The ongoing debate about return-to-office mandates is a symptom of a bigger issue. Most companies treat employees as a cost to be managed rather than customers who choose how much of their personal energy and effort to bring to work every day. Your organization likely knows a lot about customer value: There is also tremendous value to be generated when employees love their work — or to be lost when they are frustrated or exasperated by it.

The concept of employee centricity isn’t new, but the way organizations have pursued it has been largely simplistic and problematic for various reasons. For example, most employee engagement surveys simply ask workers what they want. Meanwhile, consumer researchers use sophisticated analytics tools, like conjoint, max-diff, and regression analyses, to gain much deeper insights.

A case in point: In a global survey of more than 11,000 employees, BCG Henderson Institute researchers asked a direct question: “Why would you take a new job?” Not surprisingly, the respondents typically referred to functional aspects of work, such as pay, benefits, perks, and hours. Then the researchers looked deeper, using correlations between satisfaction and retention, to determine what factors predict whether someone is likely to stay in a job. With this more rigorous analysis, emotional factors, such as feeling respected, valued, and supported, dominated the top five. Pay dropped all the way to No. 15 in importance among the list of 22 functional and emotional attributes of work. In other words, pay matters when someone is already looking to leave — it affects where people apply for a new job. But if you want to prevent people from starting that job search in the first place, emotional needs matter most.