By: Audrey Denise B. Cachuela
An employee tells you they’ve accepted another job, and the first thing you wonder is whether you can match the offer. Maybe a bonus would do it. Brian Watkins, founder and president of BTOM Consultants, approaches employee retention through the work that happens long before that conversation, and his Great Manager Operating System centers on the behaviors managers need to build engaged, accountable teams.
Before you start negotiating, ask what working here was like before the other company called. Pay complaints deserve a real hearing, and so does everything that happened around the paycheck, especially the problems that sat unresolved. A counteroffer can close a salary difference. An employee who also wants relief from a manager who waves off concerns or changes expectations without explanation will need a separate response to that.
Most employers get to this question after the resignation letter is already on the desk, and by then the answers can’t change much. Asking earlier, when the person has no offer in hand yet, gives you room to improve employee retention and deal with problems before they turn into reasons to leave.
Employee Retention Begins With Understanding Why People Leave
Of 717 people who had voluntarily left an employer in the previous 12 months, 42% believed their manager or organization could have done something to prevent their departure (Source: Gallup, 2024). That’s roughly four in ten, which makes “could we have prevented this?” a fair question to ask after every exit.
The number reflects how employees judge their own departures, so treat it as a reason to look into what happened on your own team and what you could have addressed sooner. If you’ve been wondering how to reduce employee turnover, that digging is where it starts.
Additional compensation or benefits was the most common response among leavers who said their exit could have been prevented, and it made up 30% of the actions they named (Source: Gallup, 2024). Pay carries enough weight that it’s easy to read every resignation as a salary conversation.
Start by asking what happened. Then look at the paycheck and the daily working experience together, and give each one its own attention. Ask when the employee first thought about leaving and what changed around then. Find out whether they ever brought the issue to anyone. What comes back tells you how long the concern was around and whether anybody had the chance to respond.
Workplace Culture Shows Up in a Manager’s Decisions
Resignations often trace back to small, ordinary moments. Take a hypothetical employee whose manager welcomes questions in meetings and reacts impatiently when someone challenges a deadline. That employee learns to weigh every question against the reaction it might get.
Now imagine two colleagues who make the same mistake. One gets a patient walkthrough. The other hears about it in front of the whole team, with everyone watching how they react. Before anyone writes another statement about respect, an employer should ask why the same standard produced such different treatment.
These examples make workplace culture something you can point at. Watch how managers assign work, explain decisions, respond to mistakes, and handle disagreement, since a company value only becomes real to an employee when it shows up in a decision that affects them. The way a manager reacts to a challenged deadline shows people what the culture looks like in practice.
Brian’s leadership materials come back to dignity, honesty, listening, and ongoing relationship building, and those ideas translate directly to the situations above. A manager can hold the work to a high standard while explaining the reasoning behind a deadline. When someone makes an error, the conversation can stay focused on fixing it.
Once an employee decides that speaking up costs too much, concerns go private, and the manager loses the early warning that makes a retention conversation possible. At that point the manager is guessing about who’s frustrated and which workloads have become unmanageable, and guesses rarely lead to the right conversation.
Manager Training Builds the Skills a Promotion Assumes
Managers deliver culture every day, and plenty of them step into the role with little preparation, which was Brian’s experience. His interest in manager training started with a difficult transition. He performed well as an individual contributor, got promoted to lead a team without adequate preparation, and pieced together what he needed from books, courses, podcasts, and conversations with experienced managers. That experience points to a distinction employers should make before any promotion. Teaching the work and coaching someone to improve at it calls for skills that deserve their own check before anyone gets a team.
Of managers entering management positions in the UK, 82% had received no formal management and leadership training (Source: Chartered Management Institute, 2023). That number covers the UK workforce specifically. Wherever you operate, you can ask what preparation your own managers get before they become responsible for other people. A useful answer names who teaches a new manager to explain expectations and give feedback, and where that manager goes for help when a situation gets difficult.
Training for frontline and middle managers can focus on observable behavior and leave room for practice, tools, and reflection, which is how Brian’s program works. A manager might practice explaining an expectation and listening without interrupting, then move on to feedback that makes the next step clear. Vague advice to communicate better turns into something a person can rehearse.
Management Habits Turn One-on-Ones Into Retention Tools
New behaviors need a regular place to show up, and the one-on-ones already on your calendar are the obvious spot. Those meetings turn into progress reports when the manager only asks whether the work is finished, so leave room to talk about what’s making it difficult.
Ask which part of the workload needs attention and stay with the answer. If two urgent assignments are fighting for the same hours, you decide which one wins. A task that needs a skill the person hasn’t learned yet calls for a plan to get them help.
Finish each conversation with a clear result: write down the action you agreed to take and bring it back at the next meeting. A written note keeps the commitment from resting on anyone’s memory and gives both people the same version of what was agreed.
Some issues stay unresolved. When that happens, explain what you tried and what’s still possible, so the employee knows where the concern stands and can stop wondering whether anything happened. Development belongs in these meetings too, starting with what each person needs to learn. If you’re after practical employee retention strategies for small businesses, one specific responsibility and the support to attempt it is a workable beginning. Keep every commitment inside what you can authorize, and hold off on talking about promotion until you have the power to grant one.
Managers Need Support From Their Own Managers
Every habit above takes time and authority a manager may not control, which means accountability has to reach above the person leading the team. Employers who want regular one-on-ones have to protect time for them. Managers asked to solve workload problems also need a clear list of decisions they can make on their own.
Lower manager engagement accounts for much of the downturn in global employee engagement since 2023 (Source: Gallup, 2026). Managers shape how employees experience the organization day to day, so when their engagement dips, everyone on their teams feels it.
That finding puts manager support at the center of any employee engagement conversation. It also argues against answering employee dissatisfaction by handing managers one more responsibility without checking their capacity, because a manager stretched across too many tasks has little attention left for a one-on-one.
Suppose a manager reports that the team can’t meet all its deadlines with current staffing. Senior leadership owns that call about resources, scope, or priorities, so the fix has to come from the people who control the budget. A practical way to find these limits is to ask managers where they get stuck and send each answer to whoever has the authority to resolve it. Leaders who do this quickly see how many of the team’s problems actually sit on their own desk.
Put Employee Retention Into Your Next Management Conversation
Retention improves through specific conversations with specific people, so pick one issue you can look into this week. There’s plenty in this article to act on, and a single issue keeps the job manageable. Maybe an expectation has drifted and needs clarifying. That kind of issue comes straight out of the situations described above, which makes it a realistic place to begin. Decide what the action is and who owns it, and put a follow-up date on the calendar. A small, well-defined commitment gives you and the employee something concrete to look at when that date arrives.
Then check whether the issue actually changed. That check shows whether your effort made a difference and what to adjust before the next one. If you want to improve employee retention through stronger management habits, book a conversation with Brian Watkins at BTOM Consultants this week. Bring one recurring team problem and explore how his Great Manager Operating System could help you practice the behaviors needed to address it.
