Your Daily Dose of Ad World Buzz
Latest
✦T.S. Kalyanaraman, Who Bought Trust With a Face✦Kranti Cookbook Asks Whether Indian Food Was Ever Freed✦Godawan Spends Eight Months And 5,200 Ceramics On One Bird✦AJIO Signs Ahaan Panday For A Festival That Will Not End✦The Small Behaviours That Decide Whether People Stay Or Leave✦Paul John Repacks The Whisky And Leaves It Alone✦DoubleVerify Starts Measuring What ChatGPT Ads Do✦NOICE Doubles Its Makers And Adds A Credit Line✦Skyscanner Buys The Title On JioStar’s Prediction Game✦Snabbit Hands Ramesh Srinivasan Growth And Revenue✦ixigo Hands Subhadeep Chakraborty All Of Growth✦Emporio Armani Watches Signs Farhan Akhtar For India✦T.S. Kalyanaraman, Who Bought Trust With a Face✦Kranti Cookbook Asks Whether Indian Food Was Ever Freed✦Godawan Spends Eight Months And 5,200 Ceramics On One Bird✦AJIO Signs Ahaan Panday For A Festival That Will Not End✦The Small Behaviours That Decide Whether People Stay Or Leave✦Paul John Repacks The Whisky And Leaves It Alone✦DoubleVerify Starts Measuring What ChatGPT Ads Do✦NOICE Doubles Its Makers And Adds A Credit Line✦Skyscanner Buys The Title On JioStar’s Prediction Game✦Snabbit Hands Ramesh Srinivasan Growth And Revenue✦ixigo Hands Subhadeep Chakraborty All Of Growth✦Emporio Armani Watches Signs Farhan Akhtar For India
Work Life

The Small Behaviours That Decide Whether People Stay Or Leave

Ad Tribe Editorial2 min read
A silhouette walking away while small cut-paper squares fall behind it in olive and ochre

Retention is decided by small behaviours, not policy. An exit interview will tell you somebody left for a better offer. It is usually true and almost never the reason. The reason accumulated over about nine months in pieces too small to put in a resignation letter.

Agencies look for retention problems in the big instruments: salary bands, designations, appraisal cycles. Those set the floor. What decides whether a good person stays is a set of behaviours so minor that nobody thinks of them as management at all.

Which small behaviours actually count

Who gets named in the mail when the work lands. Whether the person who did the thinking is in the room when it is presented. Whether feedback arrives as a correction or as a reason. Whether a Friday change request comes with an apology or an assumption.

None of that costs money. All of it is legible to the person on the receiving end within a week of joining, and it compounds. A junior who is told why, three times, will forgive a bad month. One who is only ever told what will leave during a good one.

People do not resign from agencies. They resign from a pattern they have stopped expecting to change.

Why learning is the one to watch

Deloitte's 2025 India research found 94% of Gen Z value hands-on, on-the-job learning, and flagged a mentorship gap alongside it. In an agency that gap shows up as a specific small behaviour: nobody has time to explain the reasoning behind a change, so the change just arrives.

The counterargument

Some senior people will say this is a demand to be managed gently, and that advertising has never been gentle. Fair. But the behaviours listed above are not gentleness, they are basic legibility, and they were plentiful in the industry that senior people remember fondly. What has gone is not toughness. It is time.

More on Ad Tribe Work Life.

#Agency Culture#Mentorship#Work Life#Retention
Follow Ad Tribe