How to Retain Your EA or PA Before They Start Looking

The moment you learn your EA is leaving is almost always the moment it is too late to do anything about it. A resignation feels sudden from the employer’s side, but the decision behind it was usually made weeks or months earlier, quietly, while everything on the surface still looked fine.

Retention is not something you reach for when someone hands in their notice. It is the sum of everything that happened in the year before they started thinking about leaving. For Executive Assistants, Personal Assistants and wider business support professionals, that year is often where the warning signs sit in plain view, unread.

The current market makes this easier to get wrong than usual. Hiring has slowed across most sectors, which has quietly created what some are now calling the “Big Stay”. People are holding on to their roles because the market feels uncertain, not because they feel settled or motivated. For employers, that produces a comfortable illusion: a stable-looking team that is really a group of people waiting for conditions to improve. Your best EA or PA may look perfectly content today. On its own, that tells you very little about whether they will still be with you once the market opens up.

Why EAs and PAs leave, and why it is rarely a surprise

When business support professionals move on, the reasons are remarkably consistent. Career growth sits at the top of the list, and it lands harder in support roles than most employers expect. An EA who has quietly taken on diary management for three executives, started running board papers and become the person everyone routes decisions through has grown their role considerably. If their title, pay and recognition have not moved with it, the gap becomes obvious to them long before it becomes obvious to you.

The second driver is feeling undervalued, and people who feel that way rarely stay for long once a better option appears. Business support is particularly exposed here, because so much of the work is invisible by design. A great EA removes friction so smoothly that the people around them stop noticing the friction ever existed. Do that well enough, for long enough, without acknowledgement, and the quiet message an assistant receives is that the work does not matter.

The third is the relationship with the person they support. An EA or PA can love the company and still leave because the pairing with their principal is not working. This one is often missed entirely, because it never shows up in a salary review.

The hidden cost of getting it wrong

Losing a good EA or PA is expensive in ways that never show up cleanly on a spreadsheet, which is part of why it gets underestimated. The disruption is not limited to the vacant seat. The executive they supported loses their operating rhythm. Institutional knowledge walks out of the door, often the small, undocumented things that quietly kept a leader’s week running. The replacement, however capable, needs months to reach the same level of effectiveness, and those are months the leader spends less productive than they were.

Set against that kind of disruption, almost anything you might reasonably do to retain someone looks inexpensive.

What actually keeps them

None of the fixes here are complicated. They are simply easier to skip than to do.

• Pay that tracks scope, not title. Review compensation against what the person is actually doing now, not what the role was when they started. If you are not sure where that sits against the live market, a salary benchmarking exercise is the fastest way to find out.
• A visible progression path. Support professionals are often told there is nowhere to go above their current role. That is rarely true. Chief of Staff, operations, EA team lead and executive business partner routes all exist. What is usually missing is the conversation, not the ceiling.
• Specific recognition. General praise fades quickly. Naming the actual thing someone handled well, and doing it in front of the people who matter, does not.
• The right pairing. When an EA and their principal genuinely click, retention tends to take care of itself. When they do not, no benefits package will fix it. The fit is worth paying attention to, not just the hire.
• Development that is real. Access to CPD, mentoring and structured learning signals that you see a future for someone. It is one of the clearest ways to tell a good EA that you intend to keep them.

The signals worth watching for

By the time someone resigns, they have usually been showing you for a while. The patterns tend to be subtle rather than dramatic:

• They stop volunteering the ideas or improvements they used to raise unprompted.
• They pull back from work they previously owned with energy.
• Their LinkedIn profile suddenly gets a refresh after months untouched.
• They take days off in a scattered, hard-to-read pattern.
• They go quiet in the meetings where they used to be the most engaged voice.

None of these guarantees someone is leaving. Together, and especially in a strong performer, they are worth a conversation rather than a wait-and-see.

Retention starts long before the offer letter

The businesses that struggle most with retention are often the ones that promised one thing at interview and delivered something else once the person started. A role sold as strategic that turns out to be purely administrative. A growth path described warmly and then never mentioned again. A culture that reads very differently from the inside. The gap between the pitch and the reality is where trust quietly erodes.

Getting retention right is less about grand gestures and more about honesty, attention and keeping pace with a role as it grows. For business support in particular, where the work is so easy to take for granted, that attention is close to the whole game.

If your support team is quietly at risk

If you are seeing turnover in your support function and are not certain why, or you want to understand whether your pay and structure are keeping up with the market, the Lily Shippen team can help. We benchmark EA, PA and business support roles against live market data, and we help employers understand what is driving attrition before it turns into a resignation.