As we move into 2026, staff retention remains a critical focus for organisations across chemicals, life sciences, polymers, coatings, and personal care & cosmetics.
In our July 2024 article "Staff Retention in 2024: Global Stats and Trends", we explored the established drivers of retention: flexible working, wellbeing, learning & development, DEI, and recognition. Those fundamentals still matter.
What’s changed is the context around them.
Across the UK, employer hiring intentions have remained subdued by recent standards, and pay expectations have stabilised in many sectors. That can create the illusion that retention should be “easier” now. In reality, retention pressure has become more concentrated: specialist skills remain hard to find, transformation programmes continue, and experienced technical talent still has options.
So, the retention question in 2026 is not simply, “How do we stop people leaving?”
It is, “How do we design work, progression & leadership so our best people can see a future here and want it?”
Why staff retention still deserves board-level attention
Turnover is often treated as an HR metric, but in technical and regulated industries it becomes an operational and commercial risk very quickly.
High churn can lead to:
• Increased recruitment and onboarding costs, especially for specialist roles
• Slower project delivery (validation, scale-up, tech transfer, formulation development)
• Greater compliance and quality risk due to loss of knowledge and continuity
• Higher workload on remaining teams, which can trigger further resignations
• Disrupted customer relationships in technical-commercial and technical service roles
When an individual leaves, such as a QA lead, regulatory specialist, process engineer, senior formulation scientist, or technical sales manager, the impact rarely stays within one team.
UK and Europe: what Gallup’s latest data tells us about retention risk
When we assess retention risk, we look at early indicators that typically shift before resignations do. Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace findings (reported in 2025, based on 2024 fieldwork) give a useful snapshot for the UK and Europe across engagement, wellbeing, day-to-day strain and job-move confidence.
1. Engagement (what it means, and why it matters)
In this context, engagement does not mean loyalty or length of service. Gallup uses engagement to describe how connected and motivated people feel at work day to day — whether they feel their work matters, whether they have support, and whether they are likely to bring energy and effort rather than simply “show up”. Low engagement often appears before people become active job seekers.
Across Europe, only 13% of employees are engaged, and in the UK that figure is 10%.
2. Wellbeing and “thriving” in Europe
Gallup’s separate wellbeing measure shows 47% of employees in Europe are “thriving” in their lives overall (higher than the global average of 33%). This highlights an important nuance: people can feel broadly OK in life, yet still feel disconnected at work.
3. Day-to-day strain signals (Europe)
Gallup’s daily-emotions measures suggest many employees are operating under strain: 38% experienced stress a lot of the previous day, 14% anger, 17% sadness, and 12% loneliness.
4. Job-move confidence and active job seeking (Europe)
Even where labour markets have cooled, many employees still feel they can move if the right role appears. In Europe, 57% say now is a good time to find a job locally, and 30% say they are watching for or actively seeking a new job.
What retention pressure looks like in Merritt’s sectors
Chemicals and polymers: transformation load meets operational reality
Deloitte’s 2026 Chemical Industry Outlook highlights weak demand, overcapacity and heightened uncertainty, with many companies focusing on profitability, resilience and long-term transformation. In practice, that often means leaner teams, changing priorities and greater pressure on experienced specialists — conditions that accelerate attrition if not actively managed.
Retention risk is typically concentrated in:
• Process and project engineering
• Site leadership and operational excellence
• EHS / HSE and process safety
• Quality and technical governance
• Technical-commercial roles bridging complex products and customer value
Paints and coatings: New growth areas create mobility
This sector continues to evolve through sustainability requirements, performance demands and innovation. As new sub-specialisms emerge, retention risk rises because the external market may offer faster progression into new niches than internal structures within an organisation can.
Our most consistent observation here is simple: if you do not build internal mobility into growth areas, competitors will do it for you by hiring your talent.
Personal care & cosmetics: Pace, pressure and transferable skills
Personal care sits at the intersection of fast innovation cycles and regulatory scrutiny. That combination increases pressure on formulation, QA and regulatory teams — and those skills are transferable across adjacent sectors.
Where retention works well, organisations tend to be clearer on progression, development opportunities and workload boundaries, not just compensation.
Life sciences: Ongoing movement even in a cautious market
In life sciences, mobility remains high. BioSpace has reported strong “open-to-move” sentiment in the biopharma workforce, including survey and poll indicators showing many employed respondents plan to look for a new role within the next 12 months.
In a sector shaped by innovation cycles, funding conditions and rapid capability shifts, retention is often won on development, leadership quality and role design — not only salary.
The retention shift in 2026: what’s moving the needle now
In 2024, retention conversations often centred on hybrid policy, wellbeing benefits and pay competitiveness. In 2026, those remain important — but we are seeing the strongest retention outcomes when organisations focus on three practical areas.
1. Career momentum for specialists, not just managers
Work Institute’s findings reinforce what many technical employers already sense: people leave when their careers stall.
For science-led organisations, the structural risk is relying on management as the only progression route. Not everyone wants to lead people, but high-value specialists still need growth, status and recognition.
What helps:
• Dual progression tracks (technical expert and people leader) with comparable reward and visibility
• Clear definitions of “senior” for technical roles (scope, impact, autonomy)
• Planned lateral moves (R&D to manufacturing, quality to regulatory, technical service to commercial)
2. Workload design and line management capability
Retention rarely fails overnight. It fails when work becomes unsustainable. In regulated industries, the strain is not just volume — it is complexity, context switching, compliance burden and unclear decision-making.
Work Institute also flags managers as a central factor in preventable turnover. If we want retention to improve, we need line managers equipped to prioritise work, protect focus and develop people.
What helps:
• Manager training focused on prioritisation and workload planning, not just annual reviews
• Stay interviews (early warning) as well as exit interviews (post-mortem)
• Better resourcing assumptions during transformation programmes
3. A credible learning contract that future-proofs skills
The skills pinch point is not going away quickly: global talent shortage levels remain high, and UK engineering employers report significant recruitment difficulty.
When employees believe they must leave to learn, retention suffers. When they can build future-relevant skills internally, retention improves.
What helps:
• Targeted upskilling tied to priority roles (make it visible and supported)
• Internal project rotations that build capability without job-hopping
• Short “academies” for scarce disciplines (QA, regulatory, validation, process safety, technical sales)
Summary: what strong retention looks like in 2026
For chemicals, life sciences, polymers, coatings and personal care, retention is not being won by “more perks”. It is being won by reducing preventable turnover through better role design, stronger management and clearer progression.
The most effective retention strategies in 2026 consistently focus on:
• Visible specialist progression and internal mobility
• Line management quality and sustainable workload
• Skills investment that makes staying the best development option
Suggested Next Steps
If you would like to benchmark retention risk across your hard-to-fill roles, we can support you.
With market insight on talent availability, location friction and competitor pull factors, and help you translate that intelligence into practical retention actions for 2026 and beyond.
If you want to understand where you’re most at risk of losing people in your hard-to-fill roles, we can help.
We’ll share what we’re seeing in the market; who’s hiring, where talent is available (and where it isn’t), what locations are putting candidates off, and what other organisations are doing to attract them. With this insight you can take practical steps to keep your best people through 2026 and beyond.