Why your staff keep leaving: sometimes it is not the staff.

Almost every month, someone tells me a version of the same sentence: “We cannot keep good people here.” It is usually said with real frustration, and usually about the staff. Often the staff are not the reason.

Sometimes it genuinely is a hiring problem. The wrong person was selected, the salary was not competitive, or the role was never clearly defined. Those are real, and they are fixable.

But when a business has replaced the same position three or four times in two years, the probability that four different people were all independently wrong starts to fall. At that point the more useful question is not “where do we find better staff?” It is “what is happening inside this business that good people keep deciding to leave?”

That question is uncomfortable, because the answer frequently sits at the top.

The owner is often the variable nobody examines

In Bali and Lombok, a large share of hospitality businesses are owner-operated or owner-adjacent. Many were built personally: the owner found the land, hired the first staff, chose the furniture, answered the first guest messages. That involvement is usually part of why the business exists at all.

The difficulty is that the thing which made the business work at five rooms can be the thing that breaks it at twenty-five. The habits do not scale. Direct messages to junior staff, decisions reversed after the fact, approvals that bottleneck through one phone — each is harmless once, and corrosive as a pattern.

Staff rarely resign citing this. They cite salary, family, or a better offer. Those reasons are not lies, but they are often the socially acceptable version of something harder to say: I did not feel able to do my job here.

When people leave, they tell you the reason that is safest to give. The real one usually shows up in the pattern, not the exit interview.

I have written separately about how to hear what your team is not telling you and about defining the job before you search for the person. This piece is about the layer underneath both: the owner or new entrepreneur who is doing their honest best, in a country they are still learning, and who has nobody independent to think with.

The new entrepreneur's particular trap

People arriving to start a hospitality business in Indonesia usually arrive with competence. They have run businesses before, or they have hospitality experience, or they have capital and good instincts. What they generally do not have is calibration.

Calibration is knowing which problems are normal and which are warnings. Whether a supplier price is reasonable. Whether a department head is underperforming or under-supported. Whether a quiet team is content or disengaged. Whether a request for leave is routine or significant. In a familiar market you read these without effort. In a new one, every signal has to be interpreted, and the cost of misreading them accumulates quietly.

The common failure is not arrogance. It is a well-intentioned person applying a management style that worked elsewhere, getting a muted response, concluding the team lacks initiative, and tightening control. The team reads the tightening as distrust, becomes more cautious, and the cycle reinforces itself. Nobody involved is behaving unreasonably. The outcome is still turnover.

Indonesia is not one culture, and your team is not one group

This is where a lot of otherwise capable owners get caught, because the mental shortcut — “Indonesian staff” — does not describe anything real.

Indonesia spans roughly seventeen thousand islands, more than seven hundred living languages, and six officially recognised religions. A villa team in Uluwatu might include Balinese Hindu staff with community obligations in their home village, Javanese Muslim staff who send money home monthly, and staff from Flores or Timor from Catholic backgrounds. They share a working language and very little else by default.

Treating that as one culture is not only inaccurate. It is operationally expensive.

Where your team is from	What it can mean for how you manage
Bali	Predominantly Balinese Hindu. Community and temple obligations through the banjar are genuine commitments, not preferences. Ceremony dates are fixed and non-negotiable in a way annual leave is not.
Lombok	Predominantly Sasak and Muslim. The religious calendar, Ramadan fasting and Idul Fitri shape the operating year far more than they do in Bali.
Java	A large share of hospitality staff across both islands. Communication norms tend to be indirect and hierarchy-sensitive; disagreement is often signalled rather than stated.
Flores, Timor & eastern Indonesia	Often Catholic or Protestant, with a different festival calendar again, and usually a long and expensive journey home.

These are patterns, not rules. A young Jakarta-educated manager may be far more direct than any of this suggests, and individual personality beats regional generalisation every time. The point is not to sort people into categories. It is to stop assuming that one approach reads the same way to everyone on your payroll.

The calendar is an operational document

The clearest example is the one most new owners underestimate in their first year.

In Bali, Nyepi shuts the island completely. No flights, no movement outside, guests confined to the property, lighting restricted. It is not an inconvenience to be worked around — it is a day the entire operation has to be planned for in advance, with guests briefed before they book. Galungan, Kuningan and village temple ceremonies recur through the year and matter enormously to Balinese staff.

In Lombok, the shape of the year is different. Ramadan changes energy levels, shift tolerance and food service rhythms for a month. Idul Fitri triggers mudik, the mass homecoming, which is the single most predictable staffing crunch in the country and also the one most frequently handled badly — usually by an owner who did not plan rotation early enough and is then surprised by requests they experience as unreasonable.

An owner who treats these as interruptions will spend years frustrated. An owner who builds the roster around them, early and visibly, earns a quantity of goodwill that is difficult to buy any other way.

Bahasa Indonesia is the bridge, not the mother tongue

Bahasa Indonesia is the national language and the common ground of almost every workplace. It is also, for a very large number of your staff, their second language. Balinese, Sasak, Javanese and dozens of others are what people grew up in and still think in.

This matters more than it first appears. Nuance, hesitation and the softening of bad news travel differently across a second language — and then across a third if the conversation is happening in English. Something said carefully in Balinese, rendered into Bahasa, then into English for an owner, can arrive sounding like agreement when it was a warning.

Owners do not need to learn four languages. They need to stop treating fluent English as a proxy for capability, and to build at least one channel — usually a trusted senior Indonesian manager — where meaning is checked rather than assumed. Our own salary guide covers the market side of retention; this is the other half of it.

Religion is not a sensitivity issue. It is a scheduling, facilities and trust issue.

Most owners are perfectly respectful in principle. The gap is usually practical rather than attitudinal: whether there is somewhere to pray, whether fasting staff are rostered sensibly, whether a Hindu staff member can attend a ceremony without using their entire annual leave, whether a shared offering or celebration at the property is observed properly or performed for guests.

Staff read these details precisely. They are the clearest available evidence of whether an employer actually sees them. Getting them right costs very little. Getting them wrong costs people.

Where coaching comes in

Most owners in this position do not need a consultant with a deck. They need someone independent to think with — who knows the market, has no stake in the internal politics, and will say the uncomfortable thing.

That is the work I do one to one with owners, founders and incoming senior managers. It is not training. It is a structured, confidential conversation that keeps running while the decisions are actually being made.

Sessions run remotely or on the ground in Bali and Lombok, in English, Indonesian, French, Spanish, German or Italian. Some engagements run alongside a search. Many run entirely on their own.

The question worth sitting with

If three capable people have left the same role, the most expensive assumption available is that you will find a fourth who is simply better.

Occasionally that is true. More often, something about the role, the structure or the way the business is led is producing the result — and no amount of recruitment will outrun it. Recruitment is a powerful tool. It cannot indefinitely compensate for a business that is difficult to work inside.

The businesses that keep people in Bali and Lombok are rarely the ones paying the most. They are the ones where good people can do their job without fighting the organisation to do it.

That is usually built from the top. Which is encouraging, because it means it is within your control.

Cultural observations here are experience-led, drawn from fifteen years working in and recruiting for Indonesian hospitality. They describe tendencies, not rules — individuals vary, and the only reliable method is asking the people on your own team.