If the majority of your retention work is escalations and meetings at the time they want to leave, you're really holding this management thing wrong. I've done

If the majority of your retention work is escalations and meetings at the time they want to leave, you're really holding this management thing wrong. I've done this 3 times in 20+ years as a manager. It's not exactly super-common. When it happened, it took maybe a day total. (Seriously, one of your jobs is to have good relations with your execs. If somebody wants to leave due to a better offer, you need to be able to go to your exec and say "hey, we need to counter this offer, make it so please", and they trust you - you can't have endless runarounds at that point) Yes, there's a lot of unseen work, but active retention measures is so tiny a blip, it doesn't even matter.