Is This a Consultant Problem?

Most retention problems are not consultant problems. They are a manager who needs a different conversation, a role that has not changed in four years, or pay that is below market and known to be. Those have owners inside the building, and the fix is cheaper than a proposal. This page is for deciding which kind you have, and it will tell a good share of readers to keep their money.

Five questions decide it. Answer them below and the page will say where you stand and what to do next, with the finding each answer rests on.

What a consultant cannot do for you

There is no study showing that hiring a retention consultant reduces turnover. There is not much showing that most retention interventions do, either: our own reviews grade the evidence for stay interviews as insufficient, for exit interviews as limited, and for retention bonuses as mixed. Outside help does not change the state of that evidence.

What it can change is narrower, and it is the list this page is built on: whether the problem gets diagnosed from data rather than guessed from exit interviews, whether the case for a change you cannot make from your seat gets made to someone who can, and whether anyone owns the work for long enough to matter.

The five things that decide it

Scope: one person, or a pattern

One resignation is a data point, and the right response is a conversation, not a contract. A pattern is two or more exits in a year that share a team, a manager or a tenure band. Departures also travel. In a registry study of 121,883 finance professionals, more than 30% of a person's peers leaving within six months was associated with a 23% higher probability that they left too. When a cluster is forming, the question has stopped being about one person.

Seat: can you change what it points at

The most common single driver in the retention literature is the direct manager; Gallup attributes at least 70% of the variance in team engagement to the manager. If that manager reports to you, this is yours to fix. If the driver is a pay band set two levels up, a headcount you cannot add, or a workload that is the business model, the fix needs authority you do not have. The useful product of outside help, in that case, is often the case that gets it.

Diagnosis: data, or exit interviews

Exit interviews are the wrong instrument to diagnose with. In the case study on this site, every departing employee managed the conversation to avoid burning a bridge, and pay is the safest reason to give. If your read on the cause comes from exit interviews alone, you do not have a diagnosis yet. Turnover by team, tenure and manager, and a stay interview run by someone other than the manager, are where a diagnosis starts, and you can do both yourself.

Tried: you did the obvious thing and nothing moved

This is the strongest signal on the list. The obvious things have weak evidence on their own. Across all eligible teachers in a randomized trial, a retention bonus produced no detectable effect on retention. The evidence behind engagement surveys is a correlation whose causal direction the authors themselves left unresolved. If you raised pay, ran a survey or paid a bonus, and turnover did not move, your problem is more particular than the advice you have been reading. That is exactly the situation outside help is for.

Owner: someone with budget and two quarters

This one overrides the others. The exit-interview case study found that changes made as a result of the data collected were negligible, and the author put it down to nobody being able to analyse the findings and carry them to a decision maker. A consultant's report lands in the same place if nobody owns what comes after it. No owner, no consultant. Get the owner first.

When you do not need one

• It is one person. Have the conversation, with someone other than their manager if the manager might be the reason. The stay interview questions are built for it.
• You know the factor and you can change it. Change it, and measure your own turnover for two quarters before deciding it did not work.
• You cannot say what it is costing you. Size it with the calculator and your own numbers. The popular figures are weaker than they look: the widely quoted 33% of salary is an estimate its source adopted for calculation, not a measured finding. If the number is small, the fix should be too.
• It is too early to tell. If you changed something in the last quarter, wait for the second one. Turnover moves slowly and the data lags.

When you do

• The fix is above your seat. A pay structure, a headcount, a manager you cannot move, a workload that is the business model. What you need is the case, made with data, to the person who can decide.
• You tried the obvious thing and it did not move. The advice you have been reading assumes a problem you do not have.
• It is a pattern you cannot diagnose. The data is not yours, or does not exist, and the exit interviews are all you have.
• The work is in finding who to act on. In the one-company case study on this site, a targeted set of actions touching about 18% of employees reduced predicted leavers from 41.5% to 24%, in a simulation rather than an observed outcome. The point stands either way: the effort is in finding the 18%, and that is work most teams cannot staff.

What to ask before you sign anything

• How will you diagnose it, and what data do you need from us? If the answer is a survey and nothing else, read our grade on engagement surveys first.
• Who owns the change after you leave, and which of our people do you need, for how long? An answer that names nobody inside your organization is the negligible-action failure with a fee attached.
• What will you measure, and what is our baseline? If they cannot say, you will not be able to tell whether it worked.
• Be skeptical of a retention figure in the pitch. A vendor's percentage is a customer's before-and-after, not a measurement, and it does not separate the consultant from everything else that changed in the same period, including the labour market.
• On fees: we hold no verified data on what retention consultants charge and will not guess. Size what is at stake with the calculator, then compare.

What happens if you take the diagnostic

The diagnostic scores nine factors against cited research and shows which is heaviest on your team. If you unlock the full breakdown, you tell us your industry, company size and region, and you consent to hear from retention consultants we work with. If there is a fit for your industry and region, we make one introduction by email. We do not sell your details to anyone else, and you can withdraw at any time; the privacy policy says how.