Replacing people is the expensive option
Recruitment fees, months of ramp-up, and lost client knowledge all land before a new hire is productive. Keeping someone good is almost always cheaper than replacing them.
Independent employee listening · Europe
Keep the good people you already have.
Loyal employees are hard to find. Let us help you keep yours — and make them happier.
CanarySpill runs protected, anonymous employee surveys inside your company, analyses the results independently, and shows you exactly what to fix before your best people start looking elsewhere.
Anonymous by design Minimum cohort reporting Human-led analysis
Your people stay anonymous
Employees answer with a shared company code. Nobody in your company ever sees who said what.
Answers, not another dashboard
We interpret the patterns and tensions and tell you what to do — not just averages to stare at.
Safe enough for honesty
Results are suppressed below the agreed cohort threshold and comments are screened for identity clues.
Why now
Retention is won long before the resignation.
Our view, from running listening programmes for European employers.
Disengagement is quiet before it is visible
People rarely announce that they have checked out. It shows up first in effort, candour, and discretionary work — long before a resignation letter.
Exit interviews arrive too late
By the time someone is leaving, they have already decided and they are rarely fully honest. Anonymous listening tells you while there is still something to fix.
The engagement
A rigorous route from silence to action.
CanarySpill sits between employees and leadership as an independent listening partner.
- 01
Design the listening programme
We define the questions, privacy threshold, audience, and reporting scope with your leadership team.
- 02
Collect protected feedback
Employees answer with a shared company access code. Identity is separated from answers and never shown to employers.
- 03
Analyse what matters
We test themes across leadership, culture, reward, wellbeing, inclusion, and psychological safety.
- 04
Act with confidence
Your team receives a clear evidence pack, facilitated readout, and prioritised retention actions.
What you receive
A decision document, not another dashboard.
Every engagement closes with a consultancy-led readout that makes the trade-offs visible and the next steps specific.
Download the full services & analysis overview (PDF)- Executive evidence brief
- Theme and driver analysis
- Cohort gap and retention-risk view
- eNPS and psychological safety
- Pay fairness by cohort
- Protected employee comments
- Prioritised 90-day recommendations
- Optional selected public insight
Illustrative example · fictional data
What your retention report contains.
Every engagement produces the same depth of evidence: scores by theme and question, where cohorts diverge, whether pay holds up, what needs attention first, how you're trending against your own history, how you compare to our wider portfolio, and what people actually write when nobody can trace it back to them.
Overall assessment
3.4 / 5
Participation
78%
Protected cohort
64
Employee eNPS
+12
Priority attention
Auto-surfaced from the scores — where to focus first, not left for you to spot in a table.
Critical
Wellbeing & workload
Averaging 2.5 / 5 across 4 questions — well below a healthy range.
Critical
Tenure 2–5 years
-0.7 vs. company average (n=19) — meaningfully less positive than the rest.
Priority
Reward & fairness
Averaging 2.9 / 5 — worth addressing before it becomes a retention risk.
Company shape by theme
Average score across the six grouped assessment themes.
Leadership trust3.9
Culture & collaboration4.3
Reward & fairness2.9
Wellbeing & workload2.5
Inclusion & belonging4.0
Psychological safety3.2
Question ranking and sentiment
Favourable (4–5), neutral (3), and unfavourable (1–2) share of responses.
My team helps me when I need it4.4
I understand how my pay is decided2.6
My workload is sustainable2.4
I can raise a concern without fear3.2
Favourable Neutral Unfavourable
Where cohorts diverge
Difference from the company average for each privacy-safe group.
Tenure 2–5 years-0.7
Operations-0.4
First-line managers-0.3
Tenure under 1 year+0.5
Groups below the agreed privacy threshold are never reported.
Progress across engagements
If we've run more than one programme with you, here's whether things are moving.
3.1 / 5
2024
3.4 / 5
+0.3
2025
3.8 / 5
+0.4
2026
How you compare
Each theme against what we typically see across our portfolio.
Culture & collaboration
Portfolio avg 3.9
Reward & fairness
Portfolio avg 3.3
Wellbeing & workload
Portfolio avg 3.1
Psychological safety
Portfolio avg 3.4
Pay fairness
Median pay by cohort, with year-on-year movement.
Operations€41,500
Client services€48,200
Engineering€63,900
Company median
€52,000
Year movement
+2.1%
What people actually wrote
Most frequent language across protected free-text answers.
recognition
34
capacity
29
progression
24
flexibility
18
manager
15
clarity
11
Comments are screened for identity clues before anything reaches leadership.
Consultant interpretation
A human reading of the numbers, not an automated summary.
Collaboration is a genuine strength and new joiners are positive. The retention risk sits with employees at 2–5 years: recognition, workload, and pay clarity all drop together in that group, which is exactly where replacing someone costs you the most.
Example priority action
Rebalance workload in Operations and publish a transparent progression and pay framework within 90 days.
Outcomes
From findings to happier employees.
Each part of the report is tied to something you can change this quarter.
Reduce avoidable leavers
Cohort gaps show which tenure groups, departments, and manager lines are drifting, so you intervene with the people most likely to go.
Fix workload before burnout
Wellbeing and capacity scores, plus what people write in their own words, tell you where the pressure is genuinely unsustainable.
Make pay and progression credible
Median pay by cohort and pay-clarity scores show whether your reward story holds up in the eyes of the people living it.
Turn managers into the fix
Psychological safety and recognition results give each leader something specific to change, not a company-wide average to ignore.
Start a conversation
Find out what your people really think.
Register your interest and choose how you would like to meet. We will confirm the scope, privacy model, audience, and timing with you — then help you keep the people you cannot afford to lose.
- 1.Send your company details
- 2.Choose video, phone, or in person
- 3.We agree scope and confidentiality
- 4.Employees participate; we analyse and present