What Really Drives Workplace Commitment And Why Some ABA Organizations Are Getting It Wrong
I work with people who chose this field because they believed in something. They loved the science. They connected with the clients. They felt called to the mission.
And somewhere along the way, they lost the will.
Not because they stopped caring. But because the system asked them to prove their commitment in ways that slowly erased them.
- Can you handle inconsistent schedules?
- Can you absorb disrespect and call it professionalism?
- Can you carry emotional weight without the authority or support to actually help?
- Can you keep saying yes while your body, your finances, your relationships take the hit?
That’s not commitment we’re measuring. That’s basic needs. And we’re surprised when people can’t meet them forever.
What Joe Mull Sees Happening
Joe Mull has spent 13 years studying why people stay and why they leave. He founded Boss Hero School, wrote Employalty, and synthesized over 200 studies to answer one question: where does commitment actually come from?
On a recent episode of The People Contingency podcast, he shared something that stopped me: “People do a great job when they believe they have a great job.”
Not when they have the right personality. Not when they’re more resilient or more passionate. When they believe they have a great job.
And here’s the shift he’s watching: “The era of trying to hire the best person for the job is over. What we have to do now is create the best job for the person.”
That’s not just a nice idea. It’s what the data shows. When people are supported by their supervisors, their peers, and their organization, they become more committed. They reciprocate. They stay voluntarily.
Not because they’re more loyal by nature. Because we made it possible for them to have the space to give back.
The Internal Scorecard Nobody’s Talking About
Joe describes something he calls the “internal psychological scorecard”—something every employee in every job is walking around with.
They’re asking three questions:
How does this job fit into my life?
Compensation matters. But so does workload. So does flexibility. So does whether the structure of the job allows someone to live a life alongside it.
We can’t keep piling on caseloads and calling it a test of commitment. We’re testing how long someone can operate under unsuitable conditions. And then we act surprised when they can’t do it indefinitely.
Joe shared an example from a healthcare clinic struggling to staff their front desk. Instead of trying to fill five 40-hour positions, they restructured to seven or eight 34-hour positions—still full-time with benefits. People could get their kids off the bus. They had morning time open. Turnover dropped. And even though they’re paying for more positions, the cost savings from reduced turnover made it a net positive.
That’s what happens when you ask: What would make this the very best place to be a front desk coordinator?
I’ve seen this work in ABA too—without changing pay or adding perks, just by strengthening the first line of defense: the people shaping hiring decisions, expectations, and placement.
In one organization, we retrained recruiters on how to evaluate and set expectations during hiring. Instead of screening for enthusiasm and “open availability,” they were trained to assess real-life fit: schedule constraints, transportation reliability, tolerance for cancellations, and what supports someone would need to succeed.
The result was a 70%+ reduction in RBT turnover when looking at 90-day retention.
Not because people suddenly had more “commitment”—but because fewer people were hired into a job structure that didn’t fit their lives.
Is the work meaningful?
People want purpose. They want to belong. They want to use their strengths in ways that matter.
But here’s where we go wrong: we substitute mission for sustainability.
“This is about the kids.”
“If you really cared, you’d find a way.”
And then we ask them to:
- Prescribe hours they know aren’t right
- Run sessions following protocols they don’t believe in
- Push for inappropriate programming because that’s what insurance will cover
- Spend more time babysitting than actually changing lives
- Appease parents or insurance companies instead of doing what’s right
- Feel like a dollar sign instead of someone making a difference
Caring about the work doesn’t pay rent. It doesn’t reduce a 60-hour week to something manageable. And it doesn’t replace systemic support with self-sacrifice.
Joe says the shift happens when we move people from “I have to do this” to “I want to do this.” That requires aligning their role to their strengths. Giving them a sense of purpose. Creating belonging.
But in our field? It also requires letting them actually do the work they were trained to do.
What’s my relationship with my boss?
The research here is overwhelming. The quality of the manager-employee relationship predicts retention more than almost anything else.
Here’s what Joe pointed out: when we ask supervisors why someone quit, they point to money 81% of the time. But people actually left for money less than 20% of the time.
Leaders get it wrong. Not because they don’t care. But because they’re drowning too—undertrained, under-resourced, and tasked with squeezing productivity out of a broken system.
I’ve personally seen BCBAs take more than $10K less per year because the level of support and balance was there. We know this from OBM and applied behavior analysis—the environment shapes behavior. Including the decision to stay or leave.
What Young Workers Are Actually Saying
Here’s a statistic Joe shared that changed how I think about generational complaints:
The phrase “no one wants to work” has appeared in North American newspapers every single year for 120 years.
It’s the most persistent generational trope in human history. There’s even a name for it: the illusion of moral decline.
Joe says young people aren’t lazy. They’re not entitled. Most of the time, they’re just young. And what they need more than anything is patience and mentoring.
But what do most leaders not have time for anymore as workloads explode? Patience and mentoring.
What younger workers are rejecting isn’t work itself. It’s overwork. It’s being treated like a commodity. Joe put it this way: “If I feel like a commodity to be leveraged where my company or my boss does not care about the impact my job has on my quality of life outside of work, I’m a flight risk. And it doesn’t matter what generation I’m in.”
When Someone Won’t Stop Calling Off
I asked Joe about something organizations ask me all the time: What do I do when people keep calling off?
What he described aligns with what we know from applied behavior analysis.
People take action when they hold three beliefs simultaneously:
- There’s a consequence for not taking the action
- There’s a benefit to taking the action
- They’re capable of taking the action
But before you talk about consequences, he said, lead with curiosity.
“The first conversation I would advise a leader to have is to sit down and say, ‘Hey, I noticed this pattern. Are you okay?'”
Maybe they’re limited by the bus schedule. Maybe they’re facing childcare issues. Most people care about doing a good job and are willing to try hard. But if we approach with judgment instead of curiosity, we miss what’s actually happening.
And then he said something which echoes what I preach while consulting: instead of mandating policies from the top, co-create them with your team.
“Pull your team together and say, ‘This can’t continue the way it is. How do we solve this?’ You start that dialogue and you shape systems with everybody’s input.”
What Turnover Actually Costs
In ABA and autism care, turnover isn’t just an HR problem. It’s a clinical reality.
Clients lose relationships with people they trust. Families have to start over—re-explaining their child, re-building rapport, re-starting progress. Teams get reshuffled. The workload gets heavier for whoever’s left.
And then we wonder why morale is low.
When we accept high turnover, we’re also accepting:
- Institutional knowledge walking out the door every 6-18 months
- The best people carrying unsuitable loads until they break
- A reputation that makes recruiting harder and more expensive every cycle
- Extraction as the operating model
Joe says organizations with these levels of turnover are “ripe for disruption, ripe for innovation around what that employee experience looks like.”
But the biggest mistake companies make? They rely on leaders to tell them why employees left. And leaders get it wrong most of the time.
We have to collect real data. We have to ask real questions.
The Two Questions That Change Everything
Joe talks about becoming what he calls a “destination workplace.” And it starts with two questions:
1. What would make this the very best place to be a [position title]?
Not just competitive. The very best. That forces us to look at what it’s like everywhere else and figure out what we can do differently.
Maybe it’s compensation. Maybe it’s flexibility or workload. Maybe it’s professional development or career pathing. Maybe it’s just hours.
2. What would make this the very best place to be [person’s name]?
Early in someone’s tenure, get to know them. Find out what’s important to them. Understand how this job fits into their life. Work to align the position to their strengths. Try to evolve the role to be a good fit for them.
Not just for the job. For the person.
What We Can Actually Do
This isn’t about band-aids. We can’t fix structural problems with wellness programs and pizza parties.
But we can start with honest questions:
- Are we structuring roles that humans can actually sustain long-term?
- Are we giving people authority along with responsibility?
- Are we investing in developing managers, or just promoting our best clinicians and hoping they figure it out?
- Are we designing systems that protect commitment, or systems that consume it?
Here’s what I’ve learned: people want to stay when staying doesn’t require them to abandon themselves.
That’s not a radical idea. That’s just reality.
We can keep blaming generational differences and market conditions. Or we can recognize that commitment isn’t something people owe us. It’s something we earn by creating conditions where people can do great work and still remain whole.
The Choice We’re Making
Doing nothing is not neutral.
Every day we accept turnover as inevitable, we’re making a choice.. We’re choosing short-term convenience over long-term success.
But here’s what I believe: most of us didn’t get into this work to build systems that consume people.
We got into this because we believed we could do better. For our clients. For their families. For each other.
That option is still available to us. We just have to be willing to build it.
Want to hear the full conversation?
Listen to Joe Mull on The People Contingency podcast. He walks through practical frameworks for creating the conditions where commitment actually grows—including the questions to ask, the conversations to have, and the systems to build.
“Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.” – Joel A. Barker