Should we make a counter-offer when someone resigns?

Rarely, and never on salary alone. A salary counter-offer treats the symptom at the moment it is most visible and most expensive: it buys a few months, it teaches the whole team that the fast route to a rise is a resignation letter, and it leaves the reasons for leaving untouched. If the person is leaving for lack of prospect, that same lack will be there in six months at a higher salary.

How do I know whether someone is thinking of leaving?

The reliable signals are quiet: someone who stops pushing back when they used to, who no longer proposes anything in meetings, whose quality holds but who takes no initiative beyond their strict remit. A regular monthly one-to-one surfaces those changes; an annual appraisal does not see them.

Do non-financial factors really weigh against an offer from abroad?

Not if they are presented as compensation at the moment of leaving. They weigh when they are already in place: someone who has real autonomy, a twelve-month prospect and a manager who listens is comparing two situations, not two salaries. Someone who has none of that is comparing only a number — and the overseas number wins.

Can you keep someone who wants to leave for international experience?

Often not, and it is better to recognise it. A departure to acquire experience you cannot offer is not a management failure. What is at stake then is the quality of the separation: someone who leaves on good terms sometimes comes back, recommends your company, and becomes a commercial route in. Someone who leaves badly does exactly the opposite, in a market where everyone knows everyone.

Retaining talent in Mauritius without bidding wars

A department head learns that one of their best people has had an offer. It comes from Australia, Canada, France or Dubai, and it is half again what they can put on the table. They ask their leadership for headroom, get part of what they asked for, and make a counter-offer.

The person stays. They leave eight months later.

Why the salary comparison is lost before it starts

This is the particularity of the Mauritian market for qualified profiles, and it is worth stating plainly: your competitor is not the company next door. For an experienced accountant, a developer, a floor manager or an engineer, the candidate’s real alternative is abroad.

One strategic consequence follows that many employers have not drawn. Matching local market salaries does nothing against that competitor: the local market is not the reference point of the person doing the comparing. And matching the overseas market is impossible, because the company’s cost structure does not allow it.

Staying on that ground therefore means losing an auction expensively. You have to change ground — and change it before the offer arrives.

The decision is not taken when the offer arrives

This is the most useful point in the whole subject. The offer is the visible moment; it is almost never the moment of decision.

When someone accepts a role abroad, they usually began thinking about it twelve to eighteen months earlier, and the reason for that shift is almost never salary. It is the accumulation of twelve months in which nothing visible happened: no change of remit, no training, no conversation about what comes next, no feedback beyond an annual appraisal dispatched in forty minutes.

When the offer arrives, it does not create the wish to leave. It supplies the occasion for a departure already decided.

That is also why the counter-offer fails: it answers the wrong question at the wrong moment.

Seven levers that genuinely weigh

These levers are the subject of a two-day programme: non-financial motivation levers.

Prospect. Knowing what could change in your work within a year, and by what route. It is the most powerful lever and the cheapest. Most people are not asking for a guaranteed promotion: they are asking to know whether the subject exists at all.

Real autonomy. Not “we trust you”, but specific decisions taken without asking permission. The test: name three decisions the person takes alone. If you cannot find three, they have no autonomy, whatever they have been told.

Recognition at the right moment. Precise feedback on the day the work was done is worth more than a general compliment at year end. Precision matters more than frequency: “what you said changed the outcome of Tuesday’s meeting” lands; “you’re doing good work” does not land at all.

Control over your own time. On an island where the Curepipe–Port Louis run at peak hour weighs on a whole day, flexible hours are not a cosmetic benefit: they hand someone back two hours a day.

Skill gained. Serious training, a new responsibility, a cross-functional project: these increase the person’s value. Some employers hesitate, on the grounds that it will make leaving easier. True — and the alternative, offering nothing, makes them leave sooner.

The direct manager. This is the factor whose effect is best established and most often treated as a fixed variable. People rarely leave a company; they leave their immediate manager. Training the management line is a retention investment, even when nobody calls it that — which is what the manager-leader toolkit is for.

Proximity to family. This one is specifically Mauritian and almost nobody puts it into the conversation. Leaving means leaving an extended family, a network, a place. It is not an argument to use against someone — “you’d be leaving your parents” would be contemptible — but it is a reality the person already has in their own balance, and it makes the other levers more decisive here than they would be elsewhere.

Three things that have no effect

The counter-offer after the resignation. Covered above. It buys time and damages the pay structure.

Generic collective perks. The fruit basket, the annual outing, the subscription nobody needed. They are not harmful; they simply have no bearing on the decision to stay, and they consume a budget that would have funded useful training.

Talk of loyalty. Telling someone they owe something to the company that trained them is the surest way to accelerate their departure, with resentment added. Training is an investment by the employer, not a debt owed by the employee.

What to do this week

One thing, and it needs no budget. Take the three people whose departure would cost you most — and if you want to know what your team actually thinks of your management, a 360° is the only instrument that says so without softening it, and ask each of them, one to one, two questions: what has changed in your work over the past year, and what would you want to change in the year ahead.

If you have no answer to the first, you already know the risk. If the second produces a specific request, you have twelve months to answer it — which is far more than the time you will have on the day an offer arrives.

Keeping your people when abroad is recruiting