Why Good People Leave — and How Larissa Gets Them to Stay

Put Larissa Hawkins in a room with a leadership team and she will ask the question nobody has put on the agenda: why would anyone stay here? Not the salary answer. Not the perks answer. The honest one.

It is a question she has earned the right to ask. Before founding GlassFrog, Larissa was an employment lawyer — Employment Counsel for a global telecoms business before the age of 29 — which means she spent years seeing exactly what happens inside organisations when the honest answer is 'they wouldn't'. The grievances, the exits, the slow quiet leaving that starts months before a resignation letter ever gets written. Most consultants theorise about workplace culture. Larissa has read the case files.

GlassFrog is what she built with that knowledge. For businesses, it is a culture consultancy that treats retention and belonging as things you design, not things you hope for — with particular strength in the moments that break teams: mergers, acquisitions, restructures and conflict. Larissa's argument is simple and quietly uncomfortable: by the time a retention crisis is visible, it has been legible for years. Someone just needed to know how to read it.

'It's not about us. It's never been about us. We are changing cultures, helping people change their lives, and being real with each other. That's huge.'

Then there is the idea that may prove her most influential: the Career-Change Considerate Employer Badge. British hiring still treats a straight-line CV as a virtue and a changed direction as a question mark. The Badge turns that on its head — a public signal from forward-thinking employers that non-linear histories are welcome here. For a generation of workers who have pivoted, retrained or started again, it tells them where the doors are actually open.

The same thinking runs through her one-to-one work: coaching for people who are stuck, burned out or circling a change they cannot yet name, including a particular attentiveness to clients navigating ADHD, diagnosed or not, in workplaces that were never built with them in mind.

Cover star of this edition, and the proof of her own argument — Larissa changed direction, and everything she now builds helps other people and other businesses do the same, deliberately and well.

GlassFrog works with individuals and organisations across the UK. Coaching packages and consultancy details are at weareglassfrog.com, and you will find Larissa on Instagram and LinkedIn at @weareglassfrog.