You spent months and a serious fee getting them here. Eighteen months later the family goes home.
The hire was right. The work was good. Nothing went wrong at the office. The move failed somewhere else, at home, and by the time anyone in your business hears about it the decision has already been made.
Start with the review
Before anyone buys a programme, it is worth knowing whether you have the problem. The onboarding review is a fixed-fee piece of work: I look at how your relocation and onboarding actually lands, talk to people who arrived in the last three years, and give you an honest account of where it is failing and what it is costing.
It ends with a report, not a proposal. Some employers read it and decide they are fine. That is a perfectly good outcome and you will have found out for four thousand pounds rather than after losing another hire.
Where relocations actually fail
Family adjustment is consistently identified in global mobility research as the strongest predictor of whether a relocated employee stays, and the accompanying partner is the pivot. If the partner does not build a life here, the family leaves, and the employee leaves with them.
Global mobility research is consistent on this point. One widely cited survey by NetExpat and EY found that 71% of companies named the accompanying partner's unhappiness as the primary cause of assignment failure. Historical estimates put assignment failure rates somewhere between 20 and 40%.
And the same research repeatedly notes that family and cultural support is among the most underfunded lines in mobility budgets: typical spend on destination and settling-in services is around $3,000 per assignee, while spousal job assistance alone is benchmarked at around $10,000. Almost everyone pays for the removals van. Very few pay for the thing that actually decides the outcome.
Why Guernsey sharpens the problem
A small island is not hard to arrive in. It is hard to get inside. Friendship groups here were formed at school and have been running for thirty years, and nobody is being unkind by not noticing you.
Someone can work here for two years and have no friend who was not assigned to them by an org chart. That person is one bad winter away from resigning.
How the programme runs
The programme is the same twelve month arc for every family. It was designed once and it runs many times, which is what keeps it consistent rather than depending on whoever happens to be available.
You will not be the only one
Families going through the programme at the same time are introduced to each other. That is not an afterthought. Newcomers befriending other newcomers is often the most durable connection anyone makes here, because everyone involved is at the same point and nobody has thirty years of prior friendships to return to. Two families arriving into an established island have a much easier job than one family arriving alone.
As the number of families grows, more of the programme will be run as a group. For now it is delivered one to one, with those introductions made deliberately as they become useful.
The programme
The same four phases every time. What changes between families is who they meet, which is the part that cannot be systematised and the reason this works.
- 1
Before arrival
A conversation with the whole family, not just the employee. What each person is leaving behind, what they are worried about, and what a good life here would look like for them individually.
- 2
First month
Orientation to how the island actually works, which is not what the relocation pack says. Plus three to five deliberate introductions chosen for the family, not for the company.
- 3
Months two to six
The partner into work, volunteering or study. Children into activities where they will meet people who are not in their class. Regular check-ins with the family rather than with HR.
- 4
Months six to twelve
The shift from being introduced to belonging, when the family starts generating its own invitations. It closes with a candid report to you on what would make the next hire land better.
Throughout, there is one named person the family can ring. Me.
What this is not
It is not visa, permit or removals logistics, and it is not a duplicate of what Locate Guernsey provides free of charge. Those services get the family to the island. This one is about the year that follows. It is not a coaching programme and it is not a networking group. The introductions are chosen deliberately, one at a time, for these people.
The arithmetic
UK recruitment fees typically run at 15 to 30% of first-year salary, with 20 to 25% common for permanent placements and more for senior or hard to fill roles. On a £70,000 hire that is around £14,000 before you have paid for relocation, temporary accommodation or the months of reduced output while someone learns the island.
Lose that person at eighteen months and you pay all of it again, plus whatever the vacancy costs in between. Set against that, a full twelve month programme at £5,500 a family is not a significant decision. It is a rounding error aimed at the most common cause of the loss.
What it costs
Onboarding review
£4,000 fixed fee
The recommended starting point. An honest account of how your relocation and onboarding actually lands, ending in a report rather than a proposal.
The programme
£5,500 per family
The full twelve month programme, twelve months, delivered one to one.
Annual programme
£27,000 for six families
An agreed number of families a year, with a standing point of contact for your people team.
The fair objections
Locate Guernsey already does this, and it is free.
Locate Guernsey is good at what it does and I send people to it. It handles the move: permissions, housing search, the logistics of arriving. It is not funded to spend a year on whether your hire's partner has anyone to have lunch with. This starts where that stops, and I will not bill you for anything Locate Guernsey provides free of charge.
We have a buddy system.
A buddy is a colleague doing a favour alongside their day job, and the relationship is inside the company. The part that fails is outside the company: the partner with no work, the child with no team, the weekend with nothing in it. A buddy cannot fix that, and it is not fair to ask them to.
Can you prove the return.
Honestly, not in advance, and be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise. What I can do is put a number on the cost of one failed relocation for your organisation: search fee, notice, relocation costs, the vacancy, the second search. Set the programme against that number. Then judge me on whether the families stay, which is measurable.
Why should we pay for this when the employee could arrange it themselves?
Because the person who needs it most is not your employee. It is the partner who has no workplace, no colleagues and no reason to be introduced to anyone, and who will be the one who eventually says they want to go home.
Last reviewed: August 2026. Fees are reviewed annually.
Sources
Talk it through
Tell me how many people you move to the island in a year and how many are still here after two. That conversation is usually enough to work out whether this is worth doing.
Make an enquiry