Is it worth matching an offer when someone resigns?

Sometimes, for a critical person at a critical moment. But go in knowing what it buys. If the reasons for leaving were progression, the relationship with the manager or a sense of being overlooked, a higher salary leaves all of them in place, and the same conversation tends to return within a year.

What is a stay conversation?

A short, regular one-to-one in which the manager asks what keeps the person in the job, what would make them look elsewhere, and what they want to be doing in a year. It surfaces the reasons people leave while they can still be acted on, instead of in an exit interview when they cannot.

Our younger staff move every two years. Is that simply generational?

Partly it is the market, and partly it is how early careers are managed. Rapid turnover among younger professionals usually tracks three things a manager can influence: no visible progression, feedback that is too rare, and work whose purpose is never explained. None of them needs a budget.

Retaining staff in Singapore without winning on salary

A manager in a Singapore firm learns that one of their best people is leaving. The new employer is offering more money, and it is a good firm. The manager wonders whether they could have matched the salary.

Usually they could not have, and usually that was not the real question.

The comparison you will not win

Singapore’s labour market is tight for qualified people, and pay for those profiles is benchmarked across the region. For almost any role, somewhere in the city there is an employer willing to pay more — often a short commute away. A retention strategy built on outbidding everyone else runs out of money before it runs out of competitors.

That is not a reason for despair. It simply moves the question to the things that are not decided by the market: how the job feels, where it leads, and how the person is treated by the one individual they deal with every day.

Why people actually leave

When people who have left are asked honestly why, the money is rarely the whole answer. The same few reasons recur:

No visible next step. Not a promise of promotion — a credible picture of what they will be doing, learning or responsible for in twelve months.
Feedback that is too rare. Hearing nothing for months and then receiving a rating once a year.
Recognition that arrives too late, or only in the annual review.
A working relationship with the manager that has quietly become costly.
No control over their own time, particularly when a competitor offers flexibility the current employer treats as an exception.

Every item on that list sits within a manager’s reach, and none needs a budget. The two-day course on non-financial motivation levers works through twelve of them.

The counter-offer trap

The resignation letter arrives, and the reflex is to match the offer. It sometimes works for a few months. But if the real reasons were on the list above, a higher salary leaves every one of them in place, and the person — now paid more, and still without a next step — often has the same conversation with another employer within the year.

The useful moment was earlier.

Ask before they decide

The single most effective habit is also the simplest: a regular conversation about why the person stays. Not an appraisal and not a project update — ten minutes, every few months, with three questions:

What keeps you in this job?
What would make you start looking elsewhere?
What would you like to be doing in a year?

The answers are occasionally uncomfortable, and that is the point. They tell you what an exit interview would have told you, while there is still time to act on it. Building those conversations into the rhythm of the year, rather than saving them for the appraisal, is covered in The manager-leader toolkit.

Younger professionals are not a separate species

A common conclusion in Singapore firms is that younger staff simply move every two years and nothing can be done about it. Part of that is the market. But the pattern follows the same three levers as everywhere else: a visible prospect, frequent feedback, and work whose purpose has been explained. Managers who work on those three tend to find that “generational” turnover is less generational than it looked — the subject of Non-financial motivation levers and team coaching.

None of this guarantees that a good person stays. Some will leave for reasons that have nothing to do with you, and some should. The aim is narrower and more achievable: that nobody leaves for a reason you could have fixed and never heard about.