Noticed: What the Practices Keeping Their Best People Do Differently

Most people who resign after a long stretch are not running from anything. They just worked out that nobody was going to ask.

I have spent part of this month speaking to somebody who has been at the same practice for almost two decades.

He is good at his job. His firm knows he is good at his job. There has been no falling out, no crisis, nobody dangling a bigger number in front of him. By every measure a partner might use, he is settled.

He is currently interviewing elsewhere.

When I asked him what had changed he took a while to answer, which is usually the sign that the honest answer sits underneath the easy one. What he eventually said was that he could not remember the last time anybody had asked him what he wanted next.

Long service is not the same as being happy

Almost two decades on a payroll looks like loyalty from where the partners sit. From where he sits it has been years of getting on with it while everybody assumed he was fine, largely because he never said he was not.

That is the trap. The people who complain get attention. The people who quietly deliver get left alone, and being left alone is comfortable right up until the day it starts to feel like being forgotten.

I see this pattern in practice more than any other. Not unhappy people leaving. Unnoticed people leaving.

Money is usually the messenger, not the message

When somebody resigns, the exit conversation almost always lands on salary. It is the easiest thing to say and the hardest thing to argue with.

In my experience salary is rarely where the decision got made. It is where the decision gets explained.

I placed somebody earlier this summer who had spent a long time somewhere she felt invisible. Underpaid, certainly. She had also never raised it, and nobody had ever raised it with her. The pay gap was not the problem. It was the evidence of the problem, which was that nobody was paying her any attention.

She started her new job a few weeks ago. On her birthday she walked in and found cards and flowers on her desk. Two weeks in. Nobody there had known her long enough to owe her anything.

She posted about it, and the tone told you everything. She had not expected to be treated like that. Somebody had written her birthday down during onboarding and made sure it happened. It cost the practice almost nothing.

Set that against what it costs to replace somebody six months in. Advertising, fees, partner time, client disruption, a handover that never quite happens properly. Then set it against a bunch of flowers.

The first fortnight decides more than the first year

Most of the leaving decisions I see get made inside the first three months.

Not because the work turned out to be wrong. Because the start was thin. No desk ready. No introductions beyond the immediate team. A vague first week where nobody quite owns you and you spend a lot of time trying to look busy.

People read that. They read it as an accurate signal of how much they matter here, and they are usually right.

A good first fortnight is not complicated. Somebody named as responsible. A plan written before the person arrives rather than assembled on the morning. Introductions beyond their own corridor. A proper conversation at week two about how it is going, asked in a way that allows for an honest answer.

That is a couple of hours of planning against a hire you have just spent several months and several thousand pounds securing.

The conversations that cost nothing

If you did only four things this year, I would pick these.

Have one honest career conversation a year with everybody, including the people who never complain. Especially those people.

Run pay reviews because they are due, not because somebody handed in their notice. A rise offered after a resignation buys you months. The same rise offered before one buys you years.

Know what your people are studying and ask how it is going. Study support is the single most common reason I hear for a candidate turning down an otherwise good offer, and knowing somebody has an exam next Tuesday costs nothing at all.

Ask your long-servers what they want next. Ten years in, fifteen, twenty. Not on an appraisal form. Properly, with time to hear the answer, and with some willingness to act on it if the answer is inconvenient.

Why busy practices skip all of it

Because none of it is urgent.

There is no deadline on asking somebody how they are getting on. Nothing breaks that day if you do not. In a practice where everybody is carrying a portfolio and a filing deadline, the work with a date attached always wins.

I understand that better than usual this summer. I have spent the last fortnight recovering from an operation and working in short bursts, and the first things to slide were exactly the things nobody was chasing me for.

That is the honest reason retention gets neglected. Not indifference. Just the ordinary gravity of a busy week, repeated for a couple of years, until somebody hands in their notice and everybody is surprised.

What to do before September

August is quiet. Diaries are thinner, deadlines are further away, and half the office is somewhere with better weather.

Use it. Pick the three or four people you would least like to lose and put a proper conversation in the diary with each of them before the autumn starts.

Ask what they want next. Ask what would make them stay. Then listen without immediately explaining why it is not possible.

A note on this week

It is World Breastfeeding Week, which is more relevant to this piece than it might first appear.

Returning from maternity leave is one of the clearest tests of whether a practice notices people. Where somebody can feed or express in private. Whether the first few months back are genuinely worked out or simply assumed. Whether anybody asked before she arrived, or left her to raise it herself.

The return is the pressure point, not the leave. That is where the decision about staying tends to get made.

Final thought

The practices holding on to their best people are not the ones paying the most. I see the numbers every week and it genuinely is not that.

They are the ones where somebody has decided that noticing people is part of the job, rather than something to get to once things calm down.

Things never calm down.

If you are bringing somebody in this autumn and you want the first fortnight to actually land, our onboarding toolkits are built for exactly that: protalent.eu/onboarding-toolkits