I’ve spent enough years in and around professional services to know what the exit interview usually says, and what it usually leaves out.
The form says “career progression” or “better package.” What people mean, more often, is something quieter and harder to put on a leaving card: I came here to do interesting, valuable work, and I spent eighteen months doing things a machine should have done.
That’s the bit firms keep missing. Across the sector, attracting and keeping good people has become the number one challenge, ahead of growth, ahead of AI, ahead of almost everything. And the firms winning that race aren’t simply the ones paying most. They’re the ones where flexibility, purpose and a sense of being trusted with real work have become genuine deal-breakers, not perks.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth for anyone running a practice: your most talented associates and managers are also your most mobile. They have options. And the thing that pushes them isn’t always a dramatic blow-up. It’s the slow accumulation of low-value grind, the reconciliations, the document review, the chasing, the formatting, that leaves no time for the work they actually trained for. We hire brilliant people and then quietly bore them.
I want to challenge a reflex I see a lot. When retention slips, the instinct is to reach for the compensation lever or the wellbeing webinar. Both have their place. But neither touches the daily experience of the job. If someone spends two-thirds of their week on tasks they find meaningless, no amount of fruit in the kitchen fixes that.
This is where I’d gently reframe the AI conversation. So much of it is framed around replacing people, and no wonder professionals feel uneasy. But the firms I find most interesting are using it for almost the opposite reason: to give people their week back. To strip out the repetitive, low-judgement work so that the judgement work, the client conversations, the thinking, the craft, is what fills the day. Used that way, it becomes one of the strongest retention stories a firm can tell.
The reason it so often fails isn’t the technology. It’s that change gets done to people rather than with them. A tool lands, nobody explains why, trust never forms, and within a quarter it’s quietly abandoned. People only believe in a tool when they can see it’s on their side. That belief has to be built, deliberately, with honesty about what’s changing and what isn’t.
That’s the work I care about most, and it’s the work this firm was built to do, not the software for its own sake, but helping a leadership team and their people move through change without leaving the culture behind. We start with people, then bring the technology to them.
So before the next round of leavers, I’d ask one question of your own firm: if you mapped where your best people actually spend their hours, how much of it is the work they joined you to do?
If you’re not sure of the answer, that’s usually the most useful place to begin. Our AI Readiness Assessment starts exactly there, with your people and their time, not a product demo. Worth a conversation.
