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Strategic Intelligence
Deep Dive
The quarter that wants to quit
24% of UK workers are planning to leave their jobs, and another 14% intend to follow within two years. Filed under HR, that's a morale problem. Filed correctly, it's a continuity risk and most of it is still reversible.
The numbers come from Culture Amp, drawn from 97 million employee surveys across 8,200 companies, 816 of them in the UK. This is not a mood poll. It is the largest available dataset on who intends to walk, and it says a quarter of the workforce has one foot out of the door.
Why this isn't an HR story
When someone resigns, the salary is the recoverable part of the loss. You can buy another salary. What you cannot buy back: the customer relationships that live in one person's inbox, the unwritten knowledge of how things actually get done, and the judgment that only comes from having watched the last three mistakes happen.
Gallup puts the direct cost of replacing an employee at one-half to two times their annual salary higher for senior roles. But the direct cost is the visible tip. The invisible cost is the customer who "goes quiet" three months after their contact left, the process that silently stops working, and the second resignation that follows the first. Departures are contagious in exactly the way engagement surveys never capture.
The variable you actually control
Buried in the same dataset is the finding that should reorganise your week. The biggest controllable driver of whether people stay isn't pay, it's the quality of the management and leadership above them. Employees working under great managers and leaders report 94% commitment to stay. Under poor ones, the figure is 19%.
And when leavers explain themselves, the top reason is career growth (41%). Compensation trails far behind (10%). People aren't leaving for money. They're leaving because nobody has shown them what staying leads to.
Read those two findings together and the conclusion is uncomfortable but useful: retention isn't owned by the board, the finance function, or the annual pay review. It's owned by every person in your business with at least one direct report and it's decided in ordinary conversations, months before the resignation letter.
The mistake almost everyone makes
Treating the 24% as a pay problem and reaching for the salary budget. The honest counter-case first: intention surveys always overstate action, and not everyone who plans to leave will.
But the asymmetry is the point, a retention conversation costs an hour; a wrong guess about who was serious costs up to two salaries and whatever they were carrying. You don't need the 24% to be precise. You need to know which of your five are in it.
You can buy another salary. You can't buy back the judgment that came from watching your last three mistakes happen.
BEFORE MONDAY - ASK THESE
- Who are the five most load-bearing people in the business, not the most senior, the ones holding what isn't written down?
- For each: who is their understudy, and what leaves with them if there isn't one?
- Which manager has the most reports and the least support? The 94/19 gap makes that person your single biggest retention lever.
- When did anyone last ask your best people what growth would look like here?
Key Takeaways
- 24% of UK workers plan to leave in the near term; a further 14% within two years (Culture Amp).
- Replacement costs run 0.5–2x salary (Gallup) and the unrecorded losses are larger.
- Manager and leadership quality moves intent-to-stay from 19% to 94% - the biggest controllable variable.
- Career growth (41%) beats pay (10%) as the reason people go. The fix is a conversation, not a counter-offer.
- Exits being planned now are mostly still reversible. They stop being reversible when the offer arrives.
The brief they never gave you
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