Harmonics

4 Realistic Retention Strategies for HR Leaders in 2026

This article was originally published June 2018. It was substantially updated in May 2026 to reflect hybrid work, AI, and how employee expectations have shifted.

Eight years ago I wrote about how retention was the number one challenge facing HR leaders. It still is a challenge, but the rules have changed. Hybrid work, AI’s pressure on early-career roles, and a generation of employees who treat their career as a portfolio rather than a ladder have all rewritten what “retaining people” actually means. Pay rises and ping-pong tables won’t carry the weight they used to.

Here are four strategies that work in 2026, drawn from our coaching work with HR teams across Irish multinationals and indigenous businesses.

Manage the “I want it now” mindset — without dismissing it

It’s easy to caricature early and mid-career employees as impatient. The reality is more useful: people now expect their career to keep moving, and if it doesn’t move inside your organisation, it will move outside it.

Recent data on tenure in Ireland suggests that employees in their first five years of a career start actively considering their next move within roughly 18 to 24 months of starting a role. The trigger isn’t usually money. It’s the absence of a credible answer to a simple question: “what’s next for me here?”

They direct their people to a learning management system that offers mandatory training but doesn’t help anyone figure out their next move. The career conversation that should happen at month 18 instead happens at the exit interview, and much too late.

Hybrid onboarding has only made this worse, not better. People who joined remotely often hit a connection ceiling at around the same point. They’ve learned the job, but they haven’t built the internal network that would normally surface their next opportunity. Without that network, the path of least resistance is LinkedIn.

Equip managers to have the career conversation they’re avoiding

Managers avoid career conversations for the same reason they always have… the fear of promising what they can’t deliver.

In 2018, that fear was mostly about promotions and pay. In 2026, it’s also about AI. Managers know the role their direct report is doing today may look very different in two years, and they don’t want to be the one to say it out loud. So they usually don’t say anything at all.

That silence is now the single biggest unspoken topic in performance reviews. And it leaks: employees fill the vacuum with their own (usually worse) assumptions, and start interviewing.

The conversation managers actually need to be able to have sounds something like:

None of that requires a manager to predict the future. It requires them to be willing to talk about it. That’s a coachable skill, and it’s the one most organisations under-invest in.

Be prepared to let them go — well

I wrote in 2018 that organisations should set a realistic tenure goal of around five years and build a new psychological contract around it: “you help us grow our business; we keep giving you experiences that grow your career.” That logic has held up better than most retention advice from that era.

What’s changed is the willingness to act on it. Reid Hoffman’s idea that employers should invest in their people’s employability while employees invest in the company’s adaptability felt radical when The Alliance was published. It’s now mainstream practice at the better-run firms.

The newer move is the alumni network. A growing number of leading employers — the big professional services firms have led on this, and several Irish multinationals have followed — now run formal alumni programmes. Why? Because letting people go well pays back in three ways: referrals, rehires (the “boomerang” employee is now a real talent channel), and reputation in a candidate market where Glassdoor matters more than the careers page.

Understand the culture before you try to change it!

Recently I coached an IT manager who’d joined a traditional organisation to drive a change agenda. Her remit from her new Head of Function was to scope out the changes needed and lead the project. She did the scoping, met the stakeholders, communicated the plan… and hit a wall of resistance. The managers around her had long tenure. They had too much invested in the past. Coming from a fast-moving start-up background, she was struggling.

She’d been in the role four months and hadn’t had a real conversation with her boss about what she was actually finding. The fear was that he wouldn’t understand. The reality was that neither of them had spoken honestly to the other, and a frustrated resignation was the most likely outcome.

Our coaching conversation didn’t “solve” the culture. It surfaced the question. She booked a half-day off-site with her Head of Function. They aligned on what was realistic and what wasn’t. She stayed.

The lesson generalises: culture-fit problems usually look like performance problems or motivation problems, and they get treated as such. They’re almost always communication problems first. Hybrid working has made this harder… the casual corridor conversation that used to surface a culture mismatch in week three now doesn’t happen at all, and the mismatch shows up in month nine as a resignation.

The fix isn’t more engagement surveys. It’s giving managers and new hires structured permission to have the awkward conversation early.

What’s actually changed since 2018

If you read this article when it first went up, here’s the short version of what’s different now:

• Hybrid is the default. Retention now hinges on whether a remote or hybrid employee can build internal connection… not just whether they like their manager.
• AI is the unspoken topic. Career conversations that don’t address how AI is reshaping the role are no longer credible to the employee.
• Skills, not ladders. “What will I learn here?” has overtaken “When will I be promoted?” as the dominant retention question.
• Alumni networks are an asset, not an admission of defeat. The best employers now optimise for great exits, not just great hires.

Across all four of these strategies, the common thread is the quality of the conversation between manager and employee. Most organisations don’t lack a retention strategy. They lack the conversational infrastructure to make any strategy actually land.

If you’re working on retention this year and want to talk about how Career Conversations can become a practical part of how your managers operate, book a 30-minute consult with the Harmonics team.

John Fitzgerald
Founder, Harmonics Group

Harmonics specialises in helping organisations plan for change, manage change and support their people through change. To learn more about our programmes, please contact us on 061 336136 or email info@harmonics.ie

4 Questions to Ask Before You Accept a Job Offer

This article was originally published May 2018. It was substantially updated in May 2026 to reflect hybrid expectations, AI’s effect on role evolution, and the realities of management onboarding today.

Up to half of management hires fail within 18 months. Most of those failures aren’t about ability. They’re about questions that didn’t get asked before the offer was accepted.

Moving into a new role is stressful, emotional, and all-consuming. Joining a new employer is a much bigger decision than moving internally. You’ll be in a fish bowl, everyone is watching the new person, and the cost of getting it wrong — to your career, your confidence, and the year you’ll spend recovering — is high.

Most of the time, the difference between a good move and a bad one isn’t visible at the offer stage. It surfaces later, when miscommunication and mismatched expectations have already done their damage. The good news: the warning signs are almost always knowable in advance, if you ask.

Some years ago Diarmuid called me, excited about a new offer… I’d coached him before, through a difficult exit from a previous role that had drained his confidence. He’d recovered and done well in the role since. Now he was ringing about his latest offer, mostly to talk through the package.

Within ten minutes I knew he was about to repeat a mistake. The questions I asked him… questions he should have asked the new employer… he couldn’t answer. Not because he wasn’t sharp, but because he hadn’t thought to ask.

Those questions fall under four headings. I call them the 4Cs.

1. Context: what should you know about the company before you say yes?

Do your research before the offer is in front of you. Internet searches, Glassdoor, Reddit, LinkedIn profiles of people who work there or recently left. What’s the company’s current situation… are they in growth, in a turnaround, or holding steady? Who are their real competitors and where are they losing? Why are they hiring someone like you right now?

Most importantly: who has succeeded in this role before, and who has failed, and why? If the previous incumbent left after twelve months, that’s a question, not a footnote.

What’s more important than ever is to ask what the role looks like in eighteen months. AI is reshaping most knowledge-work roles faster than job descriptions are being rewritten. The job you’re being offered is rarely the job you’ll be doing. A good employer will have a credible answer; a poor one will look surprised by the question.

2. Clarity: do you both agree on what success looks like?

Is there agreement on your role, your boss’s role, and what success looks like for both of you in three, six, twelve months? In three years? What is your boss’s biggest challenge right now… and how, specifically, will you help solve it?

This is the question most candidates fudge. They sense the answer isn’t crisp, but they accept the offer anyway because the package is good. Then six months in, they realise their idea of “doing the job” and their boss’s idea of “doing the job” were never the same thing.

It’s also important to get specific details about where, when, and how you’ll be working. “Hybrid” means different things in different organisations… some mean two days a week in the office, some mean two days a year. The mismatch between what was implied at the interview and what’s expected on day one is now one of the most common reasons new hires regret their move. Ask for the policy in writing.

3. Collaboration: have you and your boss acknowledged your different working styles?

The strongest single question I’d encourage any candidate to ask in an interview is this:

Listen carefully. The answer tells you what your prospective boss values, what they reward, and by implication what they tolerate and what they don’t. Ask the same question of two interviewers and notice where they diverge.

Ask them to share insights on the team you’d be joining. Who are the people you’ll be working alongside? What would they see as potential watch-outs for someone in this role?

If the role is hybrid, ask specifically how the team works when not co-located. What’s synchronous, what’s asynchronous, where decisions actually get made. Teams that haven’t figured this out leak their best people. “We figure it out as we go” is not a strategy.

4. Coaching: what does onboarding actually look like?

This is the question almost no one asks, and the one that most predicts whether you’ll succeed in the role.

Ask what onboarding actually looks like. Is there a structured First 100 Days plan, or is it “we’ll throw you in and see how you go”? How does the company develop and retain talent at your level? Are mentors available, and what does mentoring there actually look like — ask for examples, not platitudes.

Ask whether onboarding or executive coaching is offered to new hires to accelerate their performance. Asking for it is not a sign of weakness; it’s a sign you’re serious about getting the role right. The candidates who ask about onboarding are the ones who succeed at it.

What happened with Diarmuid

In Diarmuid’s case, too many questions stayed unanswered when he went back for clarity. The previous incumbent had failed for lack of resources and support. The role’s scope wasn’t clear. He liked his prospective boss, but the unknowns outweighed the upsides. With a heavy heart, he turned the offer down. In time, he watched from the outside as the new hire failed, for the same reasons he would have.

If you’re weighing an offer right now

If you’re sitting with an offer and one of these questions feels uncomfortable to ask, that discomfort is the article’s whole point. The conversation you don’t want to have is usually the conversation that decides whether the move works.

If you’d like to pressure-test an offer with one of our Executive Coaches before you decide, book a 30-minute career coaching consult.

John Fitzgerald
Founder, Harmonics Group

Harmonics specialises in helping organisations plan for change, manage change and support their people through change. To learn more about our programmes, please contact us on 061 336136 or email info@harmonics.ie