Chris Gash/theispot.com
A recent battle for AI talent illustrates how difficult it is for companies to retain key employees. In 2025, OpenAI’s stock-based compensation averaged roughly $1.5 million per employee — unprecedented for a pre-IPO company — yet OpenAI still experienced high-profile defections. Rivals such as Meta were reportedly extending offers in the hundreds of millions of dollars for top AI talent, prompting OpenAI to issue multimillion-dollar one-time retention bonuses and to relax equity vesting requirements twice in a single year. The result was an escalating bidding war with no clear ceiling and no guarantee of success.
That dynamic has not ceased. Rather, the competition for talent has intensified and expanded, with AI companies recruiting not only elite researchers but also senior executives and business leaders from across the technology sector.
The AI talent wars are an extreme case, but they illustrate a broader problem across industries: The most valuable employees are also the most mobile. In sectors such as artificial intelligence and consulting, intense competition reflects rapid technological change that makes certain capabilities suddenly scarce. In health care and skilled trades, retention pressures stem from long-standing workforce shortages. Construction companies are facing a growing labor gap driven in part by retirements, even as demand is rising with the expansion of large-scale infrastructure and data center projects. Across all of these contexts, when an employee leaves, their employer loses embedded knowledge, client trust, and innovation capacity along with them.
Yet most companies respond to this challenge in a tactical, episodic fashion: a counteroffer here, a culture initiative there, or a noncompete added to a contract. These one-off measures address symptoms rather than causes, and, as OpenAI’s experience shows, pay-based competition alone can trap companies in a race they cannot win.
Traditional approaches to understanding the problem focus on factors that make employees move, but what is missing is a systematic framework for understanding why they stay.1 Our recent article in the Journal of Management investigates the factors that limit employee mobility away from an employer — what we call employee mobility barriers.2 Drawing on research from multiple disciplines, we have synthesized these barriers into a practical architecture that managers can use to retain talent more deliberately — and compete for new hires more effectively — in today’s talent wars.
Understanding Employee Mobility Barriers
Whenever an employee considers leaving, they navigate a set of frictions that make moving harder and staying more attractive. These barriers range from the concrete — noncompete agreements, unvested stock, pension accrual — to the more intangible, such as the satisfaction of meaningful work, the promise of career advancement, and social ties that make teamwork productive and fulfilling. Together, such forces shape whether a move feels possible and worthwhile or not worth the disruption.
Barriers differ along two dimensions: level and control. Some barriers operate at the individual level, such as an employee’s career stage, personal preferences, or priorities. Others stem from organizational systems and practices, including social ties, employment contracts, or career development systems. Still others are rooted in broader societal factors, such as visa restrictions or labor market conditions.
Control is the degree to which employers can influence the mobility barrier and employee experiences. Employers can directly shape factors such as compensation, job design, and employment contracts, but they have less influence over others. For instance, employee attributes such as age or personality can be “shaped” only at the point of selection, while social ties and networks emerge over time and are difficult for a company to directly engineer. Other barriers, such as location preferences, regional labor-market conditions, or visa and licensing requirements, are largely outside an employer’s control.
Perceptions also play an important role in how mobility barriers function. How employees interpret such barriers they face and the opportunities available to them elsewhere can influence their decision to stay or leave. For example, an employee who believes that they have better career development opportunities with their current employer than with a competitor may choose to stay, regardless of whether that belief is accurate.
Employee Mobility Barriers in Practice
In practice, employee mobility barriers and companies’ effectiveness at retaining talent can vary across industries, companies, roles, and individuals. What keeps an AI engineer from moving may differ from what retains an industrial salesperson or a veteran nurse. Stock options are a powerful retention mechanism in the tech industry but largely irrelevant in the public sector or education. An entry-level employee building their initial professional network and reputation may experience very different barriers than a more senior employee with strong ties to the organization. Managers need to understand which barriers matter most in their specific contexts and for their employees so that their retention interventions are effective.
This context dependence also informs a crucial strategic principle: The best mobility barriers are those that are difficult for competitors to replicate. Compensation alone is a weak barrier in this regard because it can trap companies into bidding wars that better-resourced rivals can win, as OpenAI’s experience demonstrates. In contrast, Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI engineers, has emphasized employee autonomy and AI safety and has achieved higher retention rates than its rivals as a result. Similarly, Periodic Labs lured more than 20 engineers away from Meta, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind, despite offering lower pay, by promising a distinctive work environment focused on scientific discovery — closer in spirit to traditional research labs than the typical Silicon Valley firm is. Culture, mission, and working conditions can be more durable barriers precisely because they are embedded in how people work and interact — and thus far harder for competitors to imitate or re-create.
Understanding employee mobility barriers is also valuable for attracting new hires. An effective job offer should consider the barriers a candidate faces in leaving their current role. Sometimes that means offering what a candidate would be giving up. That could mean convincing a candidate that future colleagues and work conditions will be as good as what they are leaving behind, for example. Other times, it means offering something that the current employer cannot match, such as a path for career growth or a unique project. Thinking about hiring through the lens of mobility barriers turns recruiting from a pitch into a more intentional, targeted conversation.
An Architecture for Managing Employee Mobility Barriers
The varying levels and degrees of managerial control of employee mobility barriers make developing a coherent, companywide talent management strategy challenging.
To help leaders navigate this complexity, we developed an architecture of strategic modes that characterizes how companies manage employee mobility barriers, based on the two dimensions introduced above: the level of the barrier (individual, organizational, or societal) and the degree of control the employer has over it (high or low). (See “Architecture of Strategic Modes for Managing Employee Mobility Barriers.”) While firms may rely on or encounter a portfolio of different mobility barriers, the architecture of strategic modes focuses on how those barriers are managed.
Together, these dimensions define four strategic modes: For any given mobility barrier, its level and the degree of employer control determine how companies should manage it — either by directly shaping the barrier (proactive) or by adjusting other organizational practices (reactive); and either leaving it to individual managers to design and implement (delegated) or rolling out organizationwide policies (centralized).
When mobility barriers operate at the individual level and are outside the employer’s control —such as personal ties to colleagues or family circumstances — the appropriate response will be reactive and delegated (upper-left quadrant). The right move here is to empower managers to recognize these situations and respond with accommodations where appropriate, such as making schedule adjustments or redefining a role to better fit an employee’s circumstances or needs.
When mobility barriers operate at the individual level but are within the company’s control, the employer can take a proactive and delegated approach (upper-right quadrant). In these cases, managers actively design roles and work experiences — through job design, meaningful project assignments, or customized development opportunities, for example. In this quadrant, managers have the discretion to shape these elements based on the needs of their teams.
In contrast, when mobility barriers operate at the organizational or societal level and are outside the company’s control, the employer must respond in a reactive and centralized manner (lower-left quadrant). In these situations, businesses cannot directly control the focal barrier. Instead, they need to act indirectly by reconfiguring how work is organized or by introducing complementary practices that allow them to operate effectively under the constraints. Accommodating existing mobility constraints may involve reallocating work across teams, restructuring collaboration patterns, or redesigning how tasks are distributed.
Finally, when mobility barriers operate at the organizational level and are within the company’s control, the employer can take a proactive and centralized approach (lower-right quadrant). This mode captures the types of organizationwide programs and policies that companies typically associate with retention efforts. However, although these system-level interventions are important, they represent only one part of a broader set of strategies that organizations must use to manage mobility barriers effectively. No company manages in only one quadrant. Effective management layers responses across all four modes, combining tailored individual-specific interventions with companywide systems and applying different approaches to different types of mobility barriers.
Managing Employee Mobility: A Toolkit for Managers
Understanding the architecture of employee mobility barriers can inform how employers manage them. To develop a systematic approach, managers should take these three steps:
1. Inventory employee mobility barriers. Effectively managing employee mobility is not about implementing a single policy, program, or perk. Rather, it requires a systematic approach that combines multiple mobility barriers and management strategies. As a starting point, managers should develop an inventory of the barriers that matter for current employees and for the talent that the company wants to attract. This inventory must be customized to different functional areas, the needs of managers responsible for specific teams, and, in some cases, strategically important employees. It should also be reviewed and updated over time as business conditions, labor markets, and employee priorities change.
2. Evaluate for importance and impact. Once an inventory has been done, managers should assess it along two lines. First, they should determine which mobility barriers matter most in their specific context; not all barriers carry the same weight in shaping employee retention or attraction. For example, stock-based incentives may be highly effective for senior technical talent, whereas embedded social networks may matter more for midlevel managers.
Second, managers should identify gaps in the current mix of barriers and consider how different barriers reinforce or substitute for one another. By understanding where the most significant barriers lie, companies can focus their resources more effectively, avoiding both over- and underinvestment while identifying opportunities to strengthen complementary barriers. Like the inventory, this assessment should be treated as an ongoing exercise that evolves with business conditions, labor markets, and employee priorities — not as a one-time audit.
3. Match management strategies to mobility barriers. With a clear understanding of which barriers matter most, managers can determine how best to respond to them. The appropriate approach depends on which aspects of mobility the company can directly shape and which it cannot.
When companies can control mobility barriers, they can often deploy them strategically through organizationwide systems and policies. For example, companies often design structured career pathways, job-rotation programs, or stock-based incentives to retain employees. Salesforce’s AI-powered internal mobility platform, Career Connect, illustrates this approach: By providing personalized skills recommendations, highlighting internal career pathways, and suggesting upskilling opportunities, it helps employees find growth opportunities within the organization so they will not seek them elsewhere. Such a proactive, companywide initiative can help organizations retain employees by supporting internal career advancement.
Organizations can also proactively deploy mobility barriers in response to changing conditions. When the Federal Aviation Administration faced critical air traffic controller shortages in 2025, driven by retirements and its inability to hire and train replacements quickly enough, it responded with systemwide retention bonuses aimed at keeping experienced controllers from leaving. Although prompted by external pressures, that response reflects the deliberate use of centrally managed barriers organizations can proactively deploy.
In other cases, mobility barriers arise from conditions an organization cannot directly influence, particularly at the individual level. Here, effective management depends on managerial discretion and flexibility. A delegated or decentralized approach works in such cases because the managers closest to employees have the best understanding of their needs and can design effective retention strategies if empowered to do so. Such delegated actions may involve designing customized job roles, offering flexible schedules, or providing targeted professional development opportunities. For example, when Goldman Sachs’s international vice chairman, Richard Gnodde, decided to relocate from the U.K. to Milan to take advantage of Italy’s tax policy, his role was adapted so he could continue working for the company from a different location. This type of intervention illustrates how organizations can respond to mobility barriers outside their control by adapting the employment relationship at the individual level.
Taken together, these examples highlight a broader pattern: Centralized approaches are most effective when companies can shape organizationwide mobility barriers directly, while delegated approaches are better suited to barriers rooted in individual circumstances. In practice, barriers often operate at both the individual and organizational levels simultaneously, so an integrated approach to managing them is called for. For example, businesses may combine formal, organizationwide initiatives with locally driven efforts that managers and employees help shape. At financial services provider Synchrony, for instance, employees have launched many of the firm’s volunteer and community programs, illustrating how decentralized initiatives can strengthen social ties and organizational identification. Such efforts reinforce employees’ connection to the employer while they operate alongside more structured organizational practices, enhancing mobility barriers that cannot be fully designed from the top down.
Effective management in these cases requires active coordination between centralized programs and local managerial discretion. That may require significant training and communication, along with a shared understanding among managers at different levels of hierarchy and across the organization. Realistically, organizations may need to be highly selective about the set of barriers for which such intensive coordination is used. By combining central control with delegated discretion, organizations can programmatically deploy mobility barriers while remaining flexible to individual employee needs.
The intensifying AI talent wars highlight how challenging it has become for companies to retain and attract mobile employees. As competition for highly skilled workers grows, technological change is making valuable skills more portable, while remote and hybrid work are weakening some of the geographic and social barriers that once kept employees in place. At the same time, advances in AI are reshaping which forms of knowledge will remain company-specific: AI agents are beginning to take on tasks previously performed by humans, altering sources of retention advantage in ways that are still unfolding.
Against this backdrop, the underlying logic of employee mobility barriers becomes even more important. Rather than relying on any single retention tool, organizations must understand the full range of barriers shaping employee decisions to stay and match their strategies accordingly. What varies across organizations is not whether mobility barriers matter but which ones matter most and how effectively they are managed. This holds true regardless of how the specific barriers evolve. The managers best positioned to navigate these shifts will treat talent strategy as a dynamic system that requires them to continuously identify relevant barriers, evaluate their impact, and adjust responses over time. Organizations that adopt this approach will be better equipped not only to retain critical talent but also to adapt their retention strategies as conditions evolve.