been more hiring than quitting, he said. “It’s not that everyone has been quitting—everyone has been switching,” he said. Why? For their quality of life. “What’s happening right now is that they are upgrading their quality of life. Now we have to ask what’s causing this.” 

Myth 2:COVID caused it. Mr. Mull said it isn’t COVID, rather workloads have gone up. It’s not just the hours; it’s the amount, constant connectivity, expectations, and consolidation of many responsibilities into fewer and fewer people. He said that employees are getting away from work less and are not taking vacations for various reasons (everything from fear of falling behind to lack of disposable income to needing to bank time to care for family members in the future). Mr. Mull said there is also a “wages reckoning” happening in the U.S. Work is up, time away from work is down, and the economics are not working for people. “COVID didn’t cause this,” Mr. Mull said. “COVID took an already exhausted workforce and broke it.” 

Myth 3:No one wants to work anymore.This isn’t the case, Mr. Mull said. Rather, it’s “no one wants to work for you.” “We want to blame people instead of looking at the jobs and how those jobs allow [or don’t allow] for a reasonable quality of life.” When it comes to this myth being applied to the younger workforce, Mr. Mull said those newer in the workforce need patience and mentoring; they’re young. But no one has time for patience and mentoring anymore. “You have to flip the mindset that there’s a staffing shortage. There is no staffing shortage, there’s a great jobs shortage,” he said. 

The conditions for a destination workplace

“The era of simply trying to hire the best person for the job is over,” Mr. Mull said, adding that to become a destination workplace, you have to create the best job for the person.  

Three are three conditions that create a destination workplace. 

Ideal job

The ideal job is about what the employee gets in exchange for what they do. This includes compensation (benefits and wages), workload, and flexibility. “On a continuum between adequate and generous, do we lean more toward generous than adequate?” Mr. Mull questioned of employer compensation packages. As for workload, is the employee drowning in a sea of too much to do or are they able to operate at a reasonable capacity? 

“Social science tells us that a sweet spot seems to be about 80% of our capacity, 80% of the time,” he said. With these percentages, if something tricky comes up, we have the capacity to deal with it temporarily. 

Flexibility is the number one most requested workplace benefit in the world, Mr. Mull said. It includes when, where, and how people work. “It turns out that when you give people influence over some aspect of when, where, and how they work, commitment goes up, retention goes up. When I am in my ideal job, that job fits into my life, like a puzzle piece snapping into place,” Mr. Mull said.

Meaningful work

Meaningful work is about what I do, what I spend my time doing, and who I’m doing it with, Mr. Mull said. Meaningful work includes purpose (believing one’s work matters), strengths (the work uses a person’s talents, gifts, skills), and belonging (a feeling of acceptance and being a celebrated member of the team). 

“This is why you see organizations spending more time teaching leaders how to be better storytellers, getting better at recognition, and connecting the dots between even the most mundane tasks and duties of someone’s job and the difference it makes in the lives of others,” Mr. Mull said.

Great boss

“ If working for you positively impacts what matters most to them, then you’ve cracked the code. … The path to retention and commitment runs squarely through quality of life.”

Joe Mull

An employee’s direct supervisor is the single most influential factor in the employee experience, Mr. Mull said. “We have a boatload of data that tells us that that’s true. We know that approximately 75% of people who quit a job indicate that their boss is part or all of the reason why.” In addition, 65% of the workforce in the U.S. cites dealing with their boss as the most stressful part of their job and says that this person has as much impact on an employee’s mental health as their partner or spouse. 

There are three things that make a boss great: trust, coaching, and advocacy. Trust needs to be both granted and earned among the boss and the employee as a two-way street. Coaching involves, instead of telling employees things, asking them things. “What options do you see? What does your gut tell you? What do you remember about the meeting? Where could you go to find that information? What would you do if I wasn’t here?” That’s coaching, Mr. Mull said. 

The third dimension is advocacy. Being someone’s advocate means you’re operating in their best interests. “You know something about and care about who they are as a person. You care about the ways in which their life is impacted outside of work by their work. You’re also advocating for them at work,” Mr. Mull said.

On top of these, there is one other thing that employers need to do to create and maintain a destination workplace. This is to understand that what is most important for employees in their life is not necessarily their work. Work matters because it’s how you provide for the things that mean the most to you, Mr. Mull said. 

“If working for you negatively impacts what matters most to them, you’ve got no shot at being a destination workplace. You’ve got no shot at unlocking commitment,” Mr. Mull said. “If working for you positively impacts what matters most to them, then you’ve cracked the code. Then you’ve figured it out. … The path to retention and commitment runs squarely through quality of life.”